Augustin Simard

Augustin Simard is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the Université de Montréal. He is also a Research Associate at the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies (CCGES). His work focuses on the relationship between political ideas and legal doctrine in a broad sense, particularly in the context of intellectual transfers between Germany and the United States in the first half of the 20th century.

The project

Title: The critique of legal formalism in the transatlantic space.

"This project is part of a broader inquiry into the history of contemporary political and legal ideas. I am particularly interested in the ways in which jurist-scholars (law professors and legal scholars more broadly) have acted as mediators and intermediaries between different national legal traditions, serving as catalysts in many of the canonical debates of twentieth- and twenty-first-century legal doctrine.

By examining the dynamics of cultural transfers and the (at times highly inventive) recoding of legal themes from one legal universe to another, my research seeks to highlight the extent to which the transnational dimension is constitutive of the life of legal concepts. This is reflected not only in shifts in constitutional paradigms (diAusion of constitutionality control, decline of legicentrism, juridicization of fundamental rights etc.) but also in the evolving meanings attached to those paradigms by legal discourse. A particularly illustrative case is the plurality of meanings given to the notion of the “rule of law” across jurisdictions: the rule of law, the Rechtsstaat, and the État de droit.

Having devoted several works to the legacy of German interwar legal debates, their transatlantic resonance, and the role played by émigré jurists in shaping a post-bellum legal culture, I now wish to return to the upstream origins of these exchanges by addressing the “problem” of formalism (Rouvière 2009; Summers 2000) as it emerged in the early twentieth century. This inquiry will focus on a series of transatlantic dialogues that placed the critique and overcoming of formalism at the heart of the most ambitious projects for doctrinal renewal: sociological jurisprudence and legal realism in the United States, the Freirechtsbewegung and Interessenjurisprudenz in Germany, and the method of libre recherche scientifique in France."

Hosting institution: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) - CIÉRA

Selective Bibliography

• L’abîme du droit. Textes de Franz Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer et Ernst Fraenkel sur le libéralisme, le capitalisme et le nazisme. Traduction, introduction et notes critique. Montréal, PUM, à paraître fin 2025.
• « Les juristes exilés et leurs bibliothèques invisibles », in Noémie Gourde-Bouchard et Marie-Andrée Plante (dir.), Les bibliothèques des juristes, Paris, Bruylant, 2025.
• Le droit et son autre. Otto Kirchheimer et la critique de l’État de droit, Montréal, PUM, 2023.
• « L’état d’exception... et après? Exception, exécutif et autoritarisme selon Otto Kirchheimer », Marie Goupy et Yan Rivière (dir.), De la dictature à l’état d’exception, Rome, Éditions de l’EfR, 2022.