CALL FOR PAPERS: Secularization, Mysticism and Religious Hybridities in the Mediterranea

Readers interested in our work on legal and normative hybridity, including our conference in Malta (2010) and subsequent collection on the subject, might be interested in the

"Secularization, Mysticism and Religious Hybridities in the Mediterranean” Conference

The Mediterranean Institute at the University of Malta and the Institute of Mediterranean Studies of Busan University announce a conference on  “Secularization, Mysticism and Religious Hybridities in the Mediterranean” to be held in Malta  7- 9 February 2013.

 

The aim of this International Conference is to bring leading international experts from diverse humanistic and social sciences to discuss both the historical and the contemporary aspects of religion in the Mediterranean. The theme of Secularization, Mysticism and Hybridities will be explored through the continuous interplay and/or influence that exists between Religion and Society in Mediterranean Cultures.

The conference organisers invite academics and other experts who would like to act as panel convenors to submit proposals for panels for consideration by the organizing committee. Panels should be composed of 3-5 contributors with each contribution not exceeding 30 minutes in length. Panel convenors should identify the topic and the contributors and will be responsible for the organization of the panels. Furthermore, the panel convenors will be invited to act as reviewers in the call for contributions from individual academics and researchers who would like to participate in this conference.

CALL FOR PANELS: 2013 Commission on Legal Pluralism (CLP) conference

The call for panels for the 2013 Commission on Legal Pluralism (CLP) conference is closing on August 3, 2012.

 

This conference is organized in conjunction with the IUAES Congress entitled ‘Evolving Humanity, Emerging Worlds’ in Manchester (UK), and will take place on August 5-10, 2013 (see http ://www . iuaes2013 . org/).

Please directly upload your title, a short abstract of less than 300 characters, and a long abstract of less than 250 words, via the IUAES online proposal form.  The URL for that form is:
http ://www . nomadit . co . uk/iuaes/iuaes2013/panelproposal . php5. The IUAES will not be able to accept panel proposals after that date. Please also note that the title should be appended (IUAES Commission on Legal Pluralism).

Can you also please send an email with the same information to Janine Ubink at j.ubink@law.leidenuniv.nl.
That will allow us to include your panel proposal also on our own website.

We are also currently calling for papers. You can find the panels that have so far been accepted on the following website http ://www . nomadit . co . uk/iuaes/iuaes2013/panels . php5?View=General. For uploading a paper proposal, please go to the website and click on the panel you are interested in. Our panels are marked with (IUAES Commission on Legal Pluralism) behind the title.

If you feel your paper does not fit with any of the proposed panels, please send your paper proposal to Janine Ubink (j.m.ubink@law.leidenuniv.nl). Paper proposals should include your title, a short abstract of less than 300 characters, and a long abstract of less than 250 words. The deadline for paper proposals is August 3, 2012.

CALL FOR PAPERS: Sculpting the Human: Law, Culture and Biopolitics

16th Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities
University of London, Birkbeck
March 22 and March 23, 2013

Sculpting the Human: Law, Culture and Biopolitics


 
In recent times, diverse thinkers and artists including Foucault, Derrida, Esposito, Malabou, Coetzee, Agamben, Latour, Kentridge, Nancy, Butler and Brown have raised, or attempted to re-articulate, the question of ‘the human.’ The ASLCH meeting at Birkbeck, London, invites you to (re-)consider transformations in contemporary legal arrangements in light of emerging theoretical, cultural, economic, aesthetic, philosophical, and socio-political understandings or interrogations of the ‘human’. Tapping diverse conceptualizations of the indeterminacy frequently associated with the human, conference participants are invited to engage contemporary analyses of humans, others and legal forms.

The question of the human is, in many ways, an age-old one.  In other ways, however, it is peculiarly ours as we face current debates on what it is to qualify as human, in-human or animal life. These might include, but need not be limited to, discussions on: changing political cultures of disqualified lives; re-negotiating the subjects of postcolonial governance; understanding new forms of life politics and the associated determinations of life sciences; literary and artistic chronicles of intersecting orders and disorders; science fiction’s utopian or dystopian futures; the use of warbot and drone technologies; geographies of beastly spaces; histories and ethnographies that highlight the ordering required to exact popular hierarchies; the reframed spirit of bodies; visions of who may be tortured, or locked away as inhuman; critical images of human and animal rights; deployed governmental homologies between beasts and sovereigns; biopolitical frames that prefigure subjects through statistics, demography, neuroscience but also via ‘immunization’, ‘plasticity’, and so on.

