Subsidiarity and the Deracination of Political Community

Neil Walker holds the Regius Chair of Public Law and the Law of Nature and Nations at the University of Edinburgh. His main area of expertise is constitutional theory. He has published extensively on the constitutional dimension of legal order at sub-state, state, supranational and international levels. He has also published at length on the relationship between security, legal order and political community. He maintains a more general interest in broader questions of legal theory as well as in various substantive dimensions of UK and EU public law.

This discussion takes place within the colloquium series "Rethinking Law in a Global Context" that this summer semester focuses on "Law‘s Conception of Politics and Political Conceptions of Law".

The distinction between law and politics is central to modernity. Law and politics refer to each other and are structurally connected. But how exactly are they interconnected? Is law the result of political decision? Is politics, even the exercise of constituant power, legally constrained? To what extent is politics constituted by law? Which conception of the political is connected to the liberal- democratic constitutional state?

For details, please see http://www.wzb.eu/berlin-colloquium