(Re)Vision – Dritte ICON-S-Deutschland-Konferenz
The German Chapter of the International Society of Public Law (ICON-S) aims to be a forum for diverse perspectives on public law and invites legal scholars as well as scholars from other disciplines to participate in our third conference. Postdocs, Ph.D. students, as well as established scholars, working in German or English, are welcome to contribute to our conference at the University of Mannheim on 26–27 September 2024. The conference includes plenary panels alongside parallel panel sessions devoted to our conference theme “(Re)Vision”. We also offer a works-in-progress workshop for early-career researchers to get detailed feedback on paper or chapter drafts.
Conference Theme
Legal systems are path-dependent. This path-dependency allows for the continuous development of the law while guaranteeing continuity and stability. However, complex current challenges such as wars, climate change, the digital public sphere, global inequality, and populism put pressure on the trust-generating inertia of the law. These challenges create a need as well as the potential for a re-vision of public law.
Visions are usually only implicit in public law. They may be the starting point for criticism and change, but they all too quickly shrink into reform projects that are satisfied with simply following the status quo. Yet, every re-vision contains a vision – i.e. a vision of the future that transcends the present. These visions can enter the legal system from the outside or originate from within, generated by its actors. Academia, legislation, and jurisprudence retrieve this potential for reorientation within a given system, characterized by both ties to the past and openness to the future, in a more or less reflected manner. Their modus operandi – be it incremental, conceptual, or transformative – influences how fundamentally novel ideas are integrated into the legal system. The upcoming ICON-S conference will focus on the mechanisms, prerequisites, and limits of such re-visions of public law. For the third conference of the German Chapter of ICON-S, we invite contributions on “(Re)Vision” from all sub-disciplines of public law, including European and Public International Law, as well as other disciplines that share a connection with public law. We want to encourage a wide variety of approaches to scholarship, including doctrinal work, case studies, theoretical and interdisciplinary reflections on concepts and challenges of a re-vision in law. We welcome both full panel and individual submissions in English or German. The conference will include panels in both languages.
Submission of Abstracts
To present at the conference, please submit an abstract of ca. 500 words by 30 April 2024 to iconsdeutschland@gmail.com. Selected presenters will be notified by 15 May 2024.
Works in Progress-Workshop
The second main pillar of our conference is our “works in progress”-workshop. Ph.D. students and postdocs (max. 3 years after completion) will have the opportunity to discuss their papers or book chapters with select commentators, drawn inter alia from the ICON-S German Chapter’s Advisory Board, on the first days of the conference (26 September 2024). The idea is to present drafts of new research within a small circle of engaged discussants who will have read the work and provide detailed feedback.
If you would like to participate, please submit your abstract (about 500 words) and short CV (max. 2–3 pages) to iconsdeutschland@gmail.com in German or English by 30 April 2024. Complete papers (article drafts, drafts of book chapters, etc.) need to be submitted by 31 August 2024 to ensure a fruitful discussion and to give the commentators sufficient time to acquaint themselves with the papers. There is no expectation to publish the papers in the context of this workshop. Selected participants will be notified by 15 May 2024.