Emile Noel Fellows
Academic Year 2009-2010
FALL 2009
SPRING 2010
 Michele Pifferi (Italy)
Lecturer of Medieval and Modern Law History and of Criminal Law History at the Faculty of Law, University of Ferrara. Research Project: Individualization of Punishment and Social Defence in the Criminal Law of the Early Twentieth Century.
Dr. Michele Pifferi is currently Lecturer of Medieval and Modern Law History and of Criminal Law History at the Faculty of Law, University of Ferrara. Since 2002, he has also been a Visiting Researcher at the Max Planck Institut für Europäische Rechtsgeschichte in Frankfurt am Main working on a project concerning criminal justice in sixteenth century.
Dr. Pifferi holds a doctorate in the History of Law from the University of Macerata. He has also been awarded a fellowship by the Juridical Science Department of Ferrara where he will be responsible for coordinating an interdisciplinary project on the legal devices of immigrants’ exclusion. Dr. Pifferi also regularly participates in the activities of the Centro Studi per la Storia del Pensiero Giuridico Moderno in Florence.
Dr. Pifferi’s present main scientific focuses are on the criminal law justice both in Europe and United States in the XVIIIth and XIXth centuries and on the juridical regulation of migrants. While at the Jean Monnet Center, Dr. Pifferi plans to conduct research on the topic of “Individualization of Punishment and Social Defence in the Criminal Law of the Early Twentieth Century”.
Research Project:
The main aim of Dr. Pifferi’s research is to investigate the origin of the dispute on the adaptation of punishment to the personality and possible dangerousness of the criminal. This very origin is to be found in the massive debate in juridical science between Europe and the USA at the beginning of the twentieth century. Thanks to the circulation of ideas proposed by the criminological school, the objective of penal law turned into a social defence and prevention of crime.
The Individualization of punishment, indeed, is nowadays one of the most important topics in European and international criminal law. The extent of the problem is the possibility to adjust the penal system to a multicultural society which considers the different cultural or ethnic character as a criterion to personalize the punishment. Moving from this contest, the research proposal concerns the origins of the individualized punishment between the nineteenth and the twentieth century, with a comparative approach in European and American doctrines and legislations.
The expected results of the Fellowship are the elaboration of this topic in American criminal theories and the corresponding analysis of the American legislation and jurisprudence, with a special focus on the proposed balances between the individual guarantees in criminal law and the preventive treatment of the dangerous subject at the beginning of the twentieth century. This comparative and historical approach should allow an overall comprehension of the problem of individualization, with the possibility of offering an original contribution to the history of criminal law in our modern culture, useful to understand some current criminal tendencies as well.
 Michael Ewing-Chow
Michael Ewing-Chow is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore (NUS) where he teaches corporate law and world trade law. He has a LLB (First Class Honors) from NUS and a LLM from Harvard. After graduation, he worked in the corporate department of Allen & Gledhill before returning to NUS, He, with some colleagues, started the first World Trade Law course at NUS and became involved in negotiations for Singapore's early free trade agreements. He has been a consultant to the Singapore Ministry of Trade and Industry, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Finance as well as the World Bank and the WTO. Michael has also been involved in the building of trade law capacity of government officials in Asia and Latin America. On the corporate side, he has also assisted the Singapore Company Law Reform and Frameworks Committee which was tasked in 2001 with a major overhaul of corporate law in Singapore and in 2008 was appointed to a Working Group of the Steering Committee for the review of the Singapore Companies Act. Michael also volunteers with various local NGOs and co-founded aidha, an NGO which provides financial education and microfinance opportunities for domestic migrant workers and for which he was awarded a Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2007. He was also awarded the Teaching Excellence Award in 2007 and the Inspiring Mentor Award in 2009.
Research Project:
Comparing Apples and Bananas: How should ASEAN look at the EU?
