Author meets Critics Peter L. Lindseth visits University of Copenhagen 16 May 2011, 14-16; venue to be announced Register for participation here: dbg454@alumni.ku.dk The interdisciplinary research network Rethinking European Integration is proud to announce that Peter Lindseth, author of the perhaps most original contributions to European Studies in 2010, Power and Legitimacy – Reconciling Europe and Nation-State (Oxford University Press, 2010), is visiting the University of Copenhagen for the first time this spring. Peter Lindseth is Professor of International and Comparative Law at the University of Connecticut, School of Law. In Copenhagen he will present his new book in a lecture followed by comments by Mikael Rask Madsen (EURECO Professor, Faculty of Law) and Morten Rasmussen (Associate Professor, Saxo-Institute, Faculty of Humanities). Abstract. In the last decade it has become increasingly clear that the European Union (EU) is unable to achieve a democratic and constitutional legitimacy in its own right. In Power and Legitimacy Lindseth addresses the implications of European integration for national democracy and constitutionalism in a new way. By the means of a legal-historical approach, Lindseth traces the roots of European integration back to the post-war constitutional settlement of administrative governance on the national level, thereby providing an original interpretation of the processes of European integration. Arguing that the legal nature of the integration process is in clear continuity with this settlement, and thus of an administrative nature, Lindseth claims that the famous constitutionalization of the EU driven by the Court of Justice has undermined the legitimacy of the European institutions. Instead, democratic and constitutional legitimacy of the EU is to be found in the historical institutions of the Nation-State, in particular national parliaments and courts. It is therefore in the strengthening of existing forms of oversight from national constitutional bodies over the European institutions, following the models of the administrative state, that legitimacy of the EU can be secured and not by the means of a European Constitution or Federation. Author meets Critics is a new series organised by the research network: Rethinking European Integration (CEMES and CRS), which invites authors of path-breaking new studies in European Studies to University of Copenhagen to discuss their work.