The University of Amsterdam is hosting the Interfacing Private Law Lecture Series.

• On Monday March 30th, Martijn Hesselink (EUI) will give a lecture on Prefigurative EU Law. 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? Hesselinks 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.
• On Monday April 20th, Britta van Beers addresses the humanising functions of legal personhood in an age in which the person-thing distinction is increasingly regarded as a harmful fiction, at odds with the embedded, physical, interdependent and relational aspects of life. She discusses the critiques of legal personhood. Unlike posthumanist thinkers, she argues that a certain degree of legal anthropocentrism is both inevitable and indispensable in the light of the humanising functions of legal personhood.
• On Monday June 22nd, Bronwen Morgan (UNSW Sydney) will talk about his paper which traces the architecture of a legal infrastructure capable of nurturing and supporting regenerative economies by weaving together threads from six interrelated keywords: sharing, platforms, value, place, care and time. Each keyword signals a blend of concept and practice, and a conception of law that is as much about institutional imagination as about regulation and control and constraint. He argues that the legal lineaments of value, sharing and platforms tend towards extraction but open up regenerative pathways when interwoven with place, care and time. The legal infrastructure articulated points to a new kind of civic law, neither private nor public, that braids together non-state bottom-up imaginaries, bioregions, cities and local economies.
• On Monday June 29th, Ralf Michaels (MPI Hamburg) will talk about equality through private law. In the traditional division of labor private law is responsible for efficiency, and equality is achieved, if at all, by public law, most importantly through tax and transfer. Today, the division itself has become questionable, and the significant reduction in tax rates since the Reagan revolution has made public law ineffective. Can private law come to the rescue?