I. Welcome to the Common Core 2012
"European Constitutionalism from Below: Constructing a Bottom Up Constitutional Process in the European Union", which seeks to encourage an interdisciplinary platform for renown scholars, jurist, and policy makers from around the world to develop innovative critiques and alternatives that might address the urgent crises facing Europe and the depoliticisation of the European landscape as a result of over 20 years of neoliberal order. In the wake of urgent global challenges to both the European Union and the global system, here we are particularly interested in opening the Common Core Project as a platform for exploring and advancing the Commons‟ as a paradigm and strategy for initiating a process of bottom up constitutionalism in Europe.
II. Organization
The Common Core Conference has been hosted by the IUC for the past five years and the 2012 Conference is hosted by the International University College of Turin (IUC) and the Institute for the study of Political Economy and Law (IPEL). Drawing upon scholars and students from around the globe, the IUC is an academic centre for the critical, interdisciplinary study of law, economics and finance. Its faculty and advisory members include such eminent figures, such as Guido Calabresi, Duncan Kennedy, Stefano Rodotà, Amartya Sen, and Gustavo Zagrebelsky. The Institute for the Study of Political Economy and Law is a collaborative effort of scholars and practitioners to respond to the urgent need for a new politics that includes systemic critique and productive self-interrogation of existing institutional governance arrangements, as well as organized normative contestation of mainstream ideologies and practices. The Institute operates under the Directorship of Prof. Gunther Teubner and Prof. Josef Halevi.
III. Keynote speakers
Mauro Bussani
Mauro Bussani is Professor of Private and Comparative Law at the University of Trieste and has been a visiting professor in the US, Brazil, Peru, France, Switzerland, the UK, Portugal, Serbia, Hungary, and China. He is Scientific Director of the International Association of Legal Sciences (IALS - UNESCO) and also sits on the Scientific Councils of the Fondation pour le droit continental (Paris), the Interdisciplinary Association of Comparative and Private International Law (Vienna), and the Master of Laws in Cross-Cultural Business Practice, Fribourg Law School - Berne Law School - Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Professor Bussani is co-editor of the Cambridge University Press series “The Common Core of European Private Law.” His principal publications include 21 Books (of which 5 are simply edited), and more than 100 Essays, in Italian, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese.
Tine De Moor
Tine De Moor (PhD; Ghent, Antwerp, and London) is currently associate professor at the department for social and economic history of Utrecht University. Through an interdisciplinary approach for the study of the long-term evolution of rural commons, De Moor has been able to revise the historical basis of the widely debated metaphor of the Tragedy of the Commons, as launched in 1968 by G. Hardin. Whereas from a modern-day perspective the flaws in Hardin‟s theory have been well-documented, the historical deficiencies in his theory were hardly ever studied. De Moor‟s research, combined extensive empirical research and analysis with explicit modelling and a strongly developed theoretical framework, has been published in several books, journals. She is also the (co-)founder of the peer-reviewed journal the International Journal of the Commons, and she has been member of the Executive council of the International Association for the Study of the Commons since 2008. De Moor is currently in charge of two large projects on institutions for collective action, of which one is a European Research Council Starting Grant.
Gilda Farrell
Gilda Farrell has serves as Head of the Social Cohesion Research and Development Division at the Council of Europe since 2000. Before that, she was Head of the Technical Assistance Bureau for the “Leader Communitary Initiative”; Lecturer and Associate Researcher (York University, Toronto; Economic Research Institute, Catholic University, Quito, Ecuador) as well as Consultant for several international organisations. She has authored numerous publications in several languages on shared responsibility and citizenship in Europe.
Ugo Mattei
Ugo Mattei is a Professor at Università degli Studi di Torino and an Alfred & Hanna Fromm Distinguished Professor of International and Comparative Law at University of California, Hastings College of Law. He is member of Accademia Internazionale di Diritto Comparato, and Editor in Chief of Global Jurist online magazine; he is member of the Board of the American Journal of Comparative Law, and of the International Revue of Law and Economics, of the Rivista Critica del Diritto Privato. As General Editor of the project The Common Core of European Private Law, many of his publications can be found into the bibliography of Cambridge University Press and of Carolina Academic Press. Among his many publication it has to be mentioned "La proprietà rdquo; in "Trattato di Diritto Civile diretto da Rodolfo Sacco" which won in 2003 the Prize Luigi Tartufari of Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei; Comparative Law and Economics, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1997; Basic Principles of Property Law, Greenwood Press 2000; The European Codification Process, Kluwer 2003 and "Common Law, Il Diritto Anglo Americano", Utet Torino 1992 and 2004, and Plunder: When the Rule of Law is Illegal, coauthored with Laura Nader, Blackwell (2008).