Legal clinic on "identity politics and populist backlash"

The course aims to develop the knowledge of the Populist backlash from a legal point of view. Since the Great Recession of 2008, we witness a transformation of the constitutional values in many countries and a deep crisis of liberal democracies. Populist discourses typically problematize the gap between 'us', the people, and 'them', the corrupt establishment. Furthermore, in the demarcation of the people, national, ethnic, religious, and class identities are mobilized for political gains. Populists offer simple narratives which often rely heavily on identity politics, to reassure citizens in an increasingly global and interconnected world. The course will explore those issues from a comparative constitutional point of view; fostering a critical analysis and problem-solving, the students will be guided in the study of selected theoretical and practical cases and other legal issues.

At the end of the course, students will be able: - to understand and analyze the main issues related to the Populist backlash from a theoretical and constitutional point of view -to identify and to compare the different forms populisms and their relationship with the identities of the constitutional legal systems examined; - to understand the growing interaction between different the populist backslash and the identity politics; - to discuss the most controversial issues of the course through in-class discussion of case-law.