Confirmed participants (as of 27.11.2023; alphabetical)
• Benedikt Pirker, University of Fribourg
• George Pavlakos, University of Glasgow
• Gürkan Çapar, Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies
• Hyun Jung Lee, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg
• Jorge Luis Fabra Zamora, University at Buffalo
• María Isabel Turégano Mansilla, University of Castilla-La Mancha
• Orlando Scarcello, KU Leuven

Theme
Vulnerabilities, human rights, the protection of common goods, as well as climate change, are irreducible to the mastering and control of any single state. Everyday legal relations include a transnational or pre-institutional dimension. And yet, the idea that the rule of law is relative to each system has proven difficult to shake off from our concepts and theories of legal practices. This way, on the one hand, the satisfaction of basic needs and interests which are antecedent to any single legal order, or which may only be addressed on a wider scale than the territorial state, cannot be reached if merely jurisdictional reasons lead us to completely disregard this dimension. Likewise, it is ungranted to leave the resolution of such complex questions entirely to the law of each forum, as powerful actors may freely exploit forum shopping. On the other hand, the fragmentation of legal regimes in general is, probably, a permanent feature. Since the concomitant responsibility rests upon multiple concurring or conflicting sources of law, their deciding organs will always need to choose between the Scylla of jurisdictional overstepping and the Charybdis of onesided legal cognition. The stakes are high, and far from merely hypothetical. To illustrate with two or three notable developments (which do not exhaust the potential targets of this workshop’s theme): In recent years, supranational and constitutional courts have clashed not only substantively but also methodologically, concerning the adequate standards of review and proportionality as of November 2023, we experience the contestation and paralysis of the Appellate Body of the WTO over its perceived ‘activism’ and ‘overreaching’ and, perhaps from a contrastable angle, persistent calls have been raised for a profound reform and rebalancing of legitimate interests and common goods in the regimes of international investment law and their dispute settlement bodies. These contexts reveal that some of the most prized aims of legal cooperation are at stake. To better understand this complex reality, this workshop sets to gather diverse case studies and reflections on the feasibility and the legitimacy of cross-regime, interlegal reasoning and balancing at the interfaces of multiple and diverse legalities. All perspectives —empirical, analytical, methodological, normative, critical— are welcome.

Target proposals
include, but are not limited to the following:
•Analysis of cases considering norms (reasons, standards) stemming from more than one legal order, examining the legal reasoning involved, including balancing and/or other methods.
•Discussions of inter-legality, legal entanglements, and legal thinking which acknowledges fundamental principles of jurisdiction for transnational or preinstitutional legal relations, interface norms, interface conflicts, interface legal reasonings, the interaction of legal regimes, or clauses and doctrines which provide opportunities for bridging different legalities.
•Theorizing legal reasoning under multiple legal orders and the distinctive features of its arguments: Current functions and features; possible models, proposals, or methods; the applicability (or lack thereof) of theories on legal reasoning to cases of law beyond the state; judicial and epistemic virtues apposite for globalization.
•Analysis of argumentative methods related to ‘due consideration’, ‘harmonization’, equivalent protection tests, margin of appreciation, deference, general principles as a source of international law, conflicts of norms and conflict of laws.
•Arguments for restrictions or delimitations to balancing or arguments which may consider norms from ‘extrinsic’ legalities, or to acknowledging principles of jurisdiction apart from positive law; pitfalls, fallacies, uncertainties, risks in cross-border reasoning.
•Relevant aspects of argumentation theory regarding overlapping legalities and law beyond the state, such as logics, rhetoric, pragmatics, communicative force.
•The bearing of considerations from democratic legitimacy, solidarity, subsidiarity, consensus, deference, inter alia, for judgments on international human rights law (or other regimes).
•TWAIL and critical approaches to legal reasoning under globalization.

Participation
To facilitate discussion, we invite prospective participants to submit their proposals (an abstract between 300 and 500 words) by April 15, 2024, and final papers by June 21, 2024.

Publication
This Special Workshop has the goal of collecting its presentations, incorporating revisions after their discussion, in a collective volume to be proposed to a renowned academic publisher.
Submissions, contact and any further enquiries are warmly welcome at:
Interlegal.Reasoning.2024@gmail.com