Workshop: Macao at the Crossroads of Different Legal Systems

Workshop: Macao at the Crossroads of Different Legal Systems

Objective: Macao is a civil law based legal system that is different from other jurisdictions, namely China and Hong Kong, but due to its geographic proximity to Hong Kong, for instance, there is an intercorrelation with the common law system. As such, it is a good case in point of how such legal systems can co-exist and learn from each other and provide a good opportunity to discuss if the differences between these legal systems remain relevant in an increasingly integrated world of “different” legal systems. An analysis of this framework is a very useful means to enrich and update our knowledge about the relations between different legal systems. Under this new context, this workshop aims at providing a platform that brings together different leading comparative law scholars, experts and legal professionals from the region to share their professional legal knowledge on this important contemporary legal theme.

One session will be dedicated to the issue of legal hybridity.

For more information and the program visit: http://www.ieem.org.mo/

NOTICE: Halpin on 'Conceptual Collisions'

Andrew Halpin has reviewed two important recents works on jurisprudence and non-state law. The review, entitled 'Conceptual Collisions', is currently available on SSRN:

 

This review essay considers two recent attempts to produce a concept of transnational, or loosely speaking, global law, in Keith Culver and Michael Giudice, Legality’s Borders: An Essay in General Jurisprudence, and Detlef von Daniels, The Concept of Law from a Transnational Perspective. Both works seek to expand upon Hart’s approach to finding a concept of purely municipal law, and both also differ from legal pluralism. Their argument with legal pluralism is not with the identification of a plurality of legal phenomena, but with a diversity of concepts of law in the theory covering those phenomena. The subject matter of the essay naturally provides a setting to reflect more widely on the use of concepts in theory formation, on the relationship between theoretical-conceptual understanding and empirical data, on the isolation of subjects through discrete concepts, and on the relationship between global and municipal legal phenomena. A further theme encountered is the nature of engagement with academic traditions, which is key to the link developed by von Daniels between Habermas and Hart. The ways in which each of the two projects are undertaken through processes of subtracting from Hart, discovering more in Hart, and adding to Hart, are examined in detail. The suggestions of joining or linkage between different types of legal systems (or orders, or regimes) is treated as having a particular significance in the respective attempts of the authors to demarcate a grouping of distinctively legal phenomena, as opposed to other social or moral phenomena. However, questions concerning the role state law occupies in the web of interconnections between different forms of legality, and whether greater harmony or more intense contestation might occur across those forms, remain to be answered. As does the puzzle which both projects accuse Tamanaha’s legal pluralism of failing to deal with: how a broad collection of diverse phenomena can possess analytical or explanatory bite. In conclusion, the essay considers the development of theory as depending not simply on the elucidation of concepts but also on the rejection of concepts that collide with empirical data; and suggests that a singular concept of law may have to be abandoned by a mature theory of law.

 

Note: Hat Tip to Larry Solum's very fine Legal Theory Blog.

NOTICE: Van Erp on the WSMJJ Congress and on 'Teaching Law in Europe'

Sjef van Erp has given his (continental) take on the recent Congress of the World Society of Mixed Jurisdiciton Jurists on the Maastricht European Private Law Blog. You might have a look.

Sjef also cites, quite appropriately, his own 'Teaching Law in Europe: From an Intra-Systemic, Via a Trans-Systemic to a Supra-Systemic Approach'.

NOTICE: New Issue of Jurisprudence: An International Journal of Legal and Political Thought

The newest volume of Jurisprudence: An International Journal of Legal and Political Thought is out and includes, in addition to numerous book reviews, the following:

Articles

Raymond Plant - The Jurisprudence Annual Lecture 2010: Freedom, Coercion, Necessary Goods and the Rule of Law

Katrin Flikschuh - On the Cogency of Human Rights

Eoin Daly - Non-Domination as a Primary Good: Re-Thinking the Frontiers of the ‘Political’ in Rawls’s Political Liberalism

Hans Lindahl - Boundaries and the Concept of Legal Order

Discussion: A Symposium on the Nature of Legal and Political Authority

Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco - Accountability or Preemption
Stephen Darwall - Authority, Accountability, and Preemption
Andrei Marmor - The Dilemma of Authority
Daniel Star and Candice Delmas - Three Conceptions of Practical Authority
Andrea C Westlund - Autonomy, Authority, and Answerability

NOTICE: Law and the Postcolonial

Glass House Books - Routledge Law has announced a new series on Law and the Postcolonial: Ethics, Politics, & Economy. The series is edited by Prof Denise Ferreira da Silva (Queen Mary University of London), Dr Mark A. Harris (La Trobe University), and Dr Brenna Bhandar (University of Kent):

Law and the Postcolonial: Ethics, Politics, & Economy seeks to expand the critical scope of racial, postcolonial, and global theory and analysis, focusing on how the global juridico‐economic apparatus has been, and continues to be, shaped by the Colonial and the Racial structurings of power. It includes works that seek to move beyond the previous privileging of culture in considerations of racial and postcolonial subjectivity to offer a more comprehensive engagement with the legal, economic and moral issues of the global present.

The following categories of works have been identified which would fit with the aims and objectives of the series:

1. Architectures, Apparatuses, and Procedures: with a focus on the legal‐economic institutions, frameworks, agreements, and processes, including multilateral agreements, the state, international financial institutions, International NGOs, etc.
2. Dispossession, Displacement and Obliteration: with a focus on the various strategies of appropriation of land and resources, exploitation of labour, processes that create forced and voluntary displacement of populations, or threaten or cause the eradication of local population
3. Occupation, Intervention, and Detention: with a focus on policing strategies and the related moral statements that sustain them, including humanitarian interventions, military occupations, the criminalization and detention of migrant works; the criminalization of economically dispossessed urban populations and racial and ethnic collectives
4. Grammars, Discourses, and Practices: with the focus on structures and mechanism of symbolic representation, and related moral (including religious), and legal frameworks, such as the Human Rights framework, with particular attention to how they enable the articulation of political subjects

This interdisciplinary series welcomes exclusively theoretical essays that engage with the conceptual and analytical questions detailed above and discussions of how particular conceptual approaches can illuminate existing processes and help in the study of the global landscape. In addition monographs and edited volumes, using qualitative and quantitative methods with a strong theoretical grounding, which deal with these questions and processes are also welcomed.

To discuss or propose an idea for a book, please contact the series editors at d.ferreiradasilva@qmul.ac.uk, B.Bhandar@kent.ac.uk, or Mark.Harris@latrobe.edu.au.

Guidelines for preparing a book proposal can be found at: www.routledge.com/info/authors.

NOTICE: JURIS DIVERSITAS Membership

Juris Diversitas has opened up to general membership and invites interested individuals to apply.

Juris Diversitas is an international, interdisciplinary community for the study of legal and normative mixtures and movements. Originally comparatists, we've opened up a conversation with anthropologists, geographers, historians, philosophers, and sociologists, both within the law and beyond.

Membership fees have been waived for 2011. In addition to being able to vote in elections, membership benefits will include a discount or exemption on conference fees. Individuals interested in becoming members should contact visit the Juris Diversitas blog for 'Membership Information'. All applications are evaluated by the Executive Committee.