2024

EU law has developed with close ties to economic growth, and relatedly, various scholars have historically expressed critiques which would today be considered part of the Law and Political Economy approach. What is starkly absent from the relevant critiques is the way in which EU law regulates the migration phenomenon and its relation to the market. Migration law scholarship has been focusing on the exclusion produced for non-EU migrants due to security considerations or colonial legacies, but it has not related such exclusion to the parallel economic exclusion of EU migrants. Thereby a foundational myth has driven the development of EU scholarship and institutional practice, which emphasises the dichotomy between privileged EU citizens and excluded non-EU migrants.

The article revisits this myth by bringing insights from racial capitalism to bear on EU law and the ways in which it regulates migration. By an analysis of primary and secondary law in the area of free movement and migration, the article maps how EU migration law is constitutive of profit-making processes in parallel to and on top of the race-making ones, which have already been explored in literature. The parallel and mutually reinforcing race-making and profit-making features of EU migration law frame it as a legal system which creates stratified rights and shapes hierarchies among non-citizens in Member States’ domestic laws. These features are then situated in a theoretical analysis on the position of migration in EU constitutional theories. Eventually the article suggests that EU migration law and the intersecting racial and economic exclusions it produces can be better understood as being part of the neoliberal bias of the EU constitution.

The legal position of academic staff in a changing university landscape: A comparative analysis of Finland, Norway, and Sweden

Melanie Hack, Niina Mäntylä, Henrik Wenander

The higher education system has since the 2000s changed fundamentally in Finland, Norway, and Sweden. One reason behind this is so-called managerialism as a part of NPM, which means a shift towards more managerial forms of leadership, business-oriented aspects, and neoliberal university policies. Managerialism in all the Nordic countries conflicts with decades of collegial institutional tradition.

Good labour conditions have been considered as one of the safeguards to academic freedom. Based on the comparative legal studies as method the article analyses how the position of academics has changed and how the legal systems studied have reacted to the current challenges. Is academic freedom at risk because of the changing labour conditions and what is the role of managerialism in this development?

University employees’ status has started to converge to that of private sector employees. However, there is no common framework, and traditions of different legal areas affect the status of academic staff. The development due to the strong emphasis on managerialism has been most rapid in Finland, having the strongest influence on the status of university employees. In Sweden, political ambitions to increase university institutional autonomy have been accompanied by increased control and bureaucratisation. At the same time, it is remarkable that very recent developments in Norway show a trend toward moving away from NPM principles in academia.

Naturens skydd för sin egen skull i svensk rätt

Yaffa Epstein, Caroline Gardelli, Charlotta Zetterberg

I denna studie reds ut i vilken utsträckning naturen tillskrivs egenvärde i svensk rätt, och i så fall vilka delar av naturen det gäller. Det konstateras att naturen till viss del erbjuds skydd för sin egen skull i svensk rätt genom den svenska miljöbalken, underordnade författningar och vissa andra lagar, genom exempelvis bestämmelser om områdesskydd, biologisk mångfald, invasiva främmande arter, genetiskt modifierade organismer samt jakt och djurskydd. Studien belyser att delar av lagstiftningen ger naturen skydd inte enbart av antropocentriska skäl utan för olika entiteters egen skull, och det kan röra sig om såväl individuella entiteter såsom specifika djur, som kollektiva entiteter såsom arter eller ekosystem. Det skulle kunna innebära att dessa entiteter därigenom tillskrivs implicita rättigheter i svensk rätt, mot bakgrund av synsättet att ett skydd för naturens egen skull innebär plikter för människan gentemot naturen, samt att en juridisk plikt i regel motsvaras av en juridisk rättighet. Det talar för att framöver stärka möjligheterna till rättslig representation av de entiteter i naturen som tillskrivits egenvärde, så att hänsynen till naturen i högre grad säkerställs och det rättsliga skyddet i tillräcklig omfattning upprätthålls av rättssystemet.

The Arctic Railway Project: A Socio-Legal Review of the Encroachment of the Homeland of the Indigenous Sámi

Juho Kähkönen, Soili Nystén-Haarala

This article provides a socio-legal review of the Arctic Railway project, which aims to connect Norway’s northernmost coast to the Finnish railway system. The research addresses the legal and political implications of railway planning, particularly when it encroaches on the Sámi Homeland in Finland. The article examines the framework of railway planning, which is driven mainly by security politics and industrial interests. The research draws on various sources, including stakeholder interviews, a round-table discussion, legislation, and reports. The study highlights the need for discussion on, firstly, how to ensure that the interests of all the parties are considered and, secondly, that the project is developed sustainably, justly, and in compliance with the law. The article argues that regardless of whether the railway project extends to the Sámi Homeland or not, the state should consider how to build trust in local communities. Strengthening the land use rights of Indigenous peoples would be one way to improve state-citizen relations in the Sámi Homeland.

Studying the beginnings of a law of outer space: conceptual and methodological challenges

Markus Gunneflo

First delivered as a keynote speech at the 2024 National Doctoral Student conference in Lund, this text reverse-engineers a project in the history of international space law in order to highlight the scholarly moves that makes it possible: recontextualization, a way to say something new about a topic when there is already a settled understanding in the discipline. legal imagination, what is it really that jurists do when confronted with new legal situations or problems, such as the problem of regulating outer space in the late 1950s? Finally, I address the relationship between legal power and other forms of power, in particular the power of the economy.