The issue of revolving doors in politics, namely the seamless passage of individuals between public legislative/regulatory functions and industries or the private sector more generally has become a publicly relevant issue in political sciences, law, and economics since at least the 2010s.
One of the mechanisms used to avoid such conflicts of interest are cooling off periods after the legislative or regulatory functions an individual may have held. This is supposed to ensure transparency and is based on the logic that once things have cooled off, the person's capacities and possibilities to influence things to the benefit of the new private employer or financer have been vastly reduced.
This presentation instead focuses on cooling-off periods for a different kind of political actor, that have so far received little attention in the literature: judges in apex courts (supreme courts or constitutional courts) around the globe. Not only is their rationale for such actors slightly different but for that difference they exist or are proposed both for what happens after such a judicial mandate and before. This presentation will therefore zoom in on the different rationales and functioning of such mechanisms.
Speaker bio
Mathias Möschel is Associate Professor and Head of the Legal Studies Department at the Central European University (CEU), Vienna. His research, teaching and publications fall broadly in the field of comparative (constitutional) law, international human rights law and non-discrimination law, mainly from a critical race theory and legal feminist perspective.