The ASEAN Charter was signed on 20 November 2007 at the 13th ASEAN Summit in Singapore. At the signing, the ASEAN members also declared that the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) would be implemented by 2015. Some commentators have suggested that the Charter does not sufficiently address the problems of integrating the member states of an organization famous for its consensual ASEAN Way. In the months before the signing of the Charter, the then ASEAN Secretary General, Ong Keng Yong, said that the AEC would look towards the European Union (EU), while not as a model, for best practices and ideas. However, others have suggested that the EU is too different for ASEAN to look towards. It is, therefore, important to understand if and how ASEAN should look at the EU for best practices and ideas since “best” denotes a comparative analysis using an appropriate comparator. The genesis of ASEAN appears to be distinctly different from the arguably liberal (and perhaps democratic peace) theory inspired genesis of the EU. ASEAN arose not from the ashes of the Second World War but from the real politick of the Cold War. Focusing primarily on the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), the paper will ask a normative jurisprudential question of “What is “best” for ASEAN?” Since it is difficult to discern much less agree on a common ASEAN vision and ASEAN appears, at present, to be largely tied together either by self-interest of member states or enlightened self-interest that promotes their common interests, the paper will adopt the stated objective of integration as the appropriate comparator. Thus, the paper will ask what sort of “best practices” ASEAN should adopt to promote the integration it wants taking into account the EU’s experience with integration.
 Antonello Tancredi (Italy)
Professor of International Law at the University of Palermo School of Law. Research Project: “The Absence of Direct Effect of WTO Law in the European Community Legal System: a Matter of Institutional Balancing”.
Antonello Tancredi is a Full Professor of International Law at the School of Law of the University of Palermo.
He is scientific co-ordinator of the PhD Programme in EC Law, Department of Public Law, University of Palermo.
He holds a PhD in International Law from the “Federico II” University of Naples. Before joining the School of Law in Palermo, he worked at the University of Trento and “La Sapienza” in Rome. He was a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institut, Heidelberg, Germany several times.
His research interests cover public international law in general and its relationship to EU law.
Research Project:
The denial of direct effect to the WTO law in the EC legal system has been debated in an extensive literature. Relatively scant, however, has been the number of analyses focused on the institutional implications of the topic at issue here, as scholarly attention has been mainly concentrated on formal aspects (namely, the degree of precision, clarity or conditionality of the rules, and the room for negotiation left to the parties by the WTO dispute settlement system).
His research will look at the pros and cons of the judicial deference shown in this field by the EC Courts through the prism of institutional balancing. The research will enable comparisons between different, but dialoguing, legal traditions, in order to shed light on similarities, differences, and cross-influences. This will be made also with a view to comparing the stand taken by the EC Courts with the position held by US Courts on this subject matter. Such a perspective is in line with the more general contention that as the European Union is now a forceful player in international relations, it has learned from the United States how to defend itself from the penetration of international law into its own legal order.
The objective would be to publish the outcomes of this research as a Jean Monnet working paper, and as a part of a book-length project.
 Sylvia N. Tesh
Sylvia N. Tesh, currently a lecturer in the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Arizona, has a PhD in political science from the University of Hawaii. Before moving to Arizona she taught for fifteen years at Yale University, where she had joint appointments in the Department of Political Science, the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and the School of Public Health. She also taught for nine years in the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan, and was a Fulbright scholar for a year in Brazil at the Instituto de Saúde Coletiva, Universidade Federal da Bahia.
Her earlier work on public health politics morphed into an interest in environmental health politics and from there to an interest in the environmental movement. She is now concentrating on environmental activism in Latin America with an emphasis on the two countries she lived in between 1962 and 1972: Brazil and Panama. Most of her work draws from scholarship on social constructionism.
Among her publications are two books, Hidden Arguments: Political Ideology and Disease Prevention Policy (Rutgers University Press, 1988) and Uncertain Hazards: Environmental Activists and Scientific Proof (Cornell University Press, 2000)
Project description:
The idea that Europeans and Americans want to internationalize the Brazilian Amazon strikes most people outside of Brazil as ridiculous. Indeed, many Brazilians agree. Nevertheless for at least thirty-five years, fear of internationalization has gripped Brazilians of all social classes and has influenced some of the government’s most consequential laws and projects. Surprisingly, very little has appeared in the academic literature about the Brazilian concern with the internationalization of the Amazon. Scholars in Brazil as well as in other countries tend to dismiss it as a conspiracy theory or simply refer to it as a bothersome constraint on instituting policies they support. Yet an idea as powerful as this one begs for serious investigation.
