BOOKS: Abate and Kronk on Climate Change and Indigenous Peoples

Edward Elgar Publishing has announced the following:

Randall S Abate and Elizabeth Ann Kronk (eds), Climate Change And Indigenous Peoples: The Search for Legal Remedies

This timely volume explores the ways in which indigenous peoples across the world are challenged by climate change impacts, and discusses the legal resources available to confront those challenges.

Indigenous peoples occupy a unique niche within the climate justice movement, as many indigenous communities live subsistence lifestyles that are severely disrupted by the effects of climate change. Additionally, in many parts of the world, domestic law is applied differently to indigenous peoples than it is to their non-indigenous peers, further complicating the quest for legal remedies. The contributors to this book bring a range of expert legal perspectives to this complex discussion, offering both a comprehensive explanation of climate change-related problems faced by indigenous communities and a breakdown of various real world attempts to devise workable legal solutions. Regions covered include North and South America (Brazil, Canada, the US and the Arctic), the Pacific Islands (Fiji, Tuvalu and the Federated States of Micronesia), Australia and New Zealand, Asia (China and Nepal) and Africa (Kenya).

This comprehensive volume will appeal to professors and students of environmental law, indigenous law and international law, as well as practitioners and policymakers with an interest in indigenous legal issues and environmental justice.

Additional titles in international law include:

Laurence Boisson de Chazournes, Christina Leb, and Mara Tignino (eds), International Law And Freshwater: The Multiple Challenges

Onita Das, Environmental Protection, Security And Armed Conflict: A Sustainable Development Perspective

Alexander Orakhelashvili (ed), Research Handbook On The Theory And History Of International Law

BOOKS: Mackaay on Law and Economics/Yang on Laws and Society

Edward Elgar Publishing has announced the following publications:

 

Ejan Mackaay, Law And Economics For Civil Law Systems

This unique volume presents the core ideas of law and economics for audiences primarily familiar with civil law systems.

Ejan Mackaay offers a comprehensive look at the essential points of economic reasoning, the Coase Theorem, and legal institutions such as intellectual property, extra-contractual civil liability and contracts. The book’s structure mirrors the way law is taught in civil law countries, with structured presentations, references to civil code articles paired with non-technical explanations, and limited reliance on graphs. This English-language version builds on the success of the author’s 2008 French-language textbook on law and economics from a civil law perspective.

This pioneering volume fills a critical gap in the literature of law and economics, and will be an invaluable resource for lawyers and law students working in civil law systems.

Hyunah Yang, Law And Society In Korea

  

This book sets out a panoramic view of law and society studies in South Korea, considering the factors that have made this post-colonial war-torn country economically and politically successful.

The contributors examine societal and historical conditions that are reflected in – or that were shaped by – the law, through a variety of lenses; including law and development, law and politics, colonialism and gender, past wrongdoings, public interest lawyering, and judicial reform. In dismantling the historical specificity of the way in which Korea studies are universally framed, the contributions provide novel views, theories and information about South Korean law and society.

Incorporating various perspectives and methodologies, and demonstrating a finely crafted application of general theory to specific issues, this book will prove insightful to law scholars and researchers looking to widen their perspective and broaden their knowledge on law and society in Korea. Law practitioners whose practice requires knowledge of the Korean legal system will also find plenty of information in this authoritative book.

REGISTRATION: Legal Theory and Legal History - A Neglected Dialogue? Conference

Online Registration for the 2013 UK IVR Annual Conference - Legal Theory and Legal History: A Neglected Dialogue? – has opened. 

The conference will be held from 12-13 April 2013 in the Law Building of Queen Mary, University of London. The IVR is the International Association of Legal and Social Philosophy. 

The conference description reads:

The 2013 annual conference of the UK Branch of the IVR is designed to bring together legal theorists and legal historians (including historians of legal theory and political thought) in an attempt to facilitate and encourage dialogue between the two disciplines.

     Apart from some notable exceptions, much of contemporary legal theory is uninformed by history, including legal history. This is deeply regrettable, for legal theories may be vastly improved by being informed, and perhaps more importantly, challenged by historical contexts. Theories of law, one might say, are better if they are forged at the coal-face of historical research. Similarly, one could argue that legal histories are better when they draw on, and themselves contribute to, the conceptual resources of legal theory.
     Somewhat more radically, if one agrees law does not have a nature, but a culture, then one must account for how the culture of law changes, and has changed, over time. This, by necessity, demands a historically-informed methodology. Similarly, the problem of change is an unavoidable one in legal theory, whether that be change in legal regimes or changes in certain areas of the law – here, again, the resources of history, including the philosophy of history, are invaluable. Putting things a little more colourfully, one could say that legal ideas cannot but be understood historically.
     Further, legal theory has, of course, its own history: legal theories are not disconnected islands, but rather interventions in a long series of dialogues and polylogues amongst theorists. As many have observed, and described, legal theory’s history needs to be informed not only by such dialogues and polylogues amongst theorists, but also by awareness of the theorist’s immersion in political, economic and other conditions of his or her time and place – there, once more, a serious engagement with history is important.

