ARTICLE: Legal Transplant of Undue Influence:

Mindy Chen-Wishart's "Legal Transplant of Undue Influence: Lost in Translation or a Working Misunderstanding?" has appeared on SSRN:


Is legal transplant possible? The stark bipolarity of a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer attracted by such a question is much less interesting and revealing than the question: what shapes the life of legal transplants? The answer to the latter question is contingent on a wide range of variables triggered by the particular transplant; the result can occupy any point along the spectrum from faithful replication to outright rejection. This case study of the transplant of the English doctrine of undue influence into Singaporean law asks why the Singaporean courts have applied the doctrine in family guarantee cases to such divergent effect, when they profess to apply the same law. The answer owes less to grand theories than to a careful examination of the nature of the transplanted law and the relationship between the formal and informal legal orders of the originating and the recipient society raised by the particular transplant. 

JOURNAL: European Property Law Journal

The following post appeared on the Maastricht European Private Law Blog yesterday:

Special Issue of the European Property Law Journal on M-EPLI’s round table on the functional method in property law

On Friday 17 June 2011, M-EPLI hosted its first Round Table Conference on the Use of the Functional Method in Comparative and European Property Law. The contributions to this Round Table Conference are now published in a special issue of the European Property Law Journal.

CALL FOR PAPERS: The Journal of Comparative Law in Africa

The Centre for Comparative Law in Africa, headed by our own Salvatore Mancuso, has announced both their latest newsletter and a new journal:

 
The Journal of Comparative Law in Africa is a peer-reviewed annual academic legal journal founded in 2013 and published by the Centre for Comparative Law in Africa, at the University of Cape Town (South Africa).

We invite scholars and jurists to submit manuscripts of original articles for possible publication in any then-current issue of the Journal by 31 July for the November issue.

For further details go to Call for papers on the link below
http://www.comparativelaw.uct.ac.za/
 

ARTICLE: Parolin on the (Re)Arrangement of State/Islam Relations in Egypt's Constitutional Transition

Our Gianluca Parolin has posted his

(Re)Arrangement of State/Islam Relations in Egypt’s Constitutional Transition on SSRN:

After briefly framing state/shari‘ah relations in pre-2011 Egypt, the paper (1) describes the negotiations behind the (re)arrangement of shari‘ah-provisions in the new constitution, (2) analyzes the content of the new provisions in their Hegelian relation to the previous Supreme Constitutional Court jurisprudence — expounding on the complex articulation of the explanatory note to art. 2 (art. 219) — and (c) considers the ramifications of the new arrangement, focusing on the impact of the mandatory referral to al-Azhar.

ARTICLES: Picker on International Economic Law/Peerenboom on Legal Transplants

Our own Colin Picker has just published 'Comparative legal cultural analyses of international economic law: a new methodological approach' in the new Chinese Journal of Comparative Law.

The abstract reads:

The effective development and operation of the law faces many obstacles. Among the more intractable yet hidden barriers to the law are legal cultural disconnects and discontinuities. These occur when opposing legal cultural characteristics from different legal cultures are forced to interact as part of the implementation of the law across two different legal cultures. This conflictual interaction can impede or block the success of that law. While present in domestic legal systems, these conflicts are more likely, and may be deeper, between the many different legal cultures involved in the international legal order. Identification of such legal cultural disconnects and discontinuities is the first step towards developing strategies to ameliorate potential conflicts between opposing legal cultural characteristics. This identification requires the examination of the relevant legal systems with legal culture in mind—a legal cultural analysis. However, this methodology is rarely employed. To the extent that we do see legal cultural analyses, they are applied almost exclusively in the domestic arena. When it is applied across legal systems, it becomes a part of comparative law methodology. This merger of comparative law and legal cultural approaches is unusual, indeed almost unheard of in the international legal arena. This article explores this methodology and argues that it is possible and valuable.

Note, too, Randall Peerenboom's 'Toward a methodology for successful legal transplants':

The results of many reform projects focused on the substance of legal transplants, which have prescribed particular laws, practices, or institutions, concepts, norms, and attitudes, have been disappointing. The lacklustre results have called attention to the need to develop a workable methodology for legal reforms, focusing on the processes of reform. One of the shortcomings of the current rule of law promotion programs is that they tend to prescribe a common set of ‘best practices’ for all countries. Relatively little work has been done to differentiate developing countries and develop categories or ideal types based on the types of challenges they face. Accordingly, this article lays the groundwork for a methodology of legal reforms based on differential analysis by distinguishing between three ‘exceptional cases,’ including failed states, post-conflict states, and transitional states, as well as between low-income countries and middle-income countries, and it develops a preliminary methodological framework for assessing legal reforms and legal transplants.                 

NEW JOURNAL: The Chinese Journal of Comparative Law

The Chinese Journal of Comparative Law:
New from Oxford University Press in 2013!
Now open for submissions

The Chinese Journal of Comparative Law (CJCL) is an independent, peer-reviewed, general comparative law journal published under the auspices of the InternationalAcademy of Comparative Law (IACL) and in association with the Silk Road Institute for International and Comparative Law (SRIICL) at Xi’an Jiaotong University, PR China.
 