The proposed project has three sections. One section indentifies the demographic and ideological groups most worried about internationalization, searching for the assumptions about government, development, and social activism that inform their worry. A second section examines the history of foreign activity -- from the early European explorers to today’s multinational corporations and international environmental organizations -- that provide empirical evidence supporting the internationalization worry. A third section contrasts the internationalization-versus-sovereignty rhetoric with the perspective on the Amazon adopted by Brazilian and foreign environmental organizations who speak for the small farmers and traditional peoples (including indigenous groups) who live actually there. In the end the project raises larger questions about national sovereignty and globalization, and about what citizens of every country have to hope and fear from the weakening of the former and the strengthening of the latter.
 Miriam Aziz (United Kingdom)
Associate Professor of Public and Administrative Law at the Department of Law, Siena University, Italy. Research Project: "European Union Health Law and Policy in a Global Context".
Miriam Aziz obtained her LLB (Hons) from Manchester University in 1992. She was called to the Bar of England and Wales (Inner Temple) in 1994, and obtained her PhD in Law from Edinburgh University in 1997. She was a Visiting Fellow at the Free University of Berlin from 1997 to 2000 at the Department of Political Science, where she specialised in German Public Law and European Union Law. Professor Aziz was based at the European University Institute (EUI) between 2000 and 2004 as a post-doctoral Research Fellow where she completed a monograph (“The Impact of European Rights on National Legal Cultures”, Oxford, Hart, 2004) on European Union Citizenship. She has also been a visiting Professor at Cornell Law School (2007) and Saint Louis Law School (2009).
Research Project Summary:
The evolution and implementation of health policies have traditionally been the responsibility of the nation state. The last quarter of the twentieth century, however, saw a gradual shift towards globalisation of law that has strayed beyond the predominance of single state governance.
There have been two main consequences: first, those to whom legal norms are directed are not confined within national borders and, second, those who shape policies are no longer drawn from a parochial pool but, rather, from a society that is relatively unconcerned with political boundaries. This globalisation is particularly evident within the European Union (EU). The aim of Professor Aziz’s research project is to consolidate expertise in European Union constitutionalism, governance and citizenship by conducting a comparative constitutional and administrative law analysis at the micro-level of EU health policy.
 Sara Kahn-Nisser (Israel)
Instructor, Department of Political Studies and Department of Social Studies, Bar-Ilan University, Israel. Research Project: "Inclusion, Exclusion and the Copenhagen Political Accession Criteria: The Cases of Turkey and Poland”
Sara Kahn-Nisser has been teaching Political theory and International Relations at Bar Ilan University in Israel for the past 6 years. A grantee of the BIU President’s Fellowship of Excellence for outstanding PhD candidates, she received her PhD with highest distinction in June 2009.
Sara received her BA degree in Media and Political Studies with highest distinction and was recruited as an account manager to the largest advertising agency in Israel-McCann-Erikson. She was then awarded an MA scholarship at Bar Ilan University and received the degree with highest distinction. Her thesis dealt with the Vadi Salib riots and Askenazi-Sepharadic relations in Israel.
Sara’s publications focus on Communitarian Political theory, Inclusion and Diversity in the EU, EU-Turkey relations and Hermeneutic Methodology in IR. Her research interests include: EU Enlargement, the Political Sociology of the EU, contemporary critique of Anglo-American Individual-Liberalism, Interpretive approaches to International Studies, and more.
