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Roundtable 4: Robustness of the Rule of Law: Past and Present

11.00-12.30, October 8

Participants: Petra Bard (ELTE/CEU/DI); Marta Bucholc (University of Bonn); Marc Lazar (Sciences Po, Paris); Kolja Raube, KU Leuven
Moderator: Barbara Grabowska-Moroz, DI

The recent experience of illiberal regimes where incumbent majorities reshape constitutional and administrative frameworks to cement their hold over state and society open up new questions about the legality and legitimacy of these regimes: Can these constitutional orders be considered legitimate? Should democratic opposition forces aim at erasing these institutions? What domestic and international institutional models and governance mechanisms could provide more robust safety mechanisms to guarantee the Rule of Law? What is the role of supranational legal orders and organizations such as the EU in defending the Rule of Law? What lessons can we draw from earlier historical examples of democratic devolution?

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About the speakers:
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Petra Bard
Petra Bárd is Researcher at CEU’s Legal Studies Department; Research Affiliate at the CEU Democracy Institute; and Associate Professor at Eotvos Lorand University (ELTE), Faculty of Law, Department of Criminology. In the academic year 2021/22 she is a Fernard Braudel Fellow at the European University Institute. She also lectures at other universities across Europe including Belgrade, Frankfurt and Vienna. In her research and her more than 230 pieces of publications, she targets issues at the intersection of the rule of law, fundamental rights and their European enforcement mechanism, EU criminal cooperation, and hate crimes. She participates in several EU-funded projects on the above topics. Currently she is PI on 'Recommendations' in the Horizon2020 RECONNECT consortium, and actively contributes to the research limb on the rule of law. 
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Marta Bucholc
Marta Bucholc is a professor of sociology at the Faculty of Sociology of the University of Warsaw. From 2015 through 2020 she was research professor at Käte Hamburger Centre for Advanced Studies „Law as Culture“ at the University of Bonn. She is Associated Researcher (chercheuse associée) at the Centre de recherche en science politique, Université Saint-Louis Bruxelles. She was visiting academic at the Universities of Cambridge, Graz, and Jena. Her research focus is sociology of law and historical sociology. She leads the research project “National habitus formation and the process of civilization in Poland after 1989: a figurational approach” funded by Polish National Science Centre (2020-2025), and she is the Polish PI in the Volkswagen Foundation project "Towards Illiberal Constitutionalism in East Central Europe: Historical Analysis in Comparative and Transnational Perspectives", led by the University of Jena. 
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Marc Lazar

Marc Lazar, professor of Political History and Sociology, is the Head of the Center for History at Sciences Po and President of the School of Government at Luiss University in Rome. His main research are on the Left in Europe, Political History and Sociology of France and Italy, and Populism in France and Italy. Among his last publications: Peuplecratie. La métamorphose de nos démocraties, Paris, Gallimard, 2019 andwith Mathieu Fulla (eds), European Socialists and the State in the Twentieth and the Twenty-First Century, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2020. 

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Kolja Raube
Kolja Raube is Assistant Professor for European Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences and senior member and research manager at the Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies at KU Leuven. He is director of the Centre for European Studies at KU Leuven and programme coordinator at KU Leuven’s ‘Master of European Studies: Transnational and Global Perspectives’. He is adjunct professor at the American University Washington D.C. (Brussels Campus) and was visiting professor at Kobe University (Japan) as well as Visiting Research Fellow at the EU Studies Centre at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is also an external affiliate at the Transatlantic Policy Centre, Washington D.C. At the Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies, he takes part in the H2020-projects ‘Reconciling Europe with its Citizens through Democracy and the Rule of Law’ (RECONNECT) and ‘Envisioning a New Governance Architecture for a Global Europe’ (ENGAGE). His recent publication include ‘Assessing the 2019 European Parliament Elections’ (ed. with S. Kritzinger et al.; Routledge, 2020) and ‘Japan, the European Union and Global Governance’ (ed. with S. Ozawa et al., E.Elgar, 2021).
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Barbara Grabowska-Moroz
Barbara Grabowska-Moroz is Research Fellow at CEU Democracy Institute. In 2018-2021 she was a postdoc researcher in the RECONNECT project (University of Groningen, the Netherlands). In 2010-2018 she worked as a lawyer and project coordinator in the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights (Warsaw, Poland), and as a legal expert in FRANET (multidisciplinary research network of the EU Fundamental Rights Agency). She graduated from the Faculty of Law and Administration at Warsaw University (M.A., 2010) and Central European University (LL.M., 2012). In 2017 she defended her PhD thesis on the oversight of the special security services in Poland. She has co-authored, most recently, 'EU Values Are Law, after All' (YEL 2020).

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