Max SteuerO.P. Jindal Global University (India) | Comenius University in Bratislava (Slovakia)
Max Steuer
Doctor of Philosophy
Democracy studies beyond disciplines: constitutional courts, freedom of expression, European Union constitutionalism
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58
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Introduction
Max Steuer (MA [Central European University], LLM [University of Cambridge], PhD [Comenius University]) focuses broadly on questions of democracy protection, having conducted research in the subfields of constitutional adjudication in Central Europe, constitutionalism in the European Union and freedom of expression, among others. His interdisciplinary work appeared in edited collections or journals in political science, law, sociology and European studies.
Publications
Publications (58)
The EC’s 2024 Rule of Law report is yet another indicator of the deterioration of constitutional standards in Slovakia. Next to outlining selected key developments of Slovakia’s illiberalization in 2024, this post underscores how the small jurisdiction’s size in combination with its relatively isolated doctrinal legal academia could hamper the deve...
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), praised for their global scale and open-access elements, are commonly associated with several challenges. These include unequal access, limited interactivity, or insufficient learner background and skills. This article aims to understand how introducing online and offline connectivist elements influences MOOC le...
Attitudinal and strategic models prevail in studying the capacities of centralized constitutional courts (CCs) to withstand autocratization. Yet, these models rarely scrutinize CCs’ interpretations of political concepts. This article aims to remedy the gap via an institutionalist approach to the significance of conceptualizations of democracy by CC...
Slovakia’s parliament approved an amendment to its criminal code and associated legislation that, if it comes into effect, will significantly reduce the prescription periods for various crimes including rape, the penalties for others, and abolish the Special Prosecutor’s Office. Despite a narrative claiming to commit to restorative justice by reduc...
This article offers a case study of Slovakia focusing on the 'Mazurek' case, the first criminal conviction of an incumbent Slovak far-right MP of 'hate speech'. My explorative analysis uses data from my work as expert appointed by the investigation. It shows that cultural expertise in the Slovak 'hate speech' cases involving prominent politicians h...
The study of the period from Slovakia’s independence in 1993 until 2015 demonstrated that the SCC has nominally issued rulings constraining the legislator more than some of its regional counterparts. Yet, a critical perspective on significant rulings shows a reluctance to challenge political majorities or the opposition with wide public support on...
Why a volume on the states of emergency in the Visegrad Four countries from the vantage point of fundamental rights? The introductory chapter identifies the gap in existing scholarship on emergencies pertaining to Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, which are significant for the study of emergencies for a combination of historical and co...
The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated that the extended restrictions of some fundamental rights during states of emergency cause intense public discussion about the competence of the governments to execute such restrictions, the consequences stemming from rights violations and the avenues to gain redress. In other cases, however, such discussion was m...
Emergencies are sticky and tricky; justifications keep surfacing for retaining them, showing how legal regulations are shaped by emergency discourses. This chapter scrutinises the Slovak models of emergency regimes, with attention to their political context. Firstly, it traces references to emergencies during the constitution-making and constitutio...
Editorial for the guest co-edited section of the Jindal Global Law Review (Vol. 14 No. 2). Full text at https://rdcu.be/dwhUv.
Editorial for the in-house edited section of the Jindal Global Law Review (Vol. 14 No. 2).
Full text at https://rdcu.be/dvcj1.
The study of constitutional courts (CCs) of post-communist Europe typically entailed the belief in CCs’ transformative potential for the consolidation of democracy. Recently, this belief has been questioned, albeit the knowledge of why at least some CCs in the region failed to prevent the rise of non-democratic regimes remains limited. This article...
Previous research has neglected how repeated declarations of states of emergency (SsoE) in response to the same emergency may combine with executive overreach and underreach within a single jurisdiction, undermining the authority of the SsoE as a legal institution and increasing the vulnerability of the constitutional system as a result. This artic...
Slovakia voted on the final day of September 2023. The electoral rhetoric, results and subsequent coalition-building give grounds to expect illiberal constitutional changes. More attention is needed towards the Constitutional Court’s capacity to resist such illiberalization, as Slovakia may join Hungary in a revamped illiberal Visegrad alliance.
To respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, governments frequently resorted to declaring the state of emergency, fuelling contestations over the abuse of public powers and effectiveness of the measures to induce compliance. This article examines how the denial of the political nature of emergency governance known as depoliticisation undermines government...
[Book review of The Changing Role of Citizens in EU Democratic Governance, by D. Jancic (ed.), (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2023), 368pp., hardback, £90, ISBN: 9781509950829.] 'In short, the present volume offers an enriching engagement with some of the pivotal questions of democratisation (or lack thereof) in the EU and a strong starting point for fu...
The chapter on the Slovak Constitutional Court (SCC) demonstrates that constitutional courts may develop their reading of constitutional identity in a reactive way. The lack of textual hooks in the text of the Slovak Constitution, combined with experience of political unrest, tradition of judicial minimalism, and dominance of separation of powers d...