The Programme (as of 7 February 2013) includes:

Conference: Commerce, Corporations and the Law

Commerce, Corporations and the Law

The History Project, in cooperation with the History Department at Princeton University and the Joint Center for History and Economics, will hold its second conference on 27-28 September 2013 at Dickinson Hall, Princeton University. The conference will be concerned with cross-cultural trade, firms, and legal systems around the world. The History Project is supported by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, with the object of encouraging a new generation of historians of the economy and economic life. The Organizing Committee welcomes proposals for papers from advanced undergraduates, graduate students and recent PhD recipients. The deadline for submissions of proposals is March 1, 2013.

The conference will be able to contribute to travel and accommodation costs, and a small number of research grants will be available through the History Project; see http://www.histproj.org/grants.html

Jeremy Adelman, Nikolas Bowie, Hendrik Hartog, Harold James, Melissa Lane, Jonathan Levy, Bhavani Raman, Emma Rothschild, Melissa Texeira

Proposals should be uploaded to the conference website using the following online form:

http://www.histproj.org/meeting_2013-proposal.html

For more information, please email histproj@fas.harvard.edu

PROGRAMME: Tulane Paris Institute for European Legal Studies

The Tulane Paris Institute for European Legal Studies 

takes great pleasure in welcoming Supreme Court  Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg onto its Summer Faculty in 2013

In Session: June 24-July 13, 2013

“GOOD AMERICANS, WHEN THEY DIE, GO TO PARIS.” - Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde may be right, but the time to experience Paris is sooner rather than later. Come join us next summer for classes taught by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the United States Supreme Court and a faculty of internationally renowned experts on French and European law.

You will be joining the prestigious Tulane Institute in Paris and its host, Paris-Dauphine University which is located in one of the most beautiful parts of Paris. Our Institute is the oldest, continuously running American program in France. Cultivated people the world over have long regarded Paris as not only the world’s most beautiful city, but also the cultural and intellectual heart of Europe.  Paris is also the spiritual home of the civil law. All students in the program who successfully complete a three-credit curriculum will receive the Institute's Diploma.

ARTICLE: Dedek on Natural Law Thought and the Kantian Theory of Transfer by Contract

Helge Dedek's "A Particle of Freedom: Natural Law Thought and the Kantian Theory of Transfer by Contract" is on SSRN:

Modern contract law theorists frequently invoke Kantian ideas to conceptualize contract as a form of immediate transfer. The Kantian theory of contract itself is eclectic: Kant makes use of the main conceptual building blocks of Natural Law (in particular Grotian) contract doctrine – promise and transfer. Yet Kant re-arranges and adapts them to his own epistemology and conceptual system. I submit that because of this connection, additional light can be shed on Kant’s theory of contract by placing it in the context of contemporary Natural Law discourse. One of the most outspoken critics of contract theory in the Grotian tradition was then famous (and now apocryphal) legal philosopher Theodor Schmalz. Schmalz faulted Natural Law thought for conceptualizing contract as transfer by fallaciously – “subreptively” – explaining the normative event of creating an obligation through the model of the empirical transfer of physical objects. Kant’s theory reads like a response to this critique: Kant avoids modelling contract on the transfer of property. Rather, he explains any transfer as contractual, brought about by a unified will.

CONFERENCE (POSTGRADUATE): Future Lawyers Tackling Tomorrow’s Legal Challenges

University of Liverpool

International Postgraduate Legal Conference

“FutureLawyers Tackling Tomorrow’s Legal Challenges”

FAQs

When does the conference take place?

The conference will take place at the University of Liverpool on Thursday 4^th July 2013. More information, including directions, will be provided closer to the time.

NEWS AND REVIEWS: European Network on Law and Society (Réseau Européen Droit & Société)

The excellent 'Nouvelles du monde’ and 'Au fil des revue'--both Anglophone and Francophone--of the European Network on Law and Society (Réseau Européen Droit and Société) are now available. 

 

Have a look.

OPPORTUNITY: The Juris Diversitas Web Team!!

In order to further expand the types and amount of information we provide, Juris Diversitas seeks volunteers for its Blog and Facebook pages:

A Web Editor would have primary responsibility for the development of the Blog and related pages. The Editor would work closely with our Executive and additional bloggers. At most, only a few hours a week would be required and individuals needn’t have previous blogging experience.

Guest Bloggers would be permitted to create discursive, opinion-oriented posts, within the bounds of our aims, for an agreed period of time. The time commitment is likely to be minimal and individuals needn’t have previous blogging experience.

Numerous individual Bloggers would commit to making the occasional informative or discursive posts, largely by collating existing information on events, publications, etc. The time commitment for this will be minimal and individuals needn’t have previous blogging experience.

Note, too, that individuals can always submit information directly to us for posting, though we ask that you prepare a draft post in advance.

This is easier than you think--hell, I've been doing it--but essential to our future. Interested individuals should contact me at Seán Patrick Donlan.

ARTICLE (SSRN): Antonov on Global Legal Pluralism

Mikhail Antonov's Global Legal Pluralism: A New Way of Legal Thinking is now on SSRN:

The subject matter of this article is the terminology which is used in contemporary law and sociological jurisprudence to denote changes in legal regulation. Among the most fashionable terms are those of globalization and pluralism. In the author’s opinion, these two terms indicate diverse phenomena and have different tasks. Pluralism is a concept allowing the description and explication of various legal facts, institutions, relations which are not generally recognized in state-centered theory of law. Globalization is a common name for the distinctive characteristics which distinguish the present-day Western civilization from other civilizations. The amalgamation of these two different aspects into one set of methods and ideas inspired by the need to explain modernity does not lead to the formation of a new methodology or of a scientific conception. Rather globalization talks about plurality in contemporary law having another function – to describe the changing mentality, new ways of legal thinking which are growing in the Western world. These changes have repercussions in many fields of science, i.e. in a new understanding of such traditional concepts as sovereignty.

CALL FOR PAPERS: Disrobing the Law in American Culture

The Princeton Program in American Studies Presents:

Disrobing the Law in American Culture: 
A Graduate Conference


Keynote: Laura Edwards (Duke University)
Keynote: Sally Gordon (University of Pennsylvania)

This conference, sponsored by the Program in American Studies at Princeton University, will focus on interdisciplinary questions of being beyond the law – of how people across time and space have managed to detach themselves from legal fabrics. It will examine how law accounts for specific bodies and behaviors, and how those bodies and behaviors can render themselves invisible to legal hermeneutics. We want to bring together scholars from a variety of fields to explore the disjunction between law and social practice. This conference asks how much the law really matters. It questions its historical efficacy and, at the same time, notes just how far reaching the law can be.

INSTITUTE: The Tulane-Siena Institute for International Law, Cultural Heritage & the Arts

The Tulane-Siena Institute for International Law, Cultural Heritage & the Arts 

Session Dates:  Sunday, June 2 – Saturday, June 22, 2013 


The Tulane – Siena Institute for International Law, Cultural Heritage and the Arts reinvigorates 20 years of cooperation between the University of Siena Facoltà di Giurisprudenza and Tulane University Law School. The goal of the Institute is to develop the world’s best program for the study of the complex and fascinating relationship between international law, and art and cultural property.  There could be no better place to pursue such studies than in the artistic treasure that is Siena.   

While classes in the conventional sense will be held at the Facolta di Giurisprudenza, Siena and Tuscany will be the true classrooms, providing students with the opportunity to see and experience first-hand the problems and issues that shape this field.  Classroom lectures will be supplemented extensively with field trips, visits to museums, visits to private collections, and guest speakers to take full advantage of the program’s location.

CALL FOR PAPERS: Free Access to Law in a Changing World

Free Access to Law in a Changing World

It is 11 years since the Declaration on Free Access to Law was signed at Montreal and the Free Access to Law Movement (FALM) was founded. Since then the movement has grown to include organisations from more than 50 countries and recent Law Via the Internet conferences have been held in Africa, Asia and North America. Now, for the first time, LVI comes to the British Isles in the beautiful island of Jersey.

The Jersey Legal Information Board has been a member of FALM since 2008 and is proud to host LVI2013 where the over-arching theme will be ‘Free Access to Law in a Changing World’. The Conference will take place on 26-27th September, 2013 at the Radisson Blu Hotel on Jersey’s waterfront and we look forward to welcoming you to the Island.

Call for Papers

We are delighted to announce that the call for papers for Law Via the Internet 2013 is open and we will be accepting submissions from 19th February.  We are looking for proposals for papers and presentations based around this year’s theme of free access to law in a changing world.  

Take a look at the programme to find out more