Law is a place where these orders, distinctions and divisions are frequently navigated, constituted, articulated, shared and enforced. The narratives, rights, justifications, punishments and neglect represented or contested through law intimate the legal codes by which humans and others are drawn into orders of the governed. Participants are encouraged to reflect on this broad, but not exclusive, conference theme.

NOTICE: Adams and Bomhoff on Practice and Theory in Comparative Law

As part of a bumper crop of comparative collections, readers will want to look out for Maurice Adams and Jacco Bomhoff (eds), Practice and Theory in Comparative Law (2012):

What does doing comparative law involve? Too often, explicit methodological discussions in comparative law remain limited to the level of pure theory, neglecting to test out critiques and recommendations on concrete issues. This book bridges this gap between theory and practice in comparative legal studies. Essays by both established and younger comparative lawyers reflect on the methodological challenges arising in their own work and in work in their area. Taken together, they offer clear recommendations for, and critical reflection on, a wide range of innovative comparative research projects.

The contents include:

• Comparing law: practice and theory, Maurice Adams and Jacco Bomhoff
• Reflections on comparative law methodology – getting inside contract law, Catherine Valcke
• Reasoning with previous decisions, Jan Komárek
• Comparing legal argument, Jacco Bomhoff
• In search of system neutrality: methodological issues in the drafting of European contract law rules, Gerhard Dannemann
• Comparative law and global regulatory convergence: the example of competition law, David J. Gerber
• Reflections on comparative method in European constitutional law, Monica Claes and Maartje de Visser
• Rethinking methods in European private law, Jan M. Smits
• Transnational comparisons: theory and practice of comparative law as a critique of global governance, Peer Zumbansen
• Comparative constitutional compliance: notes towards a research agenda, Frederick Schauer
• Quantitative methods for comparative constitutional law, Anne Meuwese and Mila Versteeg
• Comparisons in private patrimonial law: towards a bottom-up approach using (cross-cultural) behavioural economics, Julie de Coninck
• Against ‘comparative method’: explaining similarities and differences, Maurice Adams and John Griffiths
• Comparative law as an act of modesty: a pragmatic and realistic approach to comparative legal scholarship, Koen Lemmens

NOTICE: Comparative Law on SSRN (Thanks to the Irish Society of Comparative Law)

Additional articles from SSRN have been noted by our friend in the Irish Society of Comparative Law:

Dari-Mattiacci, Giuseppe, Guerriero, Carmine and Huang, Zhenxing, The Good-Faith Purchaser: Markets, Culture, and the Legal System (June 20, 2012). Amsterdam Law School Research Paper No. 2012-70; Amsterdam Center for Law & Economics Working Paper No. 2012-01.

 

A key legal institution is the set of rules balancing theft with markets as alternative means to transfer property rights. Even if all legal systems forbid theft, different societies provide different ex post solutions to the conflict arising between the original owner and the good-faith buyer of a stolen good. These rules range from the full protection of the original owner's property right to the full protection of the buyer's reliance on contract. In situations in which only intermediaries can transfer goods by using either theft or markets, society should condone transfers occurred through theft when innocent buyers value the good more than original owners and reverse them otherwise. We show that, in the first case, provided that the difference between the owner's and the buyer's valuation is not too wide, there are separating equilibria in which moral intermediaries --- i.e., those for whom theft entails a sufficiently high moral cost --- signal their proper title by charging higher prices. In the second case, the market shrinks since moral intermediaries refrain from stealing. In the most likely case, in which buyers tend to value the good more than original owners, the extent of protection of the owner increases (decreases) with the share of moral intermediaries (the quality of the legal system) because of the lower probability of theft (lower impact of public enforcement). Instrumental variables estimates based on a cross section of 77 jurisdictions are consistent with this prediction.

Salomons, Arthur F., Comparative Law and the Quest for Optimal Rules on the Transfer of Movables for Europe (June 8, 2012). Amsterdam Law School Research Paper No. 2012-72; Centre for the Study of European Contract Law Working Paper Series No. 2012-09; European property Law Journal 2012(3), (forthcoming).