In democracies, individuals are free to develop their own conceptions of values, and try to persuade others of their viability. However, some of these conceptions carry greater weight than others. In particular, centralized constitutional courts (CCs) authoritatively interpret fundamental values as they are typically entrusted by constitutions to d...
This chapter allows you to learn (1) why extreme speech cases benefit from cultural expertise and yet why it may be particularly challenging for experts tobe involved in them, (2) what strategies can be employed by different stakeholders, including courts, the media and the experts themselves to mitigate the risks stemming from expert witnessing in...
Scholarly discourse on the rule of law has become more open toward interdisciplinary endeavors, making the rule of law an ever more ubiquitous point of reference. In the European Union, the rule of law is becoming the most frequently publicly discussed “EU value” from among those listed in the EU Treaties, surpassing even democracy and human rights...
The purpose of this contribution is to critically scrutinize prominent reactions to two key innovative components introduced by the European Union (EU) institutions at the Conference on the Future of Europe (CoFoE) in 2021–2022: the CoFoE Plenary and the European Citizens’ Panels. These components were at the heart of what has been considered a uni...
The unsuccessful petition to ban Slovakia’s extreme right parliamentary party – the value of focusing on judicial craft for studies of militant democracy and courts – statutory frameworks as intervening variables and their overview in Czechia, Hungary and Slovakia – key components of judicial craft endogenous to courts: consistency, legal reasoning...
Key points
Junior journals occupy an intermediate space between student and senior journals and diversify academic publishing.
Junior journals have the potential to help reduce two undesirable trends in academic publishing: predatory publishing and the absence of diversity.
Some of the practices followed by Politikon: The IAPSS Journal of Political...
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the protection of public health became a political priority worldwide. Slovakia’s COVID-19 response was initially praised as a global success. However, major rights restrictions were introduced in spring 2020, with some of these endorsed by the parliament. This article uses = Rossiter’s and Schmitt’s concepts of the ex...
Slovakia’s democracy has faced intensified challenges from both far-right political actors seeking to gain a parliamentary majority and mainstream political actors engaging in various forms of anti-minority rhetoric. This chapter provides an overview of mainstream measures conventionally associated with Slovak neo-militant democracy, as well as of...
[EN] This essay starts with the observation that the belief in freedom of speech paving the way towards democratic consolidation, so central for the struggle against state socialism, is on retreat in Czechia and Slovakia, two Central European democracies balancing on the brink of deconsolidation. Two recent important contributions to the debate on...
Authoritarian populist actors rhetorically embrace a conception of democracy as unconstrained majority rule. The majoritarian conception of democracy challenges the role of independent constitutional courts as institutions safeguarding fundamental rights and the rule of law beyond majority rule. This article highlights how the tension between the c...
[Hong Kong Journal of Law and Public Affairs] This paper introduces some of the peculiarities embedded in contemporary research on the concept of militant democracy in relation to the concept of constitutionalism. As it is well known, there is an inherent tension in militant democracy, whereby militant measures, restricting rights in the name of up...
This chapter examines how the Slovak Constitutional Court conceived of its significant law-making potential granted to it by its very wide range of competences. For the first time in the research on this Court, the chapter is structured as a dialogue between the insider perspective on the SCC’s past, present, and optimal law-making role in the cons...
It is well known that media discourse may (de-) emphasise certain perspectives, and the portrayal of the EU is no exception. This chapter uses the case of the newspaper portrayal of the EU in crises to explore how the framing of the Union may reduce the complexity of the question of its further development from a multi-dimensional to a linear stand...
This article aims to place the selection process of judges to the Slovak Constitutional Court, which is most likely to determine its composition for more than a decade, into the context of the constitutional judges’ interaction with other political actors, including the broader public. It illustrates how selected quality Slovak newspapers have fram...
The Hungarian Constitutional Court (hereinafter ‘HCC’) belongs to the fourth generation of European constitutional courts. It was created after the breakdown of state socialism, as were its several counterparts in Central and Eastern Europe. Hungary was second only to Poland in the region in establishing a constitutional court. The HCC, which began...
This entry does not provide an exhaustive account of all scholarship on militant democracy. Instead, it presents why the concept is relevant, albeit rather neglected, in the field of security studies, and how it can enrich critical analyses on various measures democracies employ in the name of protection of their citizens’ (and, much less frequentl...
The Slovak Constitutional Court (SCC) is a rule-adjudicating political institution (Rothstein 133–134) that has several exclusive competences reserved to centralized constitutional courts (Cappelletti 53–66), such as constitutional review of legislation and authoritative interpretation of the Constitution of the Slovak Republic (Act No. 460/1992 Co...
Forthcoming in Bátora, J. and Fossum, J.E. (eds.): Towards a segmented European political order – The European Union's post-crises conundrum.
https://www.cpsa-acsp.ca/documents/conference/2019/584.Steuer.pdf
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It is well known that media discourse may (de-) emphasise certain perspectives, and the portrayal of the EU is no exception. This chapter...
