Legal infrastructures and democracy. Deciphering contemporary battles for the control of law

While the relationship between law and democracy is in deep crisis, we still know surprisingly little about the collective agency of legal fields and their complex relationship to the performance – or decay and resilience – of democracies in Europe and elsewhere.

In this second round of our workshop held in the framework of the Max Planck Law Working group on «Independence and Democracy in Contemporary European Democracies» (coordinated by Antoine Vauchez), we bring together a variety of disciplinary perspectives (socio-legal studies, comparative law, legal history, legal anthropology) with a view to provide new analytical lenses and new empirical knowledge on the relationship between law and democracy under global stress. In particular, the workshop proposes to adopt «infrastructural» lenses, a notion (legal infrastructures) that allows to account for the constitutive role of a limited number of nexus/platforms through which law and lawyers operate.

Thereby, the workshop aims at bringing a renewed understanding of the conditions under which law, lawyers and legal institutions allow for the development and maintenance of an inclusive and equally open public sphere of citizens in-between the market and the state.