NOTICE: New German Law Journal

The latest issue of the German Law Journal: Review of Developments in German, European and International Jurisprudence, 13 German Law Journal No. 7 (2012), is out:

Articles

• The Desirability of ‘Weak’ Form Legal Harmonization: Perspectives from Statutory Interpretation and Legal Coherence - PDF - Mark Humphery-Jenner
• Enhanced Multi-level Protection of Human Dignity in a Globalized Context Through Humanitarian Global Legal Goods - PDF - Nicolas Carrillo-Santarelli

 

Developments

• The Doctrine of Equivalent Protection: Its Life and Legitimacy Before and After the European Union’s Accession to the European Convention on Human Rights - PDF - Paul De Hert and Fisnik Korenica
• Book Review – Martin Rogoff’s French Constitutional Law: Cases and Materials - PDF - Riccardo de Caria
• Collectivity – Public Law between Group Interests and the Common Good: The Annual Meeting of Public Law Assistants in Hamburg 2012 - PDF - Mehrdad Payandeh

NOTICE: 'Tony Weir and his contribution to comparative law scholarship'

 'Tony Weir and his contribution to

comparative law scholarship'

Annual seminar of the

British Association of Comparative Law

School of Law, Wills Memorial Building,

University of Bristol

11 September 2012 

Session 1: 9.30 - 10.45

Chair: Paula Giliker (Bristol)

• John Bell (Cambridge), Tony Weir and the teaching of comparative law
• Matthew Dyson (Cambridge), Tony Weir: Scholar and colleague.

COFFEE BREAK (kindly sponsored by Intersentia)

Session 2: 11:00 -12.30

Chair: Claudina Richards (UEA)

• Geoffrey Samuel (Kent), How should contracts be classified?
• Paula Giliker (Bristol), Tony Weir and the law of tort

This event is free and all are welcome to attend.

Please address any enquiries to the Secretary of BACL, Claudina Richards (c.richards@uea.ac.uk).

NOTICE: Special Issue of Maastricht Journal of European and Comparative Law

A special issue of the Maastricht Journal of European and Comparative Law has been published. The volume, guest-edited by Janwillem Oosterhuis and Emanuel van Dongen, is focused on ‘European Traditions – Integration or Disintegration?’. The articles include:

 

• Egbert Koops, Second-Rate Citizens: Junian Latins and the Constitutio Antoniniana
• Guido Rossi, The Booke of Orders of Assurances: A Civil Law Code in 16^th Century London
• Federica Furfaro, The Revival of Romanistic Scholarship between the 19th and 20^th Centuries as a ‘Centralizing Force’ in European Legal History – The Masterpieces of German Pandectist Literature Revised by Italian Translators
• Mieke van der Linden, New Imperialism (1870–1914) and the European Legal Traditions: A (Dis)Integrative Episode
• Sandra Fabijanić Gagro and Budislav Vukas Jr, The Path of the Former Yugoslav Countries to the European Union: From Integration to Disintegration and Back
• Peter C.H. Chan, The Enigma of Civil Justice in Imperial China: A Legal Historical Enquiry

NOTICE: Monateri on Methods of Comparative Law

Readers should look out for Pier Giuseppe Monateri (ed), Methods of comparative law (2012): 

Comprising an array of distinguished contributors, this pioneering volume of original contributions explores theoretical and empirical issues in comparative law. The innovative, interpretive approach found here combines explorative scholarship and research with thoughtful, qualitative critiques of the field. The book promotes a deeper appreciation of classical theories and offers new ways to re-orient the study of legal transplants and transnational codes. 

Methods of Comparative Law brings to bear new thinking on topics including: the mutual relationship between space and law; the plot that structures legal narratives, identities and judicial interpretations; a strategic approach to legal decision making; and the inner potentialities of the ‘comparative law and economics’ approach to the field. Together, the contributors reassess the scientific understanding of comparative methodologies in the field of law in order to provide both critical insights into the traditional literature and an original overview of the most recent and purposive trends.  

A welcome addition to the lively field of comparative law, Methods of Comparative Law will appeal to students and scholars of law, comparative law and economics. Judges and practitioners will also find much of interest here.

It contents include: