Juris Diversitas member Mariano Croce will be speaking next week:
Centre for Ethnic Minority Studies
(CEMS)
As
part of the seminar
series
2011 - 2012 CEMS presents
‘The power
of defining: pluralism and the legal domain’
Dr Mariano Croce
Adjunct Professor, La
Sapienza, University
of Rome
Post-doctoral Researcher,
SOAS,
Chair Prof. Werner Menski
7 pm – 8.30p.m.
Thursday, 8th March 2012
Room G50
SOAS main building,
Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square,
London WC1H OXG
All are
most welcome
– no booking required
For further information
please
email sq1@soas.ac.uk
The author will canvass
the idea
that there
is no normative difference between state law and other
kinds of law, such as customary law or religious
law, and that eventually there is not a clear
dividing line between the
various normative fields
of social reality (from interactions of everyday life
to legal activities). More
precisely,
he will explain
why some scholars (and above all some
of those who belong
to what today is known as ‘legal
pluralism’) deem
the traditional distinction between legal rules
and other social rules either as an abstractive
construal of monist state-centred theories, or else as a factual consequence of
contingent socio-political arrangements. Legal pluralists forcefully
argue that, at present, an increasing
plurality of normative orders makes
the distinction between the legal and the
extralegal
outdated and urge legal
theorists to dispose once
and for all of the fictitious idea that law is something
separate from ordinary life. In reality,
they conclude,
the legal
and the broader
social are so intertwined
that no distinctive line among good manners, religious precepts, and positive
legal rules
can be drawn. The author will contend
that, while arguing so, legal
pluralists should also be able to take
the pragmatic bearings of their
conceptual proposals into due
account and thus to pay due
heed
to what is involved in expanding the
domain of the legal. In fact, what is at stake
here
is neither
a mere
clarification of the meaning of law nor a better understanding
of a familiar institution. Rather, what
is at stake is the stock of symbolic power
that is inevitably linked to the
term ‘law’. Enlarging the domain
of the legal,
as the author will argue, always involves
a re-allocation of power and legitimacy.
Defining something
as law, and, more in general, defining something
as something entails
the power
to say what must be included and what excluded, what belongs
to a genus and what does not, what should be
recognised
as having certain prerogatives
and prior claims and what should not.
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