REGISTRATION: Irish Society of Comparative Law Conference

Registration for the fifth annual Irish Society of Comparative Law (ISCL) Conference is now open here.

The School of Law at NUI Galway, Ireland will host the conference on 24-25 May 2013.

For additional information, contact Charles O’Mahony (charles.omahony@nuigalway.ie).

CONFERENCE: Crime, Media and Popular Culture

5th Annual International Crime, Media and Popular Culture Studies Conference: A Cross Disciplinary Exploration
23rd to 25th September 2013
Terre Haute, Indiana, United States of America

We invite those who are engaged in research, teaching and practices associated with the relationship between crime, deviance, social justice, and/or policy and law and that of media and popular culture. Each presentation must have a media or popular culture component. We accept both qualitative and quantitative research from all disciplines. In addition to the traditional panel presentation this conference also provides nine featured speaker sessions and entertainment each night of the conference. Each year we have presenters from 10 to 15 countries from a wide variety of backgrounds.

Abstracts and registration payments are due by May 6, 2013.

Enquiries: cmpc@indstate.edu
Web address: http://www.indstate.edu/ccj/popcultureconference/

CONFERENCE: Borders, Walls and Security

Borders, Walls and Security

International conference organized by the Raoul Dandurand Chair at the University of Quebec at Montreal in association with the Association for Borderlands Studies
University of Quebec at Montreal, Quebec, Canada October 17th and 18th, 2013
Fields: Political Science, Geography, Anthropology, Sociology, Law, Economics, Design, Biology, Art, Environmental studies, Feminist Studies.
Grad Students are welcome to submit a proposal.

In the post-9/11 world, fences and towers reinforce and enclose national territories, while security discourses link terrorism with immigration, and immigration with illegality, criminal violence and radical Islam. The European Union (EU) claims to tear down walls, while building external walls ever higher. At the same time, the US considers how best to deploy towers and walls along its border zones while implementing an integrated border management regime. This development is not limited to these two world regions, however. Elsewhere in the global world walls dissecting borderlands are becoming higher. In Asia, India is finishing up its fence around Bangladesh. On all four continents, changes in border policy go along with a heightened discourse on internal control and a shift from borderlines to an ubiquity of control. Such walls are ‘walling in’ as well as ‘walling out’. By this we mean that the traditional geopolitics of bordering are supplemented, rather than fully replaced, by a national biopolitics, involving new definitions of who belongs and who does not belong, who is potentially represented as a threat and a risk internally, and who should be removed from the body of the state.
 
The experience of migrations, asylum-seekers, targeted ethnicities, and non-citizen residents has also been profoundly touched by securitization assessments rooted in geopolitics emanating from assessments of conditions outside of the state. Law-enforcement agencies at national and even international level, problematize ethnicity and identity in context of terrorism and criminality, or associated geopolitical orientations based upon nationalist and ethnicity. Systems and facilities for monitoring and gathering data on migrants and asylum seekers, are a product of the opportunity offered by border control, and are now an important component of a counter-terrorist agenda. They too, demand walls in which to embed their technologies.
 
Participants are encouraged to critically examine the role of wall in security discourses, particularly with respect to immigration and citizenship, and to consider some of the following questions:
 

POSITIONS: The Competition of Normativities

2 Full-time PhD Positions on the Competition of Normativities

Perelman Centre for Legal Philosophy

Brussels, Belgium

The Interdisciplinary Seminar for Legal Studies of the Université Saint-Louis - Brussels; The Perelman Centre for Legal Philosophy at the Université Libre de Bruxelles; The Department of Moral and Political Philosophy at the Université de Liège are calling for applications for:

Two full-time PhD positions (+/- 1700€ net/month) to join a research project on the competition of normativities. The appointed persons are due to start on September 15th 2013 for a 2-year period, renewable once.

Research Project

The research project is funded by the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (F.R.S.-FNRS, FRFC project). The objective is to explore how “new normativities” replace, compete with or complement classical legal instruments. ISO standards, international accounting standards, managerial standards in the domain of justice, indicators, rankings, ratings and other European technical standards appear to constitute a new mode of regulation characteristic of “societies of control”, which differs from the legal and political model of sovereignty. The project aims to laid down a theoretical and critical model of standardization that would account, on the one hand, for the consistency and the articulation of these normative devices and, on the other hand, for their interactions with legal rules. The project relies on a theoretical framework of legal philosophy and legal theory with a strong focus on practice. It will also draw on insights from other disciplines - in particular sociology and economics.

BOOK: The Use of Foreign Precedents by Constitutional Judges

The Use of Foreign Precedents by Constitutional Judges
Edited by Tania Groppi and Marie-Claire Ponthoreau

In 2007 the International Association of Constitutional Law established an Interest Group on 'The Use of Foreign Precedents by Constitutional Judges' to conduct a survey of the use of foreign precedents by Supreme and Constitutional Courts in deciding constitutional cases. Its purpose was to determine - through empirical analysis employing both quantitative and qualitative indicators - the extent to which foreign case law is cited. The survey aimed to test the reliability of studies describing and reporting instances of transjudicial communication between Courts. The research also provides useful insights into the extent to which a progressive constitutional convergence may be taking place between common law and civil law traditions. The present work includes studies by scholars from African, American, Asian, European, Latin American and Oceania countries, representing jurisdictions belonging to both common law and civil law traditions, and countries employing both centralised and decentralised systems of judicial review. The results, published here for the first time, give us the best evidence yet of the existence and limits of a transnational constitutional communication between courts.

Tania Groppi is Professor of Public Law at the University of Siena.

Marie-Claire Ponthoreau is Professor of Constitutional Law and Comparative Law  at the University of Bordeaux.

Please click here for more details about the Hart Studies in Comparative Public Law Series

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