Project's Timetable

The project is planned to be carried out during 2008-2010. The seminars will be organized between 2009 and 2010. More informations about the seminars can be found here.

Past seminars:

Opening Seminar
Place: Tampere Hall and Hotel Urku (Kangasala)
Time: Wed 9 - Fri 11 September 2009

Invitation based Opening Seminar on the Tampere Club's Argumenta Seminar Series.

Key note Speakers: Russell Hardin, Raimo Väyrynen, Ernesto Garzón Valdés, Jose Luis Martí, Abdou Filali-Ansary, Ruth Zimmerling, Aulis Aarnio, Annette Schmitt, Geoffrey Brennan.

Law, Democracy and Legal Argumentation

Time: 8. - 10.2.2010
Place: Tampere Hall
-> Program

Key note Speaker: Professor Robert Alexy (Kiel)
Commentators: Professor Aulis Aarnio (The Tampere Club)
Professor Raimo Siltala (Turku)

Seminar will be held at Tampere Hall on February 8th and 9th on Robert Alexy´s legal thinking. Robert Alexy will give two plenary session lectures, one on the role of legal principles in modern legal thinking (or: to be specified later) and the other on a comparison on the legal thinking of the young and the mature Robert Alexy.

A set of working papers will be presented by a group of post-graduate students and post-doctoral scholars who have been reading and discussing Alexy´s main works on legal philosophy during the academic year 2008/2009 and the autumn of 2009. In the 2-day Seminar at the Tampere Hall, Robert Alexy will then comment upon the papers, to be
followed by a general discussion.

The seminar will make use of the working methods adopted in the academic year 2005/2006, when the legal philosophical works of the late Neil MacCormick were being read and discussed by the same group of Finnish scholars as called by professor Raimo Siltala, and in 2006/2007 and 2007/2008, when a similar reading circle and seminar was held on Ronald Dworkin´s legal philosophy by the said group of scholars. Neil MacCormick and Ronald Dworkin then attended the respective final seminar in Finland in 2006 and 2008.

The Seminar on Robert Alexy´s legal thinking will focus on his notion of legal principles in the context of human and basic rights, his notion of legal argumentation as a special case of practical reasoning, the criteria of legal correctness placed on the legislator and the judge, and the Mauerschutzen cases of the former GDR.