This year, the Academy of European Law’s 2025 Summer Course on the Law of the EU, which took place in Florence and online from 16 to 27 June, offered the opportunity to follow three Distinguished lectures, providing a critical and timely lens to examine the evolving role of law and power in Europe and beyond.
The lecture series opened with Professor Susan Marks (London School of Economics), who delivered a powerful address titled 'If the World Is a Family, What Kind of Family Is It?'. Professor Marks explored how the metaphor of the family is invoked in international discourse, whether as the 'human family', the 'family of nations', or (in appeals for climate change action) 'our children'. While such imagery can carry messages of unity and care, she cautioned that it also risks masking structural inequalities and reinforcing depoliticised understandings of global challenges.
According to her, “familial metaphors can obscure divisions and entrench hierarchies under the guise of shared belonging.” Her lecture invited participants to critically examine the symbolic language that shapes how global problems are framed, and to remain attentive to the political work that such metaphors perform.
In the second lecture, EUI Law Professor Deirdre Curtin examined 'The Political Stakes in the Technology of EU Security Governance', exploring the increasingly technocratic landscape of EU security governance. In particular, the focus was on the fields of migration and border control, where data-driven systems and AI tools are central.
Professor Curtin questioned the widespread perception of such processes as purely technical, revealing how decisions taken by civil servants, consultants, and data professionals carry significant political consequences. “The EU is being quietly reshaped from below,” she noted, “with the political stakes often hidden in the context of EU security governance.” Moreover, she argued that this depoliticised framing of security governance limits legal and political processes and called for critical engagement with the expanding role of data and technology in shaping EU security policies.
The lecture series concluded with Professor Katerina Linos (UC Berkeley), whose talk 'Learning from Crises', investigated how the EU defied predictions of disintegration following Brexit, responding instead to successive crises—including the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine—with unprecedented coordination and solidarity.
From the €750 billion recovery package to new migration and digital regulations, Linos analysed this unexpected shift through three lenses: the alignment of crises with visionary leadership; the behind-the-scenes development of policy templates; and the EU’s institutional geography, which allowed radical ideas to evolve away from national capitals.
She also highlighted the redistributive nature of these responses, challenging assumptions about national self-interest and pointing to emerging forms of supranational solidarity. “Understanding Europe’s unlikely success,” she noted, “offers valuable lessons for democratic governance in complex, divided societies.”
Together, these three Distinguished Lectures offered participants of the AEL Summer Courses a deep and critical engagement with the narratives, technologies, and institutional logics reshaping Europe and the world today.
Recordings of the three Distinguished lectures can be found here: