Comparative Law Call for Papers for SLS Conference, from David Marrani

SLS Conference 2012 Bristol - Call for Papers: Comparative Law Section

Dear all,

The 2012 SLS Annual Conference will take place at Bristol University from 11-14 September. The theme of the conference this year is “Pressing Problems in the Law and Legal Education” and papers on that topic are particularly welcome.

The Comparative Law Section is in group A. We will be meeting on Tuesday 11th (2 slots) after the morning workshop organised at the conference by the British Association of Comparative Law (BACL) and Wednesday 12th (2 slots). Each slot lasts 90 minutes (with two to three papers, if possible grouped around a theme).

Contributions from established and new scholars are welcome. Papers can be at any stage from work-in-progress to an article ready for publication. Speakers will have to provide an abstract of their paper by August (abstracts will be generally accessible this year, as opposed to being restricted to those registered for the conference), but providing a full text is optional.

New this year:

**There will be an opportunity for poster presentations (Posters A1 size) to be displayed beside the publishers’ stands in the area where tea and coffee are served; space is limited (only 20 posters for each half of the conference). Poster presenters are expected to attend the conference in the usual way and to be available to discuss their work. Please let me know if you are interested in this opportunity to present your work in a different way.

If you are interested in presenting a paper or poster, please email me by Monday 20th February. At this stage I need no more than your name and a brief outline of the paper or poster that you would like to present. Please note that there will be a Best Paper prize and a new Best Poster prize.

Also I have been asked to remind all speakers that they are expected to book and pay for the conference in the usual way. Furthermore, if you have submitted, or are intending to submit a paper to another section, could you please let me know when submitting your Comparative Law proposal?

Best wishes,

Dr. David Marrani,
Convener SLS Comparative Law Section
dmarrani@essex.ac.uk
SLS Comparative Law Section.
Society of Legal Scholars,
PO Box 3017.
Bristol BS6 9HJ. UK.
webadmin@legalscholars.ac.uk

CALL FOR PAPERS: Encounters: An International Journal for the Study of Culture and Society

A Call for Papers for Encounters: An International Journal for the Study of Culture and Society has been issued. The topic, 'Islamic Law: Society, Culture and State' is quite similar to our Mediterranean Project. The Guest Editor is Sabrina Joseph (Zayed University, Dubai).

The Call for Papers reads:

We invite papers that deal with the intersection between Islamic law and society particularly as it pertains to such issues as: the status of women and/or family law, property rights, land tenure, criminal law, finance/economy, and inter-faith relations. Papers from all periods of history and all disciplines arewelcome, as are papers that examine the impact of Islamic law in western contexts. Questions that are of particular interest include (but are not limited to) the following:

- How is the law a 'living law'? To what extent have legal thinkers integrated custom into the lawmaking process?

- To what extent has the law provided an arena for individuals of different religions to negotiate and/or settle their disputes?

- What sort of relationship has existed between the various schools of law and have legal thinkers drawn upon schools of law other than their own in formulating laws?

- To what extent have Western legal systems accommodated Islamic law? What impact has this had onnotions of citizenship and minority rights?
- How have state law/secular law and shari'a overlapped and/or informed one another in the lawmaking process? How has this relationship evolved over time?

Please submit your paper (6,000 to 10,000) in MS Word format to Sabrina.joseph@zu.ac.ae by July 1, 2012. Submissions should include a cover letter to the editor describing the work in approximately one hundred words.

NOTICE: Janke and Licari on Enforcing Punitive Damage Awards in France

Benjamin West Janke (Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz, PC) and Juris Diversitas Member François-Xavier Licari (University of Metz - Faculty of Law)'s 'Enforcing Punitive Damage Awards in France after Fountaine Pajot' is forthcoming in the American Journal of Comparative Law. It is available on SSRN.

In a landmark ruling, the Cour de cassation held that 'an award of punitive damages is not, per se, contrary to public policy,' but that 'it is otherwise when the amount awarded is disproportionate with regard to the damage sustained and the debtor's breach of his contractual obligation.' Schlenzka & Langhorne v. Fountaine Pajot, S.A. involved the failed attempt by American judgment creditors to enforce their California judgment against a French defendant in France. At the same time that the judgment creditors were taking their case through the French legal system, the Cour de cassation, in a different line of cases, liberalized the conditions under which a foreign judgment could be enforced in France. But when the Court opened one door for the American plaintiffs, it closed another by refusing to enforce the judgment because it included disproportionate punitive damages. The Court's reasons were inconsistent with prior interpretations of proportionality and disingenuous to the court's modern approach to the enforcement of foreign judgments. In just a few words, the Court echoed prevailing French and European sentiments about American punitive damage awards. Unfortunately, the prevailing attitudes are dominated more by prejudice than by fact and reason.

The Civil Law and its Codes: A Journey Through the Americas

Les Editions Thémis, Montreal, published Le droit civil et ses codes: parcours à travers les Amériques, a collection of papers presented at a workshop series conducted at the Quebec Research Center of Private and Comparative Law at McGill University, edited by Jimena Andino Dorato, Jean-Frédérick Ménard and Lionel Smith. View the Table of Contents.

