Call for Book Chapter Proposals: Justifying state interference with individual rights in Europe – between theory and practice

In the interaction between state authorities and citizens, justifications for executive decisions are a basic requirement of the rule of law. They help people affected by executive decisions to understand them and to challenge them if they consider them unjustified. In addition, a duty to give reasons assists public authorities in scrutinizing and monitoring their own decisions for legal correctness and proportionality as well as for patterns of discrimination, racial profiling and harassment. This is the theory reaffirmed by the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union in 2000. In practice, however, there are many difficulties in implementing the theory. This may be because decision-makers are not trained to distinguish between case-specific and universally applicable justifications; because the selection of individuals to be subjected to measures is based on common discriminatory stereotypes that cannot be revealed in the statement of reasons; or because adequate standards of justification have yet to be developed. The envisaged volume will explore the discrepancy between theory and practice through case studies from Europe.

Proposals for chapters focusing on any European country are welcome. Ideally, the chapters should reconstruct the state of the discourse on the justification requirements for executive decisions (legal theory and legislation) and discuss, with reference to concrete cases, the extent to which executive justification practice complies with these requirements. Contributions from fields, such as legal philosophy and semiotics, that help to understand concrete cases from a methodologically more abstract angle are also welcome.

Please send proposals of up to 300 words, accompanied by a short biography, to beate.kutschke@gmx.de by March 15, 2025.

ed. by Beate Kutschke, Paris Lodron Universität Salzburg