National Legal Traditions and European Criminal Justice

Guest Lecture

  • Date: May 25, 2022
  • Time: 05:00 PM - 07:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Dr. Renaud Colson
  • Dr. 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).
  • Location: Freiburg – via Zoom (link see below)
  • Host: Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law
  • Contact: c.hillemanns@csl.mpg.de
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.
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