How did we come to view the rule of law as a malleable and relative principle, when the fundamental freedoms that constitute an essential component of it must, in a democracy, be protected from the oppression of power?

In this interview, Stéphanie Hennette-Vauchez discusses these developments and the role of the Council of State and the Constitutional Council in this evident erosion.

Stéphanie Hennette-Vauchez is a professor of public law at the University of Paris Nanterre, a senior member of the Institut universitaire de France, and a researcher at the Center for Studies and Research on Fundamental Rights (CREDOF), which she directed from 2015 to 2023.

Her public stances in defense of freedoms and the rule of law—denouncing the permanent state of emergency, criticizing the distortion of the concept of secularism, and defending the right to abortion, among others—are too numerous to count.

Co-author, with Diane Roman, of a textbook on Fundamental Freedoms and Human Rights Law, she published in 2025, with Antoine Vauchez, the book Judges Who Are Far Too Well-Behaved. Who Still Protects Our Freedoms? (Seuil).

While in the 20th century, Nazi atrocities and the Nuremberg trials helped establish dignity as a shared human value and define crimes against that dignity, our era of accelerated ecosystem destruction, against a backdrop of climate change, still lacks this cardinal value.

To stop “looking the other way while our house burns,” legal scholar Laurent Neyret and philosopher Baptiste Morizot propose in their book Liberté, dignité, habitabilité (Tracts, Gallimard) propose approaches drawn from their respective work to ensure that the latter serves as the “guiding value” in law for decades to come.

Baptiste Morizot is a philosopher and lecturer at the University of Aix-Marseille.

His work is enriched by numerous immersions in natural environments and focuses on the major challenges of responsibility and the environment, as well as on living beings.

Among his seminal works are Les diplomates: cohabiter avec les loups sur une autre carte du vivant (Wildproject) and Le regard perdu: à l'origine de l'art pariétal animal (Actes Sud).

He has notably collaborated with the legal scholar Laurent Neyret.