Signe Rehling Larsen

Associate Professor

Constitutional Law and Theory

Constitutional Theory • Constitutional History • Comparative Constitutional Law • Federalism • European Union Law and Politics • Legal and Political Theory • International Relations • Geopolitics • Law and Empire

School of Law
S1.42, Social Sciences Building
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL
United Kingdom

Signe.Larsen@warwick.ac.uk

Scholarship

My work examines constitutions from theoretical, historical, and comparative perspectives.

I am particularly interested in federal, transnational, imperial, and regional constitutional orders, and in the role constitutions can play in creating and stabilising political orders beyond the state. My research straddles EU law and politics, constitutional law and theory, federalism, political theory, the history of political thought, and international relations.

I am currently pursuing a research project on Post-Imperial Unions, which explores federal, transnational, and regional constitutional projects that emerged in response to the decline and collapse of empires in the fifty years following the First World War.

Bio

I am an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Warwick and a Carlsberg Fellow at the Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen. Previously, I was a Fellow by Examination in Law (Prize Fellow) at Magdalen College, Oxford. Before coming to Oxford, I was a Max Weber Fellow in Law at the European University Institute. I am educated in law, politics, and philosophy at the LSE, the New School for Social Research, Bard College Berlin, and the University of Copenhagen.

Teaching Publications

Books:

The Constitutional Theory of the Federation and the European Union, Oxford University Press 2021.

Selected reviews, interviews and mentions:

Joseph Weiler, ‘10 Good Reads 2022’, EJIL:Talk! Blog of the European Journal of International.

Paul Linden-Retek, ‘Europe and the federal conceit’ (2022) 13 Jurisprudence: An International Journal of Legal and Political Thought, 458–474.

Interview with Review of Democracy (RevDem), 17 March 2022: ‘Signe Larsen: The Federal Telos of the European Union’

Selected Journal Articles:

'The Erosion of Constitutional Tolerance' (2026) the International Journal of Constitutional Law.

‘Varieties of Constitutionalism in the European Union’ (2021) 84 Modern Law Review 3, 477–502.

‘European Public Law after Empires’ (2022) 1 European Law Open, 6–25.

‘Imagining Europe’ (2023) 24 German Law Journal 4, 705–17.

Book chapter:

'The Material Constitution of Federations’ in TheCambridge Handbook on the Material Constitution, edited by M. Wilkinson and M. Goldoni, Cambridge University Press 2023.

‘The European Union as “Militant Democracy”?’ in The European Constitutional Imagination, edited by J. Komárek, Oxford University Press 2023.

‘Constitutional Pathways in Scandinavia’ in The Legitimacy of European Constitutional Orders, edited by M. Dani, M. Goldoni and A. Menéndez, Edward Elgar Publishing 2023.