Patricia Mindus

Uppsala University | UU · Department of Philosophy

Bringing together scholars of migration and constitutional law, this volume analyses the problematic relationship between the rise of populism, restrictions of migrants' rights and democratic decay in Europe. By offering both constructive and critical accounts, it creates a nuanced debate on the possibilities for and limitations of legal resilience...

Reason and emotion are often cast as opposites. Yet emotion comes in a wide array of manifestations and has a variety of relations with its supposed opposite. Understanding emotion better is key to grasping how jurisprudence casts the relation between psychology and judicial decision making. Jurisprudents disagree on whether and when (lack of) emot...

The article considers what arbitrary law-making is and what may count as arbitrary law-making in the field of migration policy. It contributes to the discussion of arbitrary law-making in relation to migration policy in two ways. First, it offers an analysis of arbitrariness, pointing out that rhetorical definitions abound – perhaps not surprisingl...

The special issue covers both fronts by presenting a conceptual analysis of arbitrary law-making that sets out to typify its various meanings, along an empirical account of its actual functioning in legal and political practice. As arbitrariness becomes a pressing concern for lawyers, politicians and scholars attempting to grasp the discretionary p...

ResumenLa relación entre derecho y política es uno de los temas más debatidos en la teoría del derecho.No hay un consenso sobre el alcance y extensión del elemento político y del elemento jurídico enel derecho. Legislación es un concepto ambiguo porque designa a la ley que ha sido promulgada,y, por tanto, el objeto primario de muchas teorías jurídi...

Special issue for the journal The Theory and Practice of Legislation

In this paper, a typology of forms of arbitrariness, as related to political power, is sketched out and applied specifically to the analysis of citizenship policies and border-control techniques. The paper offers a basic typology of forms of arbitrariness making possible a hopefully clarifying differentiation among forms of abuse: (a) illegal pract...

This chapter presents the problem of legal uncertainty afflicting second country nationals in the UK and British citizens turning from expats to post-European third country nationals. First we look at the case of European citizens living in the UK and then we look at British citizens residing in other parts of the Union. Real-world cases are presen...

In this final chapter some conclusions as to the nature of Union citizenship are drawn. Union citizenship is found to constitute, as a reflection of the Union itself, a status sui generis: It consists of both supranational and transnational elements. Some parallels are also drawn to the way citizenship and interstate equality is framed in American...

This chapter determines the extension of Union citizenship by asking: Who gets to withdraw the status of Union citizenship? It is a complex and debated issue. The various options are presented and the anticipated consequences for both the UK and EU states are fleshed out. Venues for challenging the loss of status are also discussed. The chapter dis...

This chapter gives a swift overview of the workings and principal rights associated with European citizenship. Some insight into the historical evolution of the status is offered. The major entitlements are explained as well as important case-law. The aim is to provide an outline of the essentials of European citizenship for the purpose of understa...

This chapter focuses on the intension of Union citizenship by asking if rights can be frozen. In particular, we look at the extra-negotiational legal resources available for freezing rights of the people involved. Can rights be frozen? Which rights? Whose rights? Under what conditions? For how long? Sources of international law and EU law, includin...

This chapter starts by explaining why a theoretically informed inquiry is needed. Such an inquiry is warranted for a number of reasons that include political volatility, lack of relevant precedents and the fact that conventional approaches do not lead to many policy suggestions for solving the hard cases at hand. It is suggested that Brexit may pla...

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book investigates European citizenship after Brexit, in light of the functionalist theory of citizenship. No matter its shape, Brexit will impact significantly on what has been labelled as one of the major achievements of EU integration: Citizenship of the Union. For the first time an automa...

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. Henry Louis Mencken INTRODUCTION This chapter will consider some common descriptive and normative claims about why justice is or should be blind to our emotions, shedding light on how jurisprudence casts emotion in relation to law. In section 2, the focus will be on what...

To better understand what issues today’s technologies raise in relation to political liberty, understood as self-determination, attention should shift from the level of contents of the Internet to its more basic architecture and governance (critical internet resources [CIR], protocols, governance ecology, etc.). Mainstream political science has for...

This special issue of Etikk i praksis - Nordic Journal of Applied Ethics deals with the largely underexplored connections between public domain and democracy in the digital age and features articles highlighting various aspects of this broader theme.

Technologies carry politics since they embed values. It is therefore surprising that mainstream political and legal theory have taken the issue so lightly. Compared to what has been going on over the past few decades in the other branches of practical thought, namely ethics, economics, and the law, political theory lags behind. Yet the current emph...

The Maastricht Treaty (the “Treaty”) first introduced the status of EU citizenship. The twentieth anniversary of the signing of the Treaty, marked in 2013, was declared the European Year of the Citizen. Union citizenship has been understood as the world's first post-national citizenship, although it is still complementary to national citizenships....

Il tema della cittadinanza è tornato ad essere di grande attualità. Chi deve essere considerato cittadino? Che cosa significa essere cittadino? Quali sono i meccanismi che regolano l’inclusione e l’esclusione dalla cittadinanza? Come si giustificano e come si criticano tali meccanismi? Con un approccio pluridisciplinare, il volume presenta gli stud...

This paper explores the contribution by the contemporary legal realist Hanoch Dagan. Dagan’s brand of realism defines law on the basis of its institutions or social practices, not of its norms or rules. The paper first provides a critical overview of this realist theory of law: It is not synonymous with the predictive theory of law, with Leiter’s t...

Technologies carry politics since they embed values. It is therefore surprising that mainstream political and legal theory have taken the issue so lightly. Compared to what has been going on over the past few decades in the other branches of practical thought, namely ethics, economics, and the law, political theory lags behind. Yet the current emph...

The relationship between law and politics is one of the most debated topics in legal theory. There is no consensus on the range and scope of the political and the legal element in law. Legislation or law-making is conceptually ambiguous because it indicates the law which has been promulgated, and therefore the primary object of many modern theories...

The imperative theory of law exemplified in the work of John Austin is the object of much criticism in the movement of Scandinavian legal realism (SLR). The very core notions of command, sovereignty and will are targeted. This paper explores the Scandinavian readings of Austin’s theory, chiefly by reconstructing the main arguments of Axel Hägerströ...

Karl Olivecrona was among the founders of the Scandinavian Legal Realist movement that developed a theory of law at odds with traditional imperativist and voluntaristic theories of law. Here his th ...

Digital democracy has been cutting the edge in fields connected to legal, political and social theory over the last two decades but cross- fertilization and transdisciplinary approaches are still scarce. The impact of ICTs on political and governance processes seem elusive to traditional theoretical settings and mainstream conceptualizations. This...

Technologies carry politics since they embed values. It is therefore surprising that mainstream political and legal theory have taken the issue so lightly. Compared to what has been going on over the past few decades in the other branches of practical thought, namely ethics, economics and the law, political theory lags behind. Yet the current empha...

When the German constitutional court expressed itself in the Lisbon ruling, on the 30th of June 2009, the famous German newspaper Der Bild published the corrosive headline “the end of federalism”. The aim of this paper is to present and discuss the arguments of the Court concerning (1) the nature of the EU as a confederation (Staatenverbund), (2) t...

The citizen is the “simple element of a polity”, as Aristotle once put it. Citizenship appears as a prolegomenon to other core questions concerning public policy and constitutionalism. In Europe today, we deal with a threefold concept of citizenship and we need to understand how it is built up in order to assess some recent trends in citizenship, t...

“Citizenship is the right to have rights” was famously claimed by Hannah Arendt. The case of the Slovenian erased sheds new light on this assumption that was supposedly put to rest after World War II. We lack a comprehensive paradigm for grasping what citizenship means today in, and for, our societies. My thesis is that there are currently three wa...

“Citizenship is the right to have rights” was famously claimed by Hannah Arendt. The case of the Slovenian erased sheds new light on this assumption that was supposedly put to rest after World War II. We lack a comprehensive paradigm for grasping what citizenship means today in, and for, our societies. My thesis is that there are currently three wa...

Hägerström’s early work seems to deal more with morals than with theoretical philosophy. However, to deduce content from glancing at the titles is to catch a red herring.2This does not imply that Hägerström did not make considerations in connection with the practical realm of philosophy but that these considerations are less relevant for the unders...

In time for his 55th birthday, on September 6th 1923, Hägerström and his wife Esther moved for their last time, settling in Floragatan, on the outskirts of town. This small house hosted the smoky studio and library room where he spent most of his remaining days, working on two immense tasks that only death could keep him from finishing. The first t...

One of the most renowned ideas of Scandinavian realism is law as a mechanism, a sort of clockwork. This thesis is usually said to parallel similar views in other anti-formalistic movements, particularly American realism.While handbooks in legal theory and philosophy of law have posited the two traditions of legal realism as parallel for decades, re...

This chapter describes Hägerström´s family- and cultural background, his childhood and relationship to religion. His arrival in the intellectually fervid milieu of Uppsala in 1887 sets the frame for discussing his early work, including the studies on Aristotle and Kant. Whereas the prevailing reading of his youth has entailed a series of problems,...

In 1910, Hägerström’s friend and mentor, Erik Burman – «the Socrates of Swedish Philosophy»Opinion of A. Hägerström in an interview by H. Apéria-Meurling, Samtal med en svensk tänkare, in «Ord och Bild», 1939, 48, p. 420: «den svenska filosofiens Sokrates.» – retired from the chair in practical philosophy because of his frequent health problems. Ev...

Hägerström had a passion for politics, international relations, political history and the history of political ideas throughout his life. He also lived in a world of great changes: Born in a rural and static society, in one of Europe’s oldest kingdoms, he died in a mass society where the industrial revolution had made possible such extremes as the...

Axel Hägerström would certainly have been surprised on the cold morning of October 31st, 1917, if someone had told him that he would be remembered as the “spiritual father” of Scandinavian realism.D. Lloyd, Introduction to Jurisprudence, Stevens & Sons, London 1965, p. 292. Yet, that very day was the first step along the way: The Uppsala University...

In any given time of emergency, fundamental rights and the constitutional arrangement are being jeopardized. The question of how to keep together liberty and security in times of emergency has puzzled generations of scholars but the issue is hardly ever addressed in times of normalcy. In the wake of 9/11, the scholarly debate has taken off quite si...

I take humans to basically strive toward a condition of peace enabling human flourishing. Yet human groups and individuals alike have an extraordinary wide range of understandings of such a condition. If hope for lasting peace and joint cooperation is to emerge from rule of law or otherwise underpin global harmony, first these very concepts need to...