The concept of democratic security attempts at reconciling the tension between democracy that is inseparable from fundamental rights guarantees (Schaffer 2015) on the one hand, and due considerations given to security both at the national and the individual level on the other hand. As such, it opens up the room for more multilevel analyses internat...
The political discourse on regulation of extreme speech in Central Europe has shifted in favor of militant democracy, an approach which supports enhanced criminal law restrictions on speech. Developing the conceptual framework of the consequences of militant democracy and applying legal and parliamentary discourse analysis, this article shows wheth...
[EN] Varieties of Democracy in the Decision Making of the Slovak Constitutional Court in Its Third Term: A Case Study of the Appointment Powers of the Head of State ||| This contribution shifts the attention from constitutional courts as 'guardians of the constitution' to 'guardians of democracy'. It explains the need for the shifting perspective b...
The Slovak Constitutional Court (SCC) is commonly known as one of the Central European “guardians of constitutionalism”, which successfully helped establish democratic standards through the division of powers and guarantees of fundamental rights. Yet there has been a lack of research on its decision-making since the accession of Slovakia to the Eur...
After the accession of several Central and Eastern European countries to the European Union in 2004, new challenges arose for their highest judicial institutions to define and shape the relationship between the national and European legal order. This paper assesses the first decade of the effort of the Slovak Constitutional Court (SCC) in interpret...
Nové možnosti komunikácie a prezentácie ideí rozšírili priestor pre vyjadrenie názorov, vrátane takých, ktoré zasahujú do ľudskej dôstojnosti. Reakcie na tento fenomén majú neraz právny charakter, umožňujúci sankcionovať pôvodcov „nenávistných prejavov“. Slovenská republika, kde sa v roku 2016 po prvýkrát v postkomunistickej histórii do zákonodarné...
The (Non)Political Taboo: Why Democracies Ban Holocaust Denial. This article unpacks the controversy that surrounds criminal law restrictions on Holocaust denial in democracies. By applying insights from postmodernist and post-structuralist theories on amendments of criminal legislation in three Central European democracies, I aim to understand the...
In 2015 and 2016, the Council of Europe (CoE) intensively participated in the global public debate about the proper response to ‘hate speech’, even though it still does not offer its own consolidated definition of the term. While the ECtHR’s case law remains to some extent inconsistent, through recommendations by the Secretary-General and the Europ...
The concept of security has remained in the shadows of the ‘three pillars’ of the Council of Europe (CoE) until 2015 when the annual report of its Secretary General presented the term ‘democratic security’. This paper provides two alternative conceptualizations of the term and, through making a parallel with the two main approaches towards extreme...
Judicial institutions in democratic countries often face the challenge of resolving the conflict between two fundamental rights, both guaranteed by domestic and international legislation. These ‘constitutional dilemmas’ call for a rule or principle which allows us to create the proper balance between these rights in concrete cases. One of the most...
Do ‘more’ human rights enable people live better? The answer might be obvious for human rights defenders but measuring the relationship between human rights and human well-being is more complicated. Via reviewing existing research on how human rights, in particular civil and political rights influence the standards of peoples’ lives, this paper ide...
Parliamentary discourse in democratic states is both a form of implementation of freedom of speech and a way of increasing awareness of the quality and level of freedom of speech in democratic regimes. The Slovak Republic is a country with a distinct post-communist tradition of freedom of speech, where restrictions and censorship have stood opposed...
This paper assesses the role of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in cases of conflicts between freedom of expression and protection of personality in Slovakia. Via legal and content analysis of selected case law of Slovak courts and cases against Slovakia decided by the ECtHR, it argues that a slow process of ‘socialization’ of Slovak cou...
The study analyzes selected outcomes of the minority policy of the Slovak Republic between 2006 and 2014. By conducting a content analysis of three government manifestos (2006, 2010, 2012) and explanatory statements of three significant laws from this period, it shows that the measures approved by two executives (2006, 2012) aimed to satisfy the al...
This paper tests the assumption of a universal right to freedom of speech in the context of the Slovak Republic, a Central European country still facing the legacies of suppression of freedom of speech during the communist regime, in order to find out whether the conception of free speech understood as European is used in Slovakia as well. Firstly,...
[SK] Štúdia skúma spôsoby zdôvodňovania rozhodnutí slovenských súdov v prípadoch kolízie dvoch základných práv, slobody prejavu a osobnostných práv. Prostredníctvom obsahovej analýzy vybraných rozhodnutí slovenských súdov prevažne z rokov 2010-2013 sme rozobrali používanie (1) ontologických, tj. filozofických a teoretických zdôvodnení v prospech sl...
I. časť. Dvadsaťdva rokov vývoja, interpretácie a aplikácie Ústavy Slovenskej republiky zanechalo stopu aj na hľadaní odpovede na otázku postavenia prezidenta v politickom systéme. Predkladaný príspevok vychádza z predpokladu, že reálne postavenie prezidenta je závislé nielen od priestoru, ktorý mu na konanie poskytuje právna úprava, ale aj od vním...