Guillaume Grégoire, winner of the Prix Jean Carbonnier 2024
Each year, the Institut des études et de la recherche sur le droit et la justice (IERDJ) awards the Prix Jean Carbonnier for an outstanding thesis in the field of legal and human sciences. For the 2024 edition, the prize was awarded to Guillaume Grégoire, whose work explores in depth the interactions between law, economics and politics.
His thesis ‘La Constitution économique. Une enquête sur les rapports entre économie, politique et droit’ won over the jury with its innovative approach, originality and significant theoretical scope.
Presentation
In a large number of legal systems, economic policy choices are progressively enshrined in constitutional or at least supra-legislative norms, so that they benefit, as such, from substantial jurisdictional guarantees. And yet, endorsing the positions put forward, explicitly or implicitly, by the constitutional courts, the majority of scientific literature continues to support the thesis of the ‘economic neutrality’ of the Constitution, whether in France, Germany or Belgium.
In an attempt to understand this apparent paradox, which cannot be resolved by dogmatic analysis alone, we need to look at the law in its historical, social and intellectual context. The methodological hypothesis underlying the research was that by tracing the itinerary of the concept of economic constitution, i.e. by establishing its genealogy, it would eventually be possible to penetrate and better grasp the phenomenon of economic constitutionalisation - and thus to shed light, step by step, on the current state of positive law.
Broadly speaking, the problem that gave rise to the notion of an economic constitution can be summed up as follows: how can the social domain of the economy be legally ordered when, under the guise of the market, it tends to be represented as autonomous, objective and self-regulating? This question, characteristic of liberal modernity, in fact reveals a tension between the quest for legal sanctuary for the market and the democratic ideal of a society fully autonomous in its collective choices. From the physiocrats to the neo-liberals, from the Weimar Republic to the European Union, from the Social Question to the Great Recession, the controversy has haunted the way we think about the organisation of the economy through law ever since.
Far from being a purely theoretical issue, the problem continues to manifest itself today in the concrete organisation of work, production, trade and the distribution of wealth, in particular through the mechanisms of constitutional law, which can contribute to politicising or, on the contrary, depoliticising the question of the organisation of the economy. Decisive controversies are thus seen from a new angle. For example, who is or should be the ultimate guardian of fundamental economic rules and principles, the elected legislature or the constitutional court? Between workers and employers (or their representatives), who should wield power within companies? Why is it now considered useful, if not necessary, to enshrine in supra-legislative standards a golden rule of balanced budgets or rules of competition? How should traditional economic freedoms and economic and social rights be articulated? How should public services be dealt with constitutionally?
From these various perspectives, the ‘economic constitution’ and its practical applications ultimately appear to be a decisive indicator, in the Western tradition, of the interactions between the spheres of economics, politics and law. To take full measure of the concept, its history and the norms, decisions and institutions through which it is embodied, is to work towards re-examining the fundamental ideological options that the law tends to formalise and set in stone, if not to naturalise.
Biography
Guillaume GRÉGOIRE holds a doctorate in legal science and is a researcher in economic law and legal theory at the Faculty of Law, Political Science and Criminology at the University of Liège (Belgium). After a double master's degree in law (2015) and management sciences (2016) at the University of Liège, he began his doctoral thesis in 2017 as an aspirant of the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research F.R.S.-FNRS, under the supervision of Professor Nicolas THIRION. He was also a visiting researcher at the Centre de droit européen (CDE) of the Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas (September-December 2018) and at the Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb in Munich (January-July 2019).
At the intersection of economic law, the history of legal and economic thought and political philosophy, his research has focused mainly on the phenomenon of the constitutionalisation of the economy, which he studies from a comparative perspective, based on the Belgian, French and German legal systems, with the decisive transversal influence of European Union law. In the course of his work, he has developed an original method, inspired by the work of the philosopher Michel Foucault, the historian Reinhart Koselleck and the sociologist Max Weber. His contextual and interdisciplinary approach has led him to explore issues at the frontiers of law, economics and politics, such as the jurisdictional confrontation between the German Federal Constitutional Court and the EU Court of Justice against the backdrop of the sovereign debt crisis, the ‘constitutive’ debates on the economic order during the inter-war revolutions, and the legacy of Carl Schmitt and neo-liberal currents of thought in the endeavour to depoliticise the economy through law.
Following on from his previous research, he is now embarking on new research into the genealogy and institutions of economic democracy.
