Kaarlo Tuori

Tutkimuksen ja opetuksen kuvaus

In general jurisprudence, my main works are Critical Legal Positivism (Ashgate 2002) and Ratio and Voluntas (Ashgate 2011). In Critical Legal Positivism I try to develop a view of modern law, based on two distinctions: a distinction between law as a symbolic-normative phenomenon (a legal order) and law as legal practices, and a distinction within the legal order between its surface level and its sub-surface, legal cultural layers.

Ratio and Voluntas is elaborates further the view of modern law articulated Critical Legal Positivism. Now this view has been detached from its nation-state moorings. I examine the various guises the tension between ratio and voluntas has adopted in the course of legal modernisation and in the development of modern law. I also explore the role of legal scholarship in accomplishing the tasks of ratio as well as the way the ratio’s tension with voluntas is manifested in constitutional law.

Since mid-2000s, my research has focused on theoretical issues of European law and constitution. Within the Centre of Excellence in Research on the Foundations of European Law and Polity (2008-2013), I developed an approach termed the many constitutions of Europe (see Tuori, Kaarlo – Sankari, Suvi (eds.): The Many Constitutions of Europe. Ashgate  2010). The basic idea is to examine the European constitution as a differentiated process of constitutionalisation (see the introductory essay in Tuori – Sankari 2010). After the end of the CoE, I continued my research within my chair as Academy Professor.

After publishing texts on various dimensions of the European constitution (see, e.g., Tuori, Kaarlo – Tuori, Klaus: The Eurozone Crisis: A Constitutional Analysis, CUP 2014), I composed   a synthesis of my recent research on European constitutionalism (European Constitutionalism, CUP 2015). I also tried to insert European constitutionalism in the more general framework of transnational law (see my chapter in Maduro, Miguel – Tuori, Kaarlo – Sankari, Suvi: Transnational Law: Rethinking European Law and Legal Thinking, CUP 2014, forthcoming).

After completing my foray to European law, I have returned to legal theory. My intention is to enrich my general view of law with the lessons I have learned during my foray to European law and constitutionalism. My aim is to publish a monograph in legal theory in 2018. The tentative title is The Kaleidoscope of Law.