UPDATE: Commission on Legal Pluralism Congress (Cape Town, 8-10 September 2011)

Note that the deadline for submitting paper proposals to the next biennial congress of the Commission on Legal Pluralism (Cape Town, 8-10 September 2011) has been extended to 1 April 2011.

See www.commission-on-legal-pluralism.com/ for themes and proposed panels:

Please be aware that the overview of panels is work in progress, and new panels will be added shortly.

Interested presenters can either indicate only the theme they wish to present their paper in, or the theme PLUS a specific panel.

Proposals for papers (including an abstract of 100-250 words) are to be sent to www.pluralismconference2011.co.za and j.ubink@law.leidenuniv.nl before April 1, 2011.

Proposals for inclusion in a specific panel are also to be sent to the organiser of that panel.

CALL FOR PAPERS: American Anthropology Association Panel (16-20 November 2011)

The 110th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropology Association will be held in Montreal from 16-20 November. Its theme is ‘Traces, tidemarks and legacies’. The following call for a panel for the Meeting may be of interest:

Tracing Migration: Border-Crossings and the Legacies of Mobility

This panel embraces the 2011 AAA Meeting theme of Traces, Tidemarks, and Legacies by asking how migratory movements can create, sustain, and reformulate relationships across geographic, political, and cultural boundaries. We often think of immigration as a unidirectional movement from "homelands" to "hostlands," and we often study the ways in which immigrants must balance their "old" cultural practices while establishing communities in "new" places. This panel seeks to upend neat distinctions between homelands and hostlands, instead asking how population mobility creates and sustains complex engagements between places of origin and destinations, leaving cultural, linguistic, political, and economic traces that are multidirectional.

Migratory patterns often reflect and reconfigure historical engagements between places, reflecting events and processes like colonialism, war, and occupation. In other cases, migrations themselves establish legacies of second and third generations of migrants who trace the footsteps of previous immigrants from one place to another. Moreover, established routes of migration that cross prominent geopolitical borders, such as the U.S.-Mexico border, or the Mediterranean Sea, also reflect and create longstanding communication and mutual effects that cross borders and regions.

This panel seeks to bring together geographically diverse papers that explore the panel's theme through ethnographically grounded studies on topics including but not limited to:

Ø Migrations that, although moving in one direction, reflect long histories of entanglement between regions (e.g. postcolonial migrations from North Africa to Europe)

Ø Migrations that, through transborder movement, create and change ties between different places (e.g. seasonal labor migrations,)

Ø Migrations that involve the crossing of many different kinds of borders: national, social, ethnic, linguistic, which, accordingly, leave many different types of traces on the socio-cultural and geographic landscapes traversed.

Ø Return migration (what happens when emigrants return home, either permanently, seasonally, for ritual celebrations, or even for short, annual visits as "tourists?" How does this kind of movement reflect ambiguities between conceptions of homelands and hostlands?)

If you are interested in contributing a paper, please send an abstract of 250-300 words, your name, contact information, institutional affiliation and a very short author bio to Mikaela Rogozen-Soltar (mikaela.rogozen-soltar@yale.edu) and Elizabeth Falconi (elifalco@umich.edu) by MARCH 21st.

NOTICE: Garcia on Hybrid legal forms among the Tzeltal of Mexico

The following has appeared on SSRN:

JOSE RUBÉN ORANTES GARCÍA, 'Hybrid Legal Forms Among the Tzeltal of Tenejapa, Chiapas, Mexico (Formas Jurídicas Híbridas Entre los Tseltales de Tenejapa, Chiapas, México: Reconfiguración Legal a Partir de Los Usos y Costumbres y eEl Derecho Positivo Mexicano)'



The abstract reads:

This paper analyzes the legal forms in the southeastern Indian state of Chiapas, Mexico, with particular reference to the Court of Indigenous Peace and Reconciliation (YFCI) of a Tzeltal town and its relationship to other legal levels since the early nineties. On this basis, the paper describes the analogy between YFCI hybrid legal levels and the towns in the municipality of Tenejapa. This will allow to study the separation (and the relationship) of these areas to settle community and intra-community crimes set in a legal logic that makes them less likely to decide on conflicts that can be resolved, as it is subordinated to the reproductive needs of the national legal system.

NOTICE: Italian Association of Comparative Law Conference (Venice, 9-11 June 2011)

The Italian Association of Comparative Law Conference will be held in Venice from 9-11 June 2011.

Note especially, the following session on 'legal pluralism and legal hybridity':

PRESIEDE: Salvo Andò

INTERVENTI DI:

• Marco Dani, 'Social Conflicts, Integration and the Nature of European Legal Pluralism'
• Andrea Pin, 'La gestione del pluralismo religioso in alcuni paesi europei: l’evoluzione dei modelli nazionali e il ruolo della comparazione'
• Vernon Palmer, 'Empire as Engine of the Mixed Legal Systems'
• Cristina Gazzetta, 'Il concetto di sovranità, tra unità e multiculturalità'
• Koen Lemmens, 'Comparative Law in Support of Legal Diversity? Some Lessons from the ECtHR’s Case-Law'
• Katalin Kelemen and Balázs Fakete, 'The classification of Eastern European legal systems: new approaches to the understanding of former Socialist legal systems'

Note also Ignazio Castellucci, 'The governance role of law in the socialist market economy: the case of insurance law'

For additional information, see the Comparative Law Blog or the Italian Association of Comparative Law Blog.

