asociación española de historia económica

Call for Papers - History of private regulation

Call for Papers for a Panel at the Third Biennial Conference of the ECPR. Standing Group on Regulatory Governance, University College Dublin, 17-19 June 2010

Publicado el 25-01-10

The Rises and Falls of Private Regulation

That private organisations exercise law-making powers is hardly a novel proposition. Over the meandering process of displacement of tasks from private to public organizations that shaped modern states, private actors kept playing a more or less significant role as standards setters, self-regulating bodies expressive of business, professional, civil society associations and others interest groups, providers of goods and services contracted out by the governments. Only the perception of this role was hidden by a narrative depicting the State as the monopolist of the law and the sole significant institution of the regulatory process. Relatively recent, by contrast, is the inverse phenomenon of displacement of regulatory powers from public to private institutions, running parallel with privatisation, broadly understood as the transfer of political, social, even security tasks from public to private actors.
Drawing on the scholarship on role of private actors in contemporary regulatory regimes, we propose an inquiry into the rises and falls of private regulation in the European history. The idea behind this is to gather a few notable historic examples of private regulatory modes in order to investigate their conditions of possibility in the institutional and cultural environment, as well as their drawbacks and failures. To this aim, we invite scholars to submit paper proposals considering the emergence of private forms of regulation from an historical perspective and to look at the relation between self and co-regulation in fields like professions and financial markets, food safety and drug.
Our aim is to identify “virtuous” and “vicious” modes of private regulation in relation to a set of fundamental normative criteria such as legitimacy, effectiveness and enforceability. This would in turn contribute to the emergence of a constitutional framework for transnational private regulation.

Individual paper proposals should include the following:
• a title and abstract of the paper of no more than 300 words;
• a short CV or biography of the author, including complete contact information.
The deadline for proposals will be February 10, 2010. Proposals (as PDF file, or in Word) should be sent as email attachments to Valentina.CalderaiEUI.eu and f.vanwaardenuu.nl Those unable to send proposals as email attachments can mail hard copies to: Frans van Waarden, University College, Utrecht University, POBox 80145, 3508 TC, Utrecht, The Netherlands