Illiberal Lawfare: the Reframing of Fundamental Rights - featuring Professor Susanna Mancini of University of Bologna Law School and of Johns Hopkins University
Room V
1111 East 60th Street, Chicago, Illinois 60637
This presentation tackles the appropriation and instrumentalization of fundamental rights and human rights by illiberal and populist forces, who seek to impose an ideological agenda at the detriment of equality, universalism and pluralism.These strategies go beyond the more traditional use of democratic tools and procedures by illiberal and populist forces to subvert democracy. Illiberal and populists often mimic the civil rights movement, use the conceptual frame of rights to build alternative cognitive frames by remolding notions of rights to anchor them in “natural” (religious) conceptions and traditional values, often presented as classical liberal understandings of rights, that are at odds with postwar international developments.
Susanna Mancini holds the Chair of Comparative Constitutional Law at the University of Bologna Law School, and is also a Professor at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University. She holds a JD from the University of Bologna, and a PhD from the European University Institute. Her work focuses on comparative, European and international law from an interdisciplinary perspective, with a particular interest in feminist theories. She explores issues of law and religion, multiculturalism, minority rights, federalism and secession, citizenship, reproductive rights, and gender and the law. She is a co-author of the Dorsen, Rosenfeld, Sajó, Baer, and Mancini’s Comparative Constitutionalism: Cases and Materials (West, 2022). Her latest books include Constitutions and Religion(Elgar, 2020), and The Conscience Wars(Cambridge University Press, 2018, co-edited with M. Rosenfeld). She is presently working on a monograph entitled Politicized Religion and the Reframing of Fundamental Rights (Oxford University Press). Susanna Mancini has been a visiting professor at various institutions, including the Columbia Law School, the Law School of the Hebrew University, and the Central European University. She is a Vice-President of the International Association of Constitutional Law.