The Question

Why has the rule of law become so fragile?

  • Joanna Kusiak

    2022/23

    Cambridge-based researcher and scholar-activist Joanna Kusiak has been announced as the winner of the 2022/23 Nine Dots Prize for her ‘exciting’ and ‘provocative’ response to our fourth question

    Kusiak’s winning essay argued that the rule of law has always been fragile, a result of its paradoxical foundations which bind together law and politics. Taking the case of the 2021 Berlin referendum, in which voters decided to expropriate more than 240,000 properties from corporate landlords into public ownership, Kusiak demonstrates the potential of radically legal politics as a path to deepen our democracies and renew the rule of law. You can read extracts from her winning entry here.

    Dr Joanna Kusiak is a scholar-activist who works at the University of Cambridge. Born in Poland, she has been shaped by the emancipatory tradition of the Solidarność movement and by the brutality of the neoliberal transformation. Her work focuses on urban land, housing crises, and the progressive potential of law. In 2021 she was one of the spokespeople of Deutsche Wohnen & Co enteignen, Berlin’s successful referendum campaign to expropriate stock-listed landlords. She also writes and performs poetry.

    Nine Dots Prize 2022/23 winner Dr Joanna Kusiak said: “The rule of law promises that all people are free and equal, yet too often it fails to deliver on its promise, getting entangled by power. My book, provisionally titled Radically Legal, showcases how social movements in Berlin and Warsaw work with the law to renew its emancipatory potential. My proposal was the work of love, and I feel elevated by winning the Nine Dots Prize. I am a scholar-activist, which means that I only engage with the topics that I believe are socially important.”

    Mandy Hill, Managing Director of Academic Publishing at Cambridge University Press said: “Dr Joanna Kusiak’s insightful, stimulating work on the rule of law is a worthy and timely winner. Her work epitomises Cambridge University Press’ values: enabling inspirational and contested ideas and voices to reach a wider audience. We are excited to support Dr Kusiak to convert her ideas into book form.”

  • Radically Legal: Berlin Constitutes the Future

    June 14, 2024

    Right in the middle of the German constitution, a group of ordinary citizens discovers a forgotten clause that allows them to take 240,000 homes back from multi-billion corporations. In this work of creative non-fiction, scholar-activist and Nine Dots Prize winner Joanna Kusiak tells the story of a grassroots movement that convinced a million Berliners to pop the speculative housing bubble. She offers a vision of urban housing as democratically held commons, legally managed by a radically new institutional model that works through democratic conflicts. Moving between interdisciplinary analysis and her own personal story, Kusiak connects the dots between the past and the present, the local and the global, and shows the potential of radically legal politics as a means of strengthening our democracies and reviving the rule of law.

    This book is free to download and read. An audiobook version is also available.

    Read the book

The board