This lecture is in collaboration with Sustainable Global Economic Law (SGEL)

About the speaker
Martijn W Hesselink (Delft, 1968) obtained his law degrees at the University of Amsterdam and the Université Panthéon-Assas in 1992. He received his doctor's degree (cum laude) from the University of Utrecht in 1999. In the same year, he was appointed Professor of private law at the University of Amsterdam. Between 1999 and 2005 he was Director of the Amsterdam Institute for Private Law. In 2006 his chair was converted, at his request, into European Private Law. In the same year, he became the Director of the newly founded Centre for the Study of European Contract Law.

He has published on a variety of subjects in the fields of European private law and private law theory. Moreover, he has been a member of several international research groups and projects including the Study Group on a European Civil Code, the Social Justice Group and the Common Core Project. He is a founding editor of the European Review of Contract Law.  Between 2010 and 2013 he served as a member of the European Commission's expert group on European contract law. In addition, he wrote numerous studies, reports and briefing notes on matters of contract law and consumer law for the Legal Affairs Committee of the European Parliament. Since 2001, he has been an honorary justice at the Court of Appeal of Amsterdam. He has been a visiting professor at several universities, including Université René Descartes (2000), Università degli studi Roma Tre (2003, 2007), Católica Global School of Law (2010-present), Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (2010) and Sciences Po (2011, 2016-present). In 2016, he was elected a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute for European and Comparative Law at the University of Oxford.

Abstract
Prefigurative practices aim to foreshadow the more just society a radical political transformation would bring. So far, there has been little attention for the possibility of prefigurative legal practices. Perhaps the assumption is that prefigurative law is a contradiction in terms. Given the law’s structural complicity in social oppression, marginalisation, and exploitation, how can it ever be part of the solution? The idea of a prefigurative EU law may seem even more absurd. The EU and its laws are deeply entangled with capitalism, racism, imperialism, and premature deaths at its borders. Surely, EU law is beyond repair? But is it? This article suggests the opposite. It argues that a radically different EU law could become a source of hope for a society without structural oppression and marginalisation. Most concretely, it proposes to occupy the European Commission’s recent plans for a 28th legal regime. To this end, it shows how the Commission’s idea of a deregulatory sandbox could be turned into a prefigurative proposal, foreshadowing the legal non-regime for a radically horizontal European society without borders.

Registration
The lecture will  be held in the Research Seminar room  (A3.01) and online via zoom. To register online, please click on the button below.