TIL Conference: Regionalisms - Shifting Scales Beyond Cities and States
Regionalisms - Shifting Scales Beyond Cities and States
June 14-16, 2022, Tel Aviv University, Buchmann Faculty of Law
Throughout the world, regions and regional institutions are emerging as solutions for many present-day maladies: metropolitan fragmentation, racial injustice, economic instability and inequality, environmental degradation, acute problems of intergovernmental coordination, concentration of too much power in the hands of central governments, and democratic deficit and decline. Regional entities of different kinds—administrative, political, economic, and social—are created and reconfigured to cope with old and new challenges. In so doing, regions are Janus-faced: they occupy an intermediary space between the local and the state, and thus simultaneously decentralize and centralize power. Looking at regions from a central government perspective, they represent a decentralization of power, shifting policy implementation and decision-making powers from the center downwards to the regions. In contrast, with respect to states and local governments, regions centralize power, since they manage activities in areas encompassing several localities or states.
While regions are often treated as extra-legal entities, the law plays a crucial role in creating, regulating and structuring them. The various regional legal forms that exist globally reflect basic tensions that are inherent in administrative law and in numerous disciplines that theorize regionalism: function v. territory; bureaucratic expertise v. democratic accountability; centralization v. decentralization; coercive mandates v. voluntary arrangements. These tensions inform the institutional design and legal power that regions possess. Yet the legal principles and rules that govern regions also mirror different political projects and competing ideologies, hence the dynamic nature of existing regional institutions.
The conference is aimed at investigating the legal forms of regions, and developing the idea of the law(s) of regions, in a wide variety of subject matters and national settings. It will bring together scholars from various legal fields and disciplines to explore the emerging law of regions. The conference is co-sponsored by the Buchmann Faculty of Law at Tel Aviv University and Virginia Law School, and under the auspices of Theoretical Inquiries in Law and the Cegla Center for Interdisciplinary Research of the Law.
Organizers: Richard Schragger (Virginia), Yishai Blank (TAU), Issi Rosen-Zvi (TAU)
