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Biography
Massimo Fichera is TIAS Senior Collegium Fellow and works at the Faculty of Law, University of Turku. He has been Academy of Finland Research Fellow at the University of Helsinki. His main areas of expertise include public law, constitutional theory, legal theory, transnational law, comparative constitutional law. In his work, he follows a law and society approach.
He has published extensively on the topics of constitutionalism beyond the State, constituent power, the relationship between courts, the area of freedom, security and justice and the notion of transnational law.
Massimo Fichera's Academy of Finland funded project developed the notion of the security of the European project as a meta-constitutional rationale informing EU self-identification in existential terms. He looked in particular at six crises of the EU as a polity: the refugee, economic and financial, rule of law, constitutional identity, boundaries and Brexit crisis. His main claim is that these crises are revelatory of a much deeper truth about the EU: legal-political conflict has been concealed beneath a veil of neutrality in the process of European integration and it is now coming to the surface, as the European project reaches more advanced stages of constitutional integration. The final outcome of the project has been the book 'The Foundations of the EU As A Polity' (Edward Elgar, 2018).
He has held research fellowships at the Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law (2014), the Faculty of Law of the University of Lund (2017), the European University Institute (2017-2018), the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) of the University of Edinburgh (2018). He has also been Emile Noël Global Fellow at the Jean Monnet Centre for International and Regional Economic Law and Justice, NYU (2018).
He is member of the Advisory Board of the Centre of Excellence in Law, Identity and the European Narratives (Faculty of Social Sciences, Helsinki) and an External Expert for the ERC Project 'Crosslocations', led by Prof. Sarah Green (Faculty of Social Sciences, Helsinki). He has also qualified at the Italian Bar and holds a PhD in Law from the University of Edinburgh
Research
In his TIAS project, 'We the people v. We the Court: A Theory of Constitutional Change for the EU', Massimo Fichera seeks to adopt an approach that reconciles constitutionalism and democracy in the EU, beyond the classic liberal approaches that have been suggested so far.
This includes reconsidering the main forms of constitutionalism in a different light, one in which deliberation at the meta-level is placed as the main source of legitimacy of a transnational polity.
The opposition between people and courts is emblematic of the contrast between 'popular' activity and 'elite' activity. Yet this opposition is fictitious and ignores the more complex dynamic that operates at the institutional level.