13 November 2023

CALL FOR PAPERS - INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR THE SEMIOTICS OF LAW - SPECIAL ISSUE - Gender and Law Issues

CALL FOR PAPERS

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR THE SEMIOTICS OF LAW 

SPECIAL ISSUE 

Gender and Law Issues 


Guest Editors – Alyane Almeida de Araujo and Sarah Marusek

Law, as a mechanism capable of regulating the most varied spaces of public and private life, is not blind to gender. In this sense, the Special Issue “Gender and Legal Issues” of the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law aims to open a space for original articles analyzing the impacts of law from a gender perspective, contributing to advancing this important aspect of critical studies of law.

This issue seeks to highlight how the legal text and the social context are articulated in a gender perspective, considering that the dynamics of perception, interpretation and application of the law demonstrate the limits of theories that reduce the legal phenomenon to a formalistic and apparently neutral legal frame.

We encourage the submissions of manuscripts with an interdisciplinary and innovative angle of analysis, as exemplified but not limited to legal institutes, laws, contracts, international conventions and decisions of international or national courts of justice, in the most varied spaces of public and private life, such as, for example, in the contractual and property relations, in the labor and corporate relations and into the family. We also welcome both qualitative and quantitative studies.

This special issue also has an international vocation, embracing the most varied legal traditions and cultures. Original articles and reviews addressing how legal mechanisms in different countries can produce or reinforce situations of gender inequalities, or, on the contrary, contribute to prevent them are highly encouraged.

We provide a high-quality blind peer-reviewing process to all the papers via our online submission platform, that will result in a relevant publication to innovation in research and practice about law and gender.

Submissions should be addressed to Alyane Almeida de Araujo (almeidadearaujo.alyane@gmail.com) and Sarah Marusek (marusek@hawaii.edu) by

- Abstracts of 300 words (maximum) by 1 January 2024.

- After selection, final papers (10,000 words maximum, including endnotes and references) should be submitted by 15 May 2024.

CALL FOR PAPERS - INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR THE SEMIOTICS OF LAW - SPECIAL ISSUE - On Ricoeur: Justice, Hermeneutics, Responsibility, and Personal Identity

 CALL FOR PAPERS
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR THE SEMIOTICS OF LAW
SPECIAL ISSUE
On Ricoeur: Justice, Hermeneutics, Responsibility, and Personal Identity

Volume 38 (2025)

Guest Editors – Peter Langford & Rafe McGregor

(Edge Hill University)

The work of Paul Ricoeur is animated by an insistent philosophical engagement with the position and orientation of human existence. An integral aspect of Ricoeur’s philosophical engagement concerns the relationship between individual existence, as a question of personal identity, and co-existence, as a question of social life. This engagement is shaped by a reflexive interpretation – a hermeneutics – of these aspects of human existence in a manner that has been termed a ‘hermeneutics of the human condition’ (Domenico Jervolino, Paul Ricoeur, Une herméneutique de la condition humaine, 2002).

The presence of law within the framework of this reflexive interpretation arises through the question of justice, which situates law in relation to both personal identity and human co-existence. The passage from the individual to human co-existence becomes that of the interconnection between responsibility and justice. In this manner, law becomes a domain or region of reflection in and through its connection to morality, ethics, and politics. Law is a distinct, but neither self-contained nor self-sufficient, domain whose distinctiveness is to be considered through its interconnection with these other domains. The position accorded to law is thus the expression of a wider, reflexive reconfiguration of the interrelationship of all these domains.

The reconfiguration results from an overarching process of reflexive interpretation that involves the selection of, and interpretative orientation to, the texts which form the material or corpus for this overarching process. It is in this selection and interpretation that the distinctive character of Ricoeurian hermeneutics is elaborated, the question of justice raised, and the domain of law accorded its particular position. We invite proposals that explore one or more of these themes of this special issue on the work of Paul Ricoeur.

Submissions should be addressed to: Peter Langford (langforp@edgehill.ac.uk) and Rafe McGregor (mcgregor@edgehill.ac.uk).

- Abstracts of 300 words (maximum) by 1 January 2025.

- After selection, final papers (10,000 words maximum, including endnotes and references) should be submitted by 1 June 2025.

CALL FOR PAPERS - SPECIAL ISSUE - SPATIAL DYNAMICS AND CULTURAL CHANGES IN CONTEMPORARY LEGAL EXPERIENCE

CALL FOR PAPERS
SPECIAL ISSUE

SPATIAL DYNAMICS AND CULTURAL CHANGES 

IN CONTEMPORARY LEGAL EXPERIENCE

Vol. 38/1 (2025)

Guest Editors

Anne Wagner & José Manuel Aroso Linhares

Law involves spatial dynamics, and as such law is like an integrated circuit with two main lines of development, at times autonomous, at others conflicting with each other to reveal a new vision of reality. This integrated circuit thereby enables the Law to grow with the life surrounding it, while simultaneously reviving concepts sometimes far too deeply rooted in a predetermined time period. Yet the Law as a living organism has the ability to territorialize a concept, while also creating alternative trajectories or deterritorialization routes for more modern and contemporaneous visions. In this way, this two-stage integrated circuit may be a source of either promise or struggle in addressing and understanding new visions of the Law. Hence, we also need to speak about these lines of resistance - i.e., refusal/hindrances of evolution or adaptation, as well as about these lines of transformation - i.e., acceptance of an evolving world with new conceptions of the past living reality. All this without forgetting a meta-discursive plan or perspective, in which the different contemporary conceptions of law and legal discourse, while considering these lines of resistance and transformation, significantly overlap and conflict: the plurality of these conceptions is actually dynamized by two unmistakable irreducible poles, one of them giving law a purely instrumental identity (within the limits of a pragmatic functionalization), the other one reinventing the symbolic and practical-cultural possibilities of its discursive autonomy (as well as the inter-semiotic claim that this autonomy demands).

Contributions may address the spatial dynamics and cultural changes that could be read as a source of legal tension but also as a place of cultural (ex)changes in contemporary law and legal theory.

Submissions should be addressed to Anne Wagner (valwagnerfr@yahoo.com) and José Manuel Aroso Linhares (linhares@fd.uc.pt pt)

Abstracts of 300 words by 15 September 2023.

After selection, final papers (no more than 10,000 words) should be submitted by 15 February 2024.

24th International Roundtables for the Semiotics of Law – IRSL 2024 - Call for papers



 24th International Roundtables for the Semiotics of Law – IRSL 2024
16th-18th July, 2024 – Keele University UK
Organizer: Mark Featherstone
IRSL President: Anne Wagner


Call for Papers


Law in the Age of Permacrisis


International Journal for the Semiotics of Law
Annual Roundtable
16th-18th July, 2024
Call for Papers
Law in the Age of Permacrisis

In the mid-19th century Marx and Engels described capitalism’s ability to melt and liquify everything solid, thus demonstrating the intimate relationship between modern society and crisis. Later, in the mid-20th century, Schumpeter further addressed the power of economy to ruin all social values, political orthodoxies, cultural traditions, and established legal norms by regarding them as barriers to progress, innovation, and profitability. Hence, crisis becomes about the passage to change despite the protests of those who feel betrayed or left behind by innovation. In this context the tendency towards transformation is inexorable as well as central to the progress of a hyper-active economic system where the key message is ’change or die’. However, it is now becoming apparent that we are moving beyond this idea towards a different situation marked by whole-system crisis, captured by the idea of poly-crisis or perma-crisis, where revolutionary change is no longer simply a sign of economic progress.

We might say that the age of perma-, poly-, perpetual, or endless crisis has been coming for some time in the form of several inter-related crises. Consider recent history: 9 / 11, the war on terror, and the demonstration of the impotence of American power; the 2008 global financial crisis, the consequent period of austerity, and the later cost of living crisis, all contributing to the deepening of social inequalities; Covid-19 and the idea that globalisation is as much about dangerous contagion as free communication; the increasing concern with cyberspace as an environment of uncontrolled algorithmic power, corporate interest, hate speech and social division; the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the return of cold war memories along with the Chinese challenge to American power; and, finally, hovering over everything, perhaps the point of crisis par excellence for the late capitalist system, the seeming inevitability of radical climate change. Recalling Derrida recalling Shakespeare, our world seems truly ‘out of joint’.

