06 April 2010

REMINDER: Symposium on Comparative Early Modern Legal History (23 April 2010)

'New Perspectives on Legal Pluralism', a Symposium on Comparative Early Modern Legal History held under the auspices of the Center for Renaissance Studies will take place at the Newberry Library in Chicago on Friday, 23 April 2010.

The symposium meets:

to discuss the comparative legal history of the Atlantic world in the period c1492 to 1815. Each year we offer a one-day conference that brings together law professors, historians, and social scientists to explore a particular topic in comparative legal history, broadly understood.

The site reads:

Colonialism enhanced legal pluralism. European, African, Asian, and American polities relied on layered and multi-centric systems of law, and their encounters generated new and often repeating patterns of jurisdictional politics. This widespread legal pluralism at times contributed to regional integration by making substantively different legal systems intelligible to travelers and merchants. It also posed challenges to imperial administration as subordinate authorities sought to establish, expand, or protect prerogatives to act independently of metropolitan sovereigns and courts. With recent scholarship establishing clearly the benefits of framing colonial law as jurisdictionally complex and unstable, opportunities are now in sight to push this perspective further in a number of directions.

One interesting set of problems involves questions about how conflicts over the prerogatives of delegated legal authorities to discipline and control subordinate or dependent populations related to the changing contours of imperial constitutions or ideologies of rule. Conference participants may explore the ways in which such figures as garrison commanders, plantation owners, ship captains, Company officials, missionaries, and others with some measure of legal authority positioned themselves in relation to both metropolitan and colonial law. Did they make innovative legal claims or exert influence on regional patterns? We invite investigations of the conditions under which such actors deferred to imperial authority, the sources they drew upon to defend their legal prerogatives, and the nature of their interactions with various courts. Other studies might consider the degree to which the politics of making and defending claims to semi-autonomous legal authority informed broader, even regional, political processes. As we bring such connections into sight, it may be possible to refine comparisons of the politics of legal pluralism in different parts of a colonial regime, or between the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Indian Ocean worlds.

A related theme focuses on the legal strategies of subordinate groups. Taking into account a framework of legal pluralism, scholars can move beyond the study of “resistance” to ask questions about the legal participation of formally subordinate groups—even some that were seemingly powerless before the law. Forum shopping, petitions for mercy, violence against magistrates, new genres of legal writing, maneuvers to escape indebtedness—these and other strategies had immediate and sometimes far-reaching institutional effects. In addition to tracing such connections, we might probe the formative influences on legal strategies. How did knowledge about law circulate? To what extent did information or stories about of the effectiveness of particular legal strategies carry across social strata, imperial divides, and oceans? How did legal actors imagine and describe plural legal orders? With attention to these and other, related topics, the conference seeks to open the study of legal pluralism to new approaches and insights.

Additional information, including the schedule, is available here. Note that attendance is free, but advance registration is required.

NOTICE: SSRN e-journals - (i) Laws, Norms, & Informal Orders and Indigenous Nations and (ii) People's Law

Two SSRN e-journals have announced the following

The Laws, Norms, & Informal Orders e-journal has announced:

Catholic Schools and Broken Windows
Margaret F. Brinig, Notre Dame Law School
Nicole Stelle Garnett, Notre Dame Law School

Debts, Disasters, and Delinquencies: The Case for a Mandatory Force Majeure Provision in Consumer Credit Agreements, and for a Consumer Credit Insurance Fund
Norman I. Silber, Hofstra University School of Law

Islamic Legal Theory, Secularism and Religious Pluralism: Is Modern Religious Freedom Sufficient for the Shari'a 'Purpose [Maqsid]' of 'Preserving Religion [Hifz Al-Din]?'
Andrew F. March, Yale University

Assessing the Effects of a 'Loser Pays' Rule on the American Legal System
Marie Gryphon, Manhattan Institute for Policy Research

Disaster Mythology and the Law
Lisa Grow Sun, Associate Professor

Comparative Deterrence from Private Enforcement and Criminal Enforcement of the U.S. Antitrust Laws
Robert H. Lande, University of Baltimore - School of Law
Joshua P. Davis, University of San Francisco - School of Law

Should States Have a Legal Right to Reputation? Applying the Rationales of Defamation Law to the International Arena
Elad Peled, University of Haifa

China’s Lax Law Harbors Academic Misconduct
Xinglong Cao, A University, School of Law

The Indigenous Nations and People's Law e-journal has announced:
 
Relocation Revisited: Sex Trafficking of Native Women in the United States
Sarah Deer, William Mitchell College of Law
 
Tribal Citizen Participation in State and National Politics: Welcome Wagon or Trojan Horse
Michael D. Oeser, University of Wisconsin Law School
 
Notes on the Implementation by Latin American Courts of the ILO Convention 169 on Indigenous Peoples
Christian Courtis, affiliation not provided to SSRN
 
Disrupted Attachments: A Social Context Complex Trauma Framework and the Lives of Aboriginal Peoples in Canada
Lori Haskell, University of Toronto - Department of Psychiatry
Melanie Randall, Faculty of Law, UWO
 
Note that with these and many other SSRN e-journals, you can subscribe for automatic updates.