Research Project Summary:
Dr. Kahn-Nisser’s research will examine the degree of inclusion that the European Parliament's interpretation of the Copenhagen Political Accession Criteria (C.P.A.C.), entails for the EU. Another question she will aim to answer is whether the C.P.A.C. functions as an instrument for equally, objectively and neutrally determining a country's compatibility with the EU's principles, and the country's "progress" towards that end. In order to answer these questions, she will analyze the EP's implementation of the C.P.A.C.- i.e. the "progress towards accession reports" that were composed with reference to it. Dr. Kahn-Nisser will compare the progress reports that were adopted by the Parliament in the accession process of Turkey and Poland, beginning in 1992- the year that the C.P.A.C. was formulated. For the purpose of examining the inclusion/ exclusion relations that the C.P.A.C. entail, she has composed an "inclusion axis" which runs from Universal Cosmopolitanism to Ethnic Nationalism, with Supra-National Cosmopolitanism and Civic-Nationalism in between. Through this analysis, Dr. Kahn-Nisser hopes to contribute to the understanding of the identity of the EU and the inclusion and exclusion relations it bears. In other words, she plans to contribute to answering the questions: “Where might the final border of the European integration project lie?” and “What kind of elements (geography, culture, political principles etc.) are those borders based on?”. She also intends to contribute to the understanding of the meaning of the C.P.A.C. and of the function they serve in the enlargement process. Finally, Dr. Kahn-Nisser plans to contribute to the understanding of the accession process of Turkey and Poland.
 Diletta Tega (Italy)
Researcher of Constitutional Law at the University of Milan - Bicocca, School of Law. Research Project: Different Country, Different Definition? The Constitutional Meaning of the Principle of Equality
Diletta Tega is a researcher of Constitutional Law at the University of Milan - Bicocca, School of Law. She is lecturer of Public Law and Protection of Fundamental Rights, at the University of Bologna, graduate degree in International cooperation, regulation and protection of fundamental rights and etno-cultural inheritance. She received a J.S.D. in Constitutional Law from the University of Bologna, School of Law in 1998. She obtained a PhD in Constitutional Law from the University of Bologna, School of Law and the University of Paris X Nanterre in 2003. She is also Junior expert for the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA).
Her research interests fall broadly in the field of fundamental rights and the so called multilevel protection of rights. She studies in particular the ECHR and the Italian Constitutional Court jurisprudence on religious freedom and the so called new rights. She has published studies in many different fields of constitutional, comparative and European Union law.
Research Project Summary:
During her time at the Jean Monnet Center, Diletta Tega will focus her research on the Constitutional Meaning of the Principle of Equality.
The research will focus on the conflict between the different meanings of the principle equality in European law and at national constitutional level. It is common knowledge that in the aftermath of the proclamation of art. 13 of the Amsterdam Treaty (1998) the EU has strengthened its antidiscrimination legislation, which clearly assumes the principle of equality as a principle of non discrimination. The progressive increase in antidiscrimination clauses contained in the Charter of Fundamental Rights concerning personal and social conditions is, on one hand, the demonstration of a positive evolution in the protection of fundamental rights, on the other, there is a risk of supporting the existence of a generic right to not be treated differently in any sector. This interpretation conflicts with the idea of enhancing diversity (or with the “right to diversity” that exists in some countries), which has gained growing importance in contemporary multi-cultural societies. The risk is therefore that of obtaining a result that is exactly the opposite of the initial aim. This extended meaning also thins out the legal aspects of the principle of equality thus rendering it less effective from a legal standpoint.
The research will explore the conflict between the different meanings of the principle equality in European law and at national constitutional level. In particular, the main goal will be to determine if and how the European definition of the principle of equality may weaken national constitutional law.
 Stefania Ninatti (Italy)
Associate Professor of Italian and European Public Law at the University of Turin, School of Economics. Research Project: "The 'Guardian of the Constitution' and Foreign Law: A Matter of Interpretation?"
Stefania Ninatti is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Turin, School of Economics, where she teaches Italian and European Public Law. She received a J.S.D. in Constitutional Law from the University of Milan, School of Law, and has been trained in Germany and United States. Before joining the School of Economics in Turin, she worked at the University of Milan, where she still holds a class of Human Rights as a Visiting Professor (as from 2005).
