All,
I hope this finds each of you well.
I write on behalf of the Juris
Diversitas Committee with an update on our
activities, including next year’s annual conference, and links to additional
information.
It’s been another busy year.
Membership has expanded and we’ve made it reasonably easy to pay fees.
A new Committee was also elected for
2014-2017. We’ve already asked Professor Christa Rautenbach (North-West University
(South Africa)) to join the Committee as Outreach Officer, ie to help us expand
still further and to create formal links to associated individuals, groups,
institutes, etc. The new Committee will also be reviewing and updating the
membership of our Advisory Board.
In addition to our Blog
and Facebook
page, we now have a Twitter
account to help spread our message. For those who haven’t already done so, I
urge you to sign up for our notices at one of these sites. And while we’re
grateful to have three new bloggers (Paola Aurucci, Erin Branigan, and Irina
Moutaye), we’re still looking for volunteers. A satellite blog—I just made that up—is also being
developed with our Maltese members to focus on Mediterranean laws and norms.
We held a workshop in Turin last January (on ‘Visions of the Economy in the Islamic and Western Legal Traditions’),
as well as our first international, interdisciplinary Annual Conference (on the ‘diffusion’
of laws and norms) with our good friends at the Swiss Institute of Comparative Law. We hope to have two or three events in 2014. This includes our annual
conference, to be held at Aix-Marseille University (France) in July 2014. Events on microjurisdictions and on ‘Mediterranean
hybridities’ (with comparatists and anthropologists) are also being planned.
Finally, we’ve a half-dozen or so books (on the
concept of law, indigenous law, mixed systems, and ‘stateless law’) being
prepared for our Book Series with Ashgate
Publishing. Several should be published in 2014, including our Concepts of law collection which will be
given free to members paid in 2013. A separate volume will be provided free for
members in 2014.
To continue this work, it’s very important
that we receive your support, both through your membership fees and your help
in spreading the word about our activities. And, as always, we welcome
your thoughts. There’s so much more to be done.
We hope to see many of you soon. Best wishes to all
for the holidays and the new year.
Seán
