Our faculty’s long-standing cooperation with Rutgers Law School (Rutgers, State University of New Jersey, USA) enables lively academic exchange, including research visits of US-American scholars in Graz and vice-versa. This December, Board of Governors Professor Dennis M. Patterson – whose first visit to our faculty within this program dates back to 1992 (!) – joined us as Land Steiermark Fellow. To exploit his wide expertise, including in legal philosophy, commercial law and trade law, but also in the practical dimension of academia to the fullest extent possible during his stay, we organized two events with our guest.
In a Faculty Lunch lecture on 11 December, Patterson offered insights into his forthcoming book Overreach: Elites, Experts and Populism to be published with MIT Press in 2024. Patterson’s findings on increasingly technocratic governance during the COVID-19 pandemic, the detachment of political and intellectual elites from the rest of the population, growing populism, and on the resulting deterioration of the democratic process sparked a lively discussion among the present members of our faculty.
In an event for early career researchers on the following day, Patterson helped his audience delve into the process of getting published internationally, illustrating his explanations with personal anecdotes on the review process and with detailed insights into the particularities of dissertations, monographs and edited volumes.
As Land Steiermark Fellow, Patterson positioned himself – in the presence of witnesses! – as a fervent advocate for a further reinforcement of Rutgers Law School's and REWI Uni Graz’ cooperation. We wholeheartedly concur!