In this age of disjointedness and disruption we must ask questions about the dominance of the value systems informing law and policy. In the wake of the early-1990s collapse of the communist states, Fukuyama’s idea of the ‘end of history’ claimed the finality of western democracy and free-market capitalism as the established order immune to the revolutionary effects of crises. But it appears that this is now over. We are living through the end of the end of history. Far from declaring the ‘end of the history’, in the context of the perpetual, endless crisis, alternative value systems antagonistic to this established order are everywhere. Thus, we witness the emergence of political parties and leaders resembling Putin’s authoritarian master who completely reject the American vision of democracy and freedom and tell people that they will solve the problems of the world through the exercise of their own personal power, charisma, and authority. But there is no consensus in this model and conflict becomes normal. Indeed, this war over visions of the future seems to reflect a deep sense of political uncertainty and unease in the contemporary climate of endless crisis and deepening socio-economic inequalities.

This context sets an enormous challenge to the social and moral legitimacy of the legal order by pulling legal norms into the state of endless crisis. Indeed, the intense demand for ‘honesty’ in public life against the double standards in the application of law seems to embody a social reaction characterised by the questioning of the legitimacy of politico-economic elites in a context of fragmented value systems around social, political, and economic governance. Overall, the critical question is whether there is a danger that the endless crisis will engulf the law creating a generalised state of anomie or lawlessness. But then, one might argue, the answer lies in the law. After all, law remains essential, simply because it both reflects and supports the existence of a workable social contract capable of shaping the future. The very legitimacy of law remains essential to avoiding the nightmare scenario where individual freedoms are sacrificed to some conception of public good that appears necessary in a context marked by a sense of emergency. This is, of course, precisely what was set out by Carl Schmitt through his concept of the sovereign exception, which became a defence for Nazi dictatorship, and the situation the Italian writer Giorgio Agamben has warned about in various works. In this regard, understanding the relationship between crisis and law is deeply important for thinking about a future free of authoritarian domination.

Given this situation, we invite contributions of panels and papers concerned with the relationship between law and crisis and ways in which this is impacted by and impacts upon society, politics, economy, and culture.

Contributions may address, for example:

• The history of the connection between law and crisis, where law is understood in its broadest sense.

• The ways in which this interaction expresses itself in diverse forms in the present.

• What the future of law might look like in a time of endless crisis.

• The relationship between law and power in the age of permacrisis.

• The social impacts of changing conceptions of norms and values in a period marked by radical, unpredictable change.

• The various theoretical models drawn from Law, Politics, Sociology, and Psychoanalysis that we might think about in order to understand our critical moment.

• The changing nature of the relationship between law, transgression, and criminality in a time characterised by permanent crisis.

• The possibility that crisis is now a new normal and how this might impact upon understandings of the law.

• The future of the law in a time of anomie or lawlessness.

To this end, we invite submission of abstracts of up to 250 words for stand-alone papers. Those wishing to submit proposals for panels should submit a short overview of the theme of the proposed panel and abstracts for the three or four papers making up the panel.

Submission of Abstracts

Abstracts should be submitted to the Keele University conference organising committee led by Professor Mark Featherstone at IJSLRoundtable2024@Keele.ac.uk for consideration for inclusion in the conference programme.

Selected papers will be invited for publication in a Special issue of the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law (Springer) and/or for inclusion in an edited volume of the Law Book Series (Law and Visual Jurisprudence - Springer).

The deadline for submission of abstracts and panel proposals is 26th January, 2024. Participants will be informed of decisions related to submission by 23rd February, 2024.

Early Bird tickets for the conference, please see link below: https://estore.keele.ac.uk/conferences-and-events/faculty-of-humanities-and-social-science/school-of-law/law-in-an-age-of-permacrisis-24th-international-roundtable-for-the-semiotics-of-law

CALL FOR PAPER - SPECIAL ISSUE - SEMIOTIC ASSEMBLAGE, TRANSLANGUAGING AND TRANSLATING LAWS OF THE MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICAN REGION

 CALL FOR PAPER
SPECIAL ISSUE
SEMIOTIC ASSEMBLAGE, TRANSLANGUAGING AND TRANSLATING LAWS OF THE MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICAN REGION

Vol.38/7 (2025)

Guest Editors – Rafat Y. Alwazna, Zoe Hurley & Tariq Elyas

The Middle East and North African region (MENA) is an interesting area where several laws ranging from sacred laws to secular laws are applied to different institutions in the area. 