NOTICE: Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (McGill University Faculty of Law Quebec Research Centre of Private and Comparative Law)

The Quebec Research Centre of Private and Comparative Law (QRCPCL) intends to appoint a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with effect from August 2011. The position is funded by a Research Team Support Grant from the Fonds québécois de recherche sur la société et la culture (Quebec Fund for Research on Culture and Society). The team is led by Professor Lionel Smith, director of the QRCPCL, and composed of colleagues from McGill’s Faculty of Law and beyond. The position is for one year, with the possibility of renewal for a second year.

ABOUT THE QUEBEC RESEARCH CENTRE OF PRIVATE AND COMPARATIVE LAW

Based at McGill University in Montreal (Quebec, Canada) the QRCPCL is the only research centre in Canada devoted to research in fundamental private law. Quebec’s private law is civilian, but it evolves in a North American environment that is otherwise largely grounded in the common law. Quebec’s private law therefore provides a living model for the fruitful coexistence of two legal traditions, in which the ongoing interaction of the common law and the civil law is combined with the interaction of French and English in Quebec’s bilingual civil law.

The research agenda to which the position relates revolves around three axes:

1) McGill’s transsystemic approach to legal education, and its impact on our understanding of law;
2) the interactions between intellectual property law and private law, in Canada and beyond; and
3) trusts in Quebec civil law, and in civilian and mixed legal systems generally.

QUALIFICATIONS:

The applicant must hold a doctoral degree in law at the time of the appointment. The ideal candidate will have a solid track record of research in private and comparative law, and will propose an interesting research project that interacts with the goals of the QRCPCL and the research agenda mentioned above.

The successful candidate will pursue his or her own research project on a topic relating to one of the QRCPCL’s axes of research. He or she will also assist in the activities of the QRCPCL, principally through involvement in the organization of a conference on transsystemic and comparative legal thought, to be held in the second quarter of 2012. He or she may also be invited to speak at the conference, and to take a role in the editing of a volume of papers presented at or arising from the conference.

APPLICATION PROCEDURE:

The review of applications will begin on 31 March 2011 and continue until the position is filled. The preferred starting date is August 2011. The position will pay C$40,000, and an office and computer will be provided. Applications are to be submitted electronically to crdpcq.law@mcgill.ca. Applicants should submit a covering letter, a curriculum vitae, a research proposal (maximum four pages), a transcript of postgraduate studies, and one or more writing samples (from peer-reviewed publications if possible). Applicants should also name three referees, who may subsequently be invited by the QRCPCL to send letters of reference.

For additional information, see www.mcgill.ca/crdpcq/employment/fellowship/

NOTICE: Colonies and Post-colonies of law (Princeton, 18 March 2011)

A one-day conference on ‘Colonies and Postcolonies of law’ will be held at Princeton University on 18 March 2011.

Presenters include:

• Patrick Peel, The American Justice of the Peace, Legal Populism and Social Intermediation: 1645 to 1860

• Paul Swanepoel, Judicial Choice during the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya, 1952-1960
• Anna Leah Fidelis T. Castañeda, Civilizing the Filipino Public: Colonialism and the American Constitutional Tradition in the Philippine Islands, 1900-1935

• Joseph Younger, “Monstrous and Illegal Proceedings:” Law, Violence and the Local Politics of Cross-Border Property in Alegrete, Brazil (1852-1864)
• Catherine Evans, One flew east, one flew west: Medical jurisprudence and British readings of the Indian criminal mind, 1850-1900
• Poornima Padipati, Time Zones: Anthropology, Tribes and Contractual Space in Colonial India
• Julia Stephens, Defining a Lex Loci for British India: Sovereignty, Evangelicalism, and the Origins of Personal Law
• Nada Moumtaz, What of the “interest of the waqf?” French mandate legislation and articulations of the Lebanese public good
• Sarah Ghabrial, Le ‘Fiqh francisé’?: Law reform and the Modern Muslim Family in Algeria, 1890-1918
• Omar Cheta, What Did Commerce Mean in Late Ottoman Egypt?
• Doreen Lustig, Abolition of Slavery in the League of Nations: The Case of Firestone in Liberia
• Michael Fakhri, The 1937 International Sugar Agreement: Neo-Colonial Cuba And Economic Aspects Of the League Of Nations

The conference’s plenary speech will be by Lauren Benton on ‘Justice by Despots: Patterns of Imperial Legal Politics’

The conference has been organized by Nurfadzilah Yahaya (nyahaya@princeton.edu) and Rohit De (rohitde@princeton.edu). Questions should be addressed to coloniesoflaw@gmail.com.