Her research interests fall broadly in the field of developments in the area of European integration and constitutional questions concerning the reality and juridical meaning of a supranational framework. Her main interests lie in theories of democracy and the democratic principle in case law, and she is the author of two books on European and Italian democracy. Moreover, she has published studies in many different fields of constitutional, comparative and European Union law.
Research Project Summary:
During her time at the Jean Monnet Center, Professor Ninatti will focus her research on comparative reasoning in constitutional adjudication.
The main goal of the present research is to provide an organic framework for the broad constitutional discussion concerning the value of looking abroad when interpreting the constitution and the proper role of constitutional adjudication in such process; to develop a systematic articulation able to better account for the profound process of constitutional transformation, due to political changes that have been carried out during the last twenty years by the courts of Luxembourg and Strasbourg in Europe, as well the consequences of markets globalization and the new dynamics that developed accordingly. Legal traditions can nowadays travel freely as goods and information, and the constitutional judge has to tune up its instruments to face such profound and epochal change. From this point of view, we would like also give new input to the discussion on the nature of constitutional adjudication and useful modifications in such process. Nowadays constitutional adjudication is becoming a means of cross-jurisdictional dialogue and encounter of different constitutional experiences, and in order to investigate such crucial change thoroughly, we would like to focus our research on the role of a Supreme Court and, more precisely, on the nature and structure of the constitutional adjudication within the framework of present constitutionalism.
The American experience in this field will be used in order to shed light on recent developments in European constitutionalism and in order to single out the sui generis character of the European Court of Justice.
 Dimitry Kochenov (Russia)
Lecturer in European Law, University of Groningen, Faculty of Law. Research Project: ‘EU’s Possible Future: The Transformative Potential of the Tandem of European Citizenship and Equality’.
Dimitry Kochenov obtained his Ph.D. on ‘EU Enlargement and the Failure of Conditionality’ (Kluwer Law International, 2008) from the University of Groningen and LL.M. in Comparative Constitutional Law from the Central European University in Budapest. He has been teaching European Law at the University of Groningen since 2006 after being Ubbo Emmius Fellow at the Department of European and Economic Law for three years. He is also a Fellow of the Groningen Graduate School of Law and a permanent guest professor at the Euroculture Erasmus Mundus Programme at the Faculty of Arts of the same University.
In recent years Dr. Kochenov has been a guest professor, inter alia, at Osaka Graduate School of Law, Ecole Supérieure des Sciences Commerciales d'Angers (in Angers and Manila) and American Bar Association Rule of Law Promotion Initiative (Kiev), and lectured at a number of institutions, including EURAC (Bolzano), ERA (Trier), and Université Marc Bloch (Strasbourg). He also consulted the Government of the Netherlands on the application of EU law in the overseas possessions of the Member States of the Union. His research focuses on EU citizenship law, EU non-discrimination and equality law, EU external relations law and the legal regulation of enlargements, as well as broader issues of democracy and the rule of law.
Research Project Summary:
With the change of the paradigm in EU development from economic success to economic success in a Union inhabited by equal citizens, the Union will necessarily be called upon to change the mode of its operation profoundly, if not entirely. The assessment of such transformation will necessarily build on the engagement with citizenship and with equality, as well as the analysis of the connections linking the two. I will map the developments which are likely to result in the eventual reinvention of the Union, building on the clash between the economic rationale behind the current operation of the Union and the logic of equality which is to acquire more importance, naturally amplified by European citizenship. The main aim and focus of the research would thus be the demonstration of the likelihood of the anticipated transformation.
Intending to use the likely developments in two interrelated areas of Community law (citizenship, equality) to judge the future dynamics of the whole project of European integration I will extrapolate the implications of evolution of these particular areas beyond the confines of their respective sub-disciplines. Moreover, since I intend to confine part of the research to the analysis of the alternative scenario, supposing the shift I anticipate is never to happen, I intend to make my argument about the future more convincing by demonstrating how dangerous it is likely to be if the ‘present’ lasts too long. |
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