The conceptual incongruency and terminological asymmetry between such laws within and outside the MENA region make the process of legal translation an arduous and formidable task that needs to be performed by professional and expert legal translators who possess the relevant knowledge, competence and skill. Failure in conveying the legal meaning of any legal term may affect the practical application of the target legal text, thus impacting the entire legal effect of the law in question. 

Concurrently, semiotic assemblages are forged by a range of sociocultural trajectories, varying semiotic resources, historical and contemporary objects and interpretations of the linguistic landscape. The broad range of semiotic resources available includes images, sounds, clothing, movements, food, buildings, traffic systems, computer systems, artificial intelligence as well as people who are immersed and absorbed in spaces defined by hybrid legal frameworks.

To explore the eclecticism, dilemmas and interpretative challenges of MENA’s semiotic legal assemblages, we thus require an expanded version of language which attends not only to the borders between languages, but also to the borders between semiotic modes. Linguistic landscape research has therefore shifted its understanding of language from a focus on linguistic signs in the public domain to include greater contextual (ethnographic) and historical understandings of texts in the landscape – who put them there, how they are interpreted, and what role they play in relation to space, race, ethnicity, gender, class, migration, mobility and law. To develop greater comprehensibility of MENA’s legal context and avoid any misinterpretation of the source legal text, if originally written in a foreign language, scholars and students of law and legal translation need to consider the practice of linguistic translanguaging in interpreting and explaining the source legal text, including diverse semiotic assemblages of different terms, concepts and imaginaries for the purpose of achieving acceptable legal communication.

Contributions may address the rendition of any law applied to the MENA region into a different law and vice versa, the concept of translanguaging in legal translation pedagogy/training and semiotic assemblages specific to the everyday practices, interpretations and challenges of the MENA region’s legal systems.

Submissions should be addressed to Rafat Y. Alwazna (alwazna@gmail.com), Zoe Hurley (Zoe.Hurley@zu.ac.ae) and Tariq Elyas (telyas@kau.edu.sa)

- Abstracts of 300 words by 15 April 2024.

- After selection, final papers (no more than 10,000 words) should be submitted by 15 August 2024.

18 October 2023

Loyola University New Orleans hires a civil law professor

Loyola University New Orleans College of Law - 

Professor/

Associate Professor/

Assistant Professor

 Loyola University New Orleans College of Law is now accepting applications for one or more tenure-track or tenured positions to begin August 1, 2024. Currently, Loyola’s curricular needs include civil/comparative law, international law, torts, business law, environmental law, and health law courses. We especially welcome applications from candidates who will add to the diversity of our educational community and who have demonstrated expertise in working with a diverse student body. If you are interested in applying, please submit your curriculum vitae, cover letter, and a statement about how you can promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. All ranks will be considered. 


Questions may be directed to law.hiring@loyno.edu, and application materials must be submitted through the following webpage:


https://www.governmentjobs.com/careers/loyno/jobs/4003800/tenure-track-tenure-law-faculty

 

About the College of Law

The College of Law is located in one of the most culturally diverse cities in the United States, with unique cuisine, museums, historical sites, and a flourishing arts and music community.  New Orleans is the seat of the United States Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, United States District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana, Louisiana Supreme Court, Louisiana Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal, as well as other lower courts.  The College of Law has a student population of approximately 500 students, over forty faculty members, active clinics that have spearheaded numerous social justice reform efforts, and summer programs in Europe and Central America.  Its location in Louisiana, one of the world’s best known “mixed jurisdictions,” provides unique opportunities for comparative and international law scholarship.

Loyola University is an educational institution dedicated to fostering intellectual achievement, personal development, and social responsibility, and it is committed to the human dignity and worth of every person.  Loyola University strongly encourages applications from individuals who will bring diversity to the community.


12 October 2023

The Grand Strategy of Comparative Law Themes, Methods, Developments

 

Edited by Luca Siliquini-Cinelli, Davide Gianti, Mauro Balestrieri

This book features original essays by leading academics and emerging researchers written in honour of a legal comparatist who, over the course of four decades, has played a major role in comparative law’s development: Pier Giuseppe Monateri.

