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The European Union is often depicted as a cradle of judicial activism and a polity built by courts. Tommaso Pavone shows how this judge-centric narrative conceals a crucial arena for political action. Beneath the radar, Europe’s political development unfolded as a struggle between judges who resisted European law and lawyers who pushed them to embrace change. Under the sheepskin of rights-conscious litigants and activist courts, these “Euro-lawyers” sought clients willing to break state laws conflicting with European law, lobbied national judges to uphold European rules, and propelled them to submit noncompliance cases to the European Union’s supreme court - the European Court of Justice - by ghostwriting their referrals.

By shadowing lawyers who encourage deliberate law-breaking and mobilize courts against their own governments, The Ghostwriters overturns the conventional wisdom regarding the judicial construction of Europe and illuminates how the politics of lawyers can profoundly impact institutional change and transnational governance.

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Tommaso Pavone is Assistant Professor in the School of Government and Public Policy at the University of Arizona and Visiting Researcher at the ARENA Center at the University of Oslo. His research interests span comparative politics, law and society, and judicial politics, tracing how lawyers and courts impact processes of political development, social change, and rule of law enforcement in the European Union (EU). His new book with Cambridge University Press – The Ghostwriters: Lawyers and the Politics Behind the Judicial Construction of Europe – reconstructs how entrepreneurial lawyers promoted the development of the EU by encouraging clients to break non-compliant state laws and mobilizing national courts against their own governments.

The book has been praised as “the most important book on European legal integration in decades” and a “stunning achievement” (in reviews by Mark Pollack and Charles Epp) and won four prizes from the American Political Science Association (APSA), the Law and Society Association (LSA), and the European Union Studies Association (EUSA). Pavone’s broader research agenda has produced seventeen scholarly publications, including in leading peer-reviewed journals like the American Political Science Review, World Politics, Law & Society Review, Journal of European Public Policy, and Journal of Law & Courts. It has also been covered in high-profile outlets such as The New York Times, Politico, the European Parliament, and the European Commission. Pavone holds a Ph.D. in politics from Princeton University.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by December 1, 2022.

The past decade has witnessed a resurgence of patrimonial rule not only in the developing world but also, more surprisingly, in the developed West. This resurgence carries potentially dire consequences for responding to a range of pressing problems. Understanding the sources of contemporary patrimonialism is hindered by assimilating the phenomenon into the familiar democracy/autocracy typology or by assuming that it is a function of failed modernization.

This paper, co-authored with Stephen E. Hanson, identifies the patrimonial phenomenon and explores the contemporary global diffusion of patrimonial rule from its origins in postcommunist Russia, which in the 1990s faced precisely the same social challenges—shrinking “blue collar” industries, sharply increasing economic inequality, and weak, unresponsive democratic institutions—that would bedevil developed countries around the world in the 21st century.  From Russia, patrimonialism spread westward to the “near abroad,” the new EU member states, Israel, and ultimately to the erstwhile heartland of the rule of law: the UK and the US. Some signs indicate that reestablishing bureaucratic predictability and expertise may be much harder than demolishing it. In some respects, the task may be more daunting than the salvation of democracy itself.

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Jeffrey Kopstein is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. In his research, Professor Kopstein focuses on interethnic violence, voting patterns of minority groups, and anti-liberal tendencies in civil society, paying special attention to cases within European and Russian Jewish history.  These interests are central topics in his co-authored book, Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust (Cornell University Press, 2018) and his forthcoming edited volume: "Politics, Memory, Violence: The New Social Science of the Holocaust" (Cornell University Press 2023). His current book project is "The Good Deep State: How the Global Patrimonial Wave Endangers our Future."

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by November 3, 2022.

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Over the last decade, responses to the crisis of democracy have been hampered by the fact that challenges to liberalism have often been subtle and ambiguous. All this changed on 24 February 2022. Two factors made Russia’s invasion a watershed moment in Europe’s battle for democracy: the stark moral clarity of Ukraine’s cause and the existential security threat presented by a newly aggressive Russia.  As a result, the West has responded in a far more unified manner than anyone expected.

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Way’s research focuses on global patterns of democracy and dictatorship.  His most recent book (with Steven Levitsky), Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (forthcoming Princeton University Press) provides a comparative historical explanation for the extraordinary durability of autocracies (China, Cuba, USSR) born of violent social revolution. Way’s solo-authored book, Pluralism by Default: Weak Autocrats and the Rise of Competitive Politics (Johns Hopkins, 2015), examines the sources of political competition in the former Soviet Union.  Way argues that pluralism in the developing world often emerges out of authoritarian weakness: governments are too fragmented and states too weak to monopolize political control.  His first book, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (with Steven Levitsky), was published in 2010 by Cambridge University Press. Way’s work on competitive authoritarianism has been cited thousands of times and helped stimulate new and wide-ranging research into the dynamics of hybrid democratic-authoritarian rule.

Way also has published articles in the American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Politics, Journal of Democracy, Perspectives on Politics, Politics & Society, Slavic Review, Studies in Comparative and International Development, World Politics, as well as in a number of area studies journals and edited volumes. His 2005 article in World Politics was awarded the Best Article Award in the “Comparative Democratization” section of the American Political Science Association in 2006. He is Co-Director of the Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine and is Co-Chair of the Editorial Board of The Journal of Democracy. He has held fellowships at Harvard University (Harvard Academy and Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies), and the University of Notre Dame (Kellogg Fellowship).

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by October 27, 2022.

Traditionally, definitions of security emphasized military defenses and alliances against potential adversaries. Over the last few decades, of course, everything from financial flows and technology transfer, water and energy supplies, trade relationships, to information security and social media disinformation have demanded increasing attention, alongside or instead of hard power. Nowhere have notions of security been more multidimensional, and less militaristic, than in Europe.

Has Russia's fullscale war in Ukraine forced an enduring correction back to traditional notions? Or are some changes predating the war destined to persist? Can geopolitics return if it never went away? What is the future of the fiscal-military state? Is the modern state fit for purpose any more? What is technology actually doing to governance, if anything? How might security depend on new or reinvented institutions? Is China an even bigger game-changer than Russia for European security? Is there, could there be, a pivot to Asia, or is that a nonsense? So many questions -- how do we begin to sift them, and order them, to establish a workable framework with which to build notions of security that could last?