National Legal Traditions and European Criminal Justice
Guest Lecture on May 25, 2022, 5 p.m.
Guest lecture by Dr. Renaud Colson (Associate Professor at the Law & Political Science Faculty, Nantes University) | Date, time: Wednesday, May 25, 2022, 5 p.m. | Venue: Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law, Freiburg, via Zoom | Guests are welcome!
Abstract:
The lecture will examine how questions of cultural difference between Member States’ legal traditions are being constructed, addressed, and resolved in the development of the European Area of Freedom, Security, and Justice. It will explore some of the paths that may be followed by the EU in seeking to cope with national diversity in the field of criminal justice, and provides some insights into various forms of legal and cultural resistance offered by Member States to the European harmonization process. The lecture is held against the background that the expanding ambitions of the European Union on criminal matters have been met with increasing hostility to deeper European integration. This sheds light on the growing potential for conflict between ever expanding EU law on the one hand and national legal traditions on the other, while EU primary law emphasizes the need to accommodate national diversity within the European framework.
Renaud Colson is Associate Professor at the Law & Political Science Faculty of the University of Nantes (France) and Honorary Lecturer at Cardiff University. He holds a Diploma in Legal Studies (Cardiff University), a Master’s degree in legal theory (Université Saint-Louis Bruxelles and Katholieke Universiteit Brussels), a Master’s degree in private law and a PhD in legal history (University of Nantes). He has written on a variety of subjects including comparative law, drug policy and criminology. His last monograph deals with The transformation of criminal justice: A comparison of France and England and Wales (2011). He has since then edited three collections: Les drogues face au droit (Presses universitaires de France, 2015), EU Criminal Justice and the Challenges of Diversity: Legal Cultures in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2016), and European Drug Policies: The Ways of Reform (Routledge, 2017).