Rather than being just a celebrative work without analytical appeal, this book makes a significant contribution to the comparative legal literature by exploring key comparative law themes and recent developments in the field. Reflecting Monateri’s vast expertise, innovative thinking, and truly global network, the volume is divided it into five thematic areas of both scholarly and practical significance: Comparative Law and Its Methods; Comparative Private Law; Law and Literature; The Politics and Ontology of Law; Comparative Law & Economics. Discussing novel case-studies as well as exploring Monateri’s importance to the comparative enterprise through various trajectories of inquiry – for example, normative, doctrinal, empirical, critical – this book takes a fundamental and much-needed step towards the establishment of comparative law as a fully-fledged academic discipline and professional practice.

Addressing the current status and future direction of comparative law, this book will appeal to legal comparativists, as well as students and scholars with broader interests in the nature of legal cultures.


  • Available for pre-order on March 12, 2024. Item will ship after April 2, 2024


05 October 2023

Personal Genome Medicine: The Legal and Regulatory Transformation of US Medicine






 

Personal Genome Medicine: The Legal and Regulatory Transformation of US Medicine

Michael J. Malinowski


Drawing from the history of U.S. medicine, Professor Malinowski applies law, policy, public and private sector practices, and governing norms to analyze the commercialization of personal genome sequencing and testing sectors, as well as to assess their impact on the future of U.S. medicine.

“In the roughly 30 years that I have been researching and writing about these important topics, I have witnessed an explosion in the use of these emerging technologies far beyond anything I could have imagined when I began my career,” said Professor Malinowski, a Yale Law School alumnus who has been an LSU Law faculty member since 2002. “In 2017, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved direct-to-consumer genetic health risk testing that does not meet evidentiary science clinical standards—with medical professional involvement wholly optional—it was a jolting deviation from the U.S. legacy of protecting and promoting the evidentiary-science base of medicine. ‘Personal Genome Medicine’ represents the culmination of my scholarship on this issue to date, and my hope is that it will elevate and advance the conversation in a meaningful way.”

CELH Seminars

CELH 2023 Annual Lecture: Professor Rebecca Probert

Tuesday, 21 November 2023 - 5.15pm

HONG KONG BETWEEN “ONE COUNTRY” AND “TWO SYSTEMS”: ESSAYS FROM THE YEAR THAT TRANSFORMED THE HONG KONG SPECIAL ADMINISTRATIVE REGION (2019 – 2020)

 


HONG KONG BETWEEN “ONE COUNTRY” AND “TWO SYSTEMS”: ESSAYS FROM THE YEAR THAT TRANSFORMED THE HONG KONG SPECIAL ADMINISTRATIVE REGION (2019 – 2020)

Larry Cata Baker


Hong Kong Between “One Country” and “Two Systems” critically explores the battle of ideas that started with the June 2019 anti-extradition law protests and ended with the enactment of the National Security and National Anthem Laws a year later. At the center of these battles was the “One Country, Two Systems” principle. By June 2020, the meaning of that principle  was highly contested, with Chinese authorities taking decisive steps to implement their own understanding of the principle and its normative foundations, and the international community taking countermeasures. All of this occurred well before the 2047 end of the 1985 Sino-British Joint Declaration (中英联合声明) that had been the blueprint for the return of Hong Kong to China. Between these events, global actors battled for control of the narrative and of the meaning of the governing principles that were meant to frame the scope and character of Hong Kong’s autonomy within China.  The book critically examines  the conflict of words between Hong Kong protesters, the Chinese central and local authorities, and important elements of the international community. This decisive discursive contest paralleled the fighting for control of the streets and that pitted protesters and the international community that supported them against the central authorities of China and Hong Kong local authorities.  In the end the Chinese central authorities largely prevailed in the discursive realm as well as on the streets. Their victory was aided, in part by the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020.  But their triumph also produced the seeds of a new and potentially stronger international constitutional discourse that may reduce the magnitude and scope of that success. These essays were written as the events unfolded. Together the essays analytically chronicle the discursive battles that were fought, won and lost, between June 2019 and June 2020. Without an underlying political or polemical agenda, the essays retain the freshness of the moment, reflecting the uncertainties of the time as events unfolded. What  was won on the streets of Hong Kong from June to December 2019, the public and physical manifestation of a principled internationalist and liberal democratic narrative of self-determination, and of civil and political rights, was lost by June 2020  within a cage of authoritative legality legitimated through the resurgence of the normative authority of the state and the application of a  strong and coherent expression of the principled narrative of its Marxist-Leninist constitutional order. Ironically enough, both political ideologies emerged stronger and more coherent from the conflict, each now better prepared for the next.