Les neufs juristes conviés par le centre de recherche en droit privé et comparé du Québec de l'Université McGill à parcourir le droit civil à travers les Amériques et leurs codes en dressent un portrait pluriel. Cela dit, comme le relève Benoît Moore dans le rapport de synthèse qui clôt cet ouvrage collectif dans lequel il se penche sur l'unicité, la centralité et la pérennité des "codes d'Amérique", des thèmes récurrents traversent les textes des auteurs, indépendamment de leur origine nationale. Ainsi, on observe l'évolution du rôle normatif du Code civil en Argentine avec Julio César Rivera qui s'attarde notamment à ses interactions avec le common law et la lex mercatoria. On constate aussi, tant avec Olivier Moréteau, qui réfléchit à la place du Code civil en Louisiane qu'avec Jimena Andino Dorate, Graciela Jasa-Silveira et Nelcy Lopez Cuellar qui abordent le dialogue des codes civils avec les normes constitutionnelles et internationales en Argentine , au Mexique et en Colombie, que la place du code civil dans l'univers juridique a beaucoup changé depuis la première vague de codification au 19ème siècle. De même, l'exposé de de José Antônio Peres Gediel sur la modernisation du droit des personnes physiques en réponse aux innovations médicales et scientifiques et dans la foulée de l'adoption par le Brésil d'un nouveau code civil rejoint à la fois le propos sur les défis associés à la réforme et à la recodification du droit privé que livre Luis Muniz-Argüelles à partir de Puerto Rico et le point de vue québécois de Sophie Morin sur l'avenir du Code civil du Québec. Tel que l'évoquent en ouverte Jimena Andino Dorato, Jean-Frédérick Ménard et Lionel Smith, cet ouvrage pose un regard renouvelé sur le droit civil tel qu'il s'est développé sur le continent américain et constitue une excellente introduction à son étude comparée.

REMINDER: Call for Papers - Doing Justice: Official and Unofficial ‘Legalities’ in Practice

Doing Justice:

Official and Unofficial ‘Legalities’ in Practice

Juris Diversitas is organising, with the Centre Jacques-Berque, a colloquium on Mediterranean laws and norms. It will be held in Rabat, Morocco from 15-16 June 2012.

Participants, both jurists and others, are asked to speak on the complexity of

• state laws (both Western and non-Western), including the gap between legal theory and practice
• other non-state normative orders (religious, customary, etc)

Speakers may discuss, in English or French, either of these aspects (including case studies) or the relationship between the two.

Those engaged in our Mediterranean Hybridity Project may also present preliminary overviews of the jurisdictions they’re working on. Indeed, related proposals focusing on similar themes beyond the Mediterranean are also welcome.

For additional information, see the original Call for Papers or contact Seán Patrick Donlan (sean.donlan@ul.ie) or Baudouin Dupret (baudouin.dupret@cjb.ma).

Those interested in making a presentation should send a short (250 word) proposal to Baudouin Dupret by 7 February 2012.

NOTICE: Pargendler on the Rise and Decline of Legal Families

Mariana Pargendler (Fundação Getulio Vargas School of Law at São Paulo)'s 'The Rise and Decline of Legal Families' (2012) 60 American Journal of Comparative Law is now available on SSRN.

The abstract reads:

The effort to group jurisdictions around the world into a handful of legal families based on common characteristics of their laws has traditionally occupied a central role in the comparative law literature. This Article revisits the intellectual history of comparative law and surveys the evolution of legal family taxonomies from the first efforts at classification in the late-nineteenth century to the influential categorizations advanced by René David and Zweigert and Kötz in the 1960s. The early taxonomies differed from their modern counterparts in important ways. Although the nineteenth century is usually viewed as the apex of the common-civil law dichotomy, this distinction was conspicuously absent from legal family classifications until the twentieth century. A number of economic and political factors – ranging from economic liberalism to anti-colonialist sentiment – likely played a role in minimizing the salience of legal traditions in nineteenth-century legal thought.

NOTICE: Palmer on 'The Great Spill in the Gulf . . . and a Sea of Pure Economic Loss'

Vernon Valentine Palmer has recently published 'The Great Spill in the Gulf . . . and a Sea of Pure Economic Loss: Reflections on the Boundaries of Civil Liability' in the (2011) 116 Penn State Law Review 105. It begins:

What has been called the greatest oil spill in history, and certainly the largest in United States history, began with an explosion on April 20, 2010, some 41 miles off the Louisiana coast. The accident occurred during the drilling of an exploratory well by the Deepwater Horizon, a mobile offshore drilling unit (MODU) under lease to BP (formerly British Petroleum) and owned by Transocean. The well-head blowout resulted in 11 dead, 17 injured, and oil spewing from the seabed 5,000 ft. below at an estimated rate of 25,000-30,000 barrels per day.