Sustainability as a Legal Principle for the Exercise of Public Authority:Call for papers: Environmental, Financial and Demographic Aspects

Call for Papers

Sustainability as a Legal Principle for the Exercise of Public Authority: Environmental, Financial and Demographic Aspects

Special Workshop IVR World Congress Belo Horizonte (Brazil), 21-27 July 2013

The focus of this workshop is on the emerging principle of environmental, financial and demographic sustainability in constitutional, administrative, European and international law. The purpose of the workshop is to examine whether conceptualisations or concrete legal solutions developed at one or several points in a three-times-three matrix (three issues: environmental, financial and demographic challenges; three legal orders/levels: domestic, European and international law) can cross-fertilise each other. We would especially welcome contributions on the following questions:

• the intellectual origins of the principle of sustainability;
• the journey of the principle of environmental sustainability from international law to constitutional law;
• how to assess environmental sustainability given the uncertainty of scientific knowledge?
• the legal, economic and political meaning of financial sustainability: what exactly is being or should be codified as a legal principle?
• debt brake vs. democracy: how does the move from discretion to rules in fiscal policy the role of parliaments?
• different types of debt brakes: what do we know about their effectiveness?
• financial sustainability forced from above: a threat to national sovereignty, or a measure to safeguard human rights?
• the meaning of demographic sustainability: is there a common core, despite the differences between high and low fertility countries?

• is demographic sustainability contradicting to some traditional constitutional taboos (cf. family suffrage, human cloning)?
• is sustainability as a constitutional principle possible at all without a similar principle in international (and/or European) law?

Abstracts should be submitted via the congress website before 28 February 2012:

http://www.ivr2013.org/hotsite/english/.

Organisers: Matthias Goldmann (MPI, Heidelberg, goldmann@mpil.de) and András Jakab (MPI, Heidelberg, jakabandr@gmail.com).

Participants must register for the conference. For further details see the conference website:www.ivr2013.org.