"Who is Sovereign in the European Union?" will be the topic of discussion featuring Dieter Grimm, former justice of the Federal Constitutional Court of the Republic of Germany; and Visiting Professor of Law and Gruber Global Constitutionalism Fellow at Yale Law School at the Woodrow Wilson School on Wednesday, February 6, 2013, at 4:30 p.m., Bowl 016, Robertson Hall. The event is co-sponsored by the Program in Law and Public Affairs (LAPA), the European Union Program at Princeton, and the Woodrow Wilson School.

The European Union (EU) is a political entity unprecedented in history. But where is the location of sovereignty in Europe? The most frequent answer is that sovereignty is shared or pooled among the member states and the EU. But recently Juergen Habermas has argued that European sovereignty lies with the citizens in their double capacity as national and European citizens. The lecture will examine these positions and propose an alternative answer to the question of sovereignty in Europe.

Dieter Grimm is a Visiting Professor of Law and Gruber Global Constitutionalism Fellow at Yale Law School. He is also a professor of law at Humboldt University of Berlin and a permanent fellow and former director of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin Institute for Advanced Study. From 1987 until 1999, he served as a justice on the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany. An honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he holds law degrees from the University of Frankfurt and a master of laws from Harvard.