Preface Thirty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, a certain disillusionment has emerged about the integration of Eastern European states into the European Union. This is the case both for states that have already joined and for those on the cusp of joining. Poland and Hungary are notorious for failing to live up […]

Europe, as a distinct political and economic body as well as a collection of separate states, is facing constitutional challenges from within and without. Brexit, Catalonia, Poland, Hungary and Romania – as well as events within the European Union itself – all present challenges to European principles of constitutionalism. On Thursday, January 25, 2018, the […]

University Professor Andras Sajo, founder of the Department of Legal Studies at CEU and former judge at the European Court of Human Rights, recently delivered a lecture on “Constitutionalism in Closing Societies”. Noteworthy, Sajo explains that “constitutionalism’s imperfections contribute to the closing of open societies” and that “institutional shortcomings are the common heritage of the […]

The Constitutionalism and Politics Working Group had the pleasure to organize the talk: A critical overview on the tension between rule of law and populism in Romania by Elena-Simina Tănăsescu (Professor of Constitutional Law and EU Law, University of Bucharest and adviser on constitutional reform of the President of Romania) On Wednesday, 31st of May, […]

Populist engagement with constitution-making and constitutional reform forms a distinctive, and in significant ways worrying, tendency. Populism is explicitly present in the constitutional politics of the East-Central European countries of Hungary and Poland (but not reducible to East-Central Europe), and is causing important tensions in the European Union, which proclaims to be grounded in the […]