CJCL aims to provide aleading international forum for comparative studies on all disciplines of law,including cross-disciplinary legal studies. It gives preference to articlesaddressing issues of fundamental and lasting importance in the field ofcomparative law and is particularly interested in publishing works having closerelevance to the development of the Chinese legal system and the widerdeveloping world.
 
For full access to the first issue of CJCL (March 2013), please view the table of contents.
 
Interested in submitting your work for consideration?
 
To read through manuscript submission instructions, please click here.

CONFERENCE: Crossing Over

5th Crossing Over International Symposium 11th to 13th October 2013 Cleveland, United States of America The Crossing Over International Symposium focuses on border studies. It analyzes borders as a physical, psychological and symbolic experience that affects relationships and negotiations among people around the world. We welcome papers about encounters, conflicts and resolutions between cultures, countries, races, religions, genders, ideologies, languages, neighborhoods, generations, social classes, etc. We are interested in an interdisciplinary dialogue within the Humanities and the Social Sciences. Keynote: Junot Diaz. Enquiries: crossingovercsu@gmail.com Web address: http://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crossingover/ Sponsored by: Cultural Crossings/Humanities Consortium

ARTICLE: Hendry on Legal Translation

Comparative Law and the (Im)Possibility of Legal Translation by Jennifer Hendry :: SSRN |sco.lt/9Je1B3
— Stephane Cottin (@cottinstef) May 16, 2013

BOOK: Fineman and Zinsstag on Feminist Perspectives on Transitional Justice:

Intersentia has published Martha Albertson Fineman and Estelle Zinsstag (eds), Feminist Perspectives on Transitional Justice: From International and Criminal to Alternative Forms of Justice:

Truth-seeking mechanisms, international criminal law developments, and other forms of transitional justice have become ubiquitous in societies emerging from long years of conflict, instability and oppression and moving into a post-conflict, more peaceful era.

In practice, both top-down and bottom-up approaches to transitional justice are being formally and informally developed in places such as South Africa, Liberia, Peru, Chile, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, and Northern Ireland. Many studies, conferences and debates have taken place addressing these developments and providing elaboration of theories relating to transition justice generally.

However, rarely have these processes been examined and critiqued through a feminist lens. The position of women, particularly their specific victimisation, typically has not been taken into account in any systematic manner. Seldom do commentators specifically consider whether the recently developed mechanisms for promoting peace and reconciliation will actually help the position of women in a society moving out of repression or conflict. This is unfortunate, since women’s issues are often overlooked and post-conflict societies, because they must rebuild, are ideally poised to introduce standards that would enable and ensure the active participation of the entire population, including women, in rebuilding a more stable, fair and democratic polity.

This book offers some insights into women’s perspectives and feminist views on the topic of transitional justice or ‘justice in transition’. Bringing feminism into the conversation allows us to expand the possibilities for a transformative justice approach after a period of conflict or insecurity, not by replacing it with feminist theory, but by broadening the scope and vision of the potential responses.

BOOK: Praduroux on the Protection of Property Rights in Comparative Perspective

Europa Law Publishing has published Sabrina Praduroux's The Protection of Property Rights in Comparative Perspective. A Study on the Interaction between European Human Rights Law and Italian and French Property Law:

The book offers a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to the issue of property rights protection in Europe. This approach explores the tensions between the European and the national level. This is done by highlighting the different understanding of the constitutional role of property within different legal cultures and legal orders. The interaction and dialogue between national law and supranational human rights law in the area of property law is therefore at the centre of the work. The book concentrates on the emerging conflicts between fundamental rights, the horizontal effect and the positive obligations of States in the area of property law, but also provides new insights on what the protection of property rights at the European level implicates for national legal orders. Investigating the constitutional dimension of private property, which currently appears to be particularly fragmented and complex due to the ever increasing influence of European human rights l aw over national laws, the work thus contributes to a critical understanding of the dynamic of property law in Europe today.

Sabrina Praduroux holds a PhD in Comparative Law from the University of Palermo and in May 2012 she was granted a PhD from the Faculty of Law of the University of Helsinki. Her experiences as trainee at both the European Court of Human Rights and the European Agency for Fundamental Rights, as well as a period as Visiting Scholar at McGill University, were of considerable value in writing the book. Her main fields of interest concern European human rights law and private law. Much of her work is comparative and interdisciplinary.

LECTURE: Gleave on Sharia law & Muslim legal mythology

The Foundation for Law, Justice, and Society recently announced a Lecture and Workshop to 'unpack Sharia Law':

Prof Robert Gleave will lecture on Sharia law & Muslim legal mythology

Robert Gleave, Professor of Arabic Studies at Exeter University, will open the debate, which will assess the implications of a Sharia-based society for post-Arab Spring and other Muslim countries.

Professor Robert Gleave:
Sharia Law and Muslim Legal Mythology
5.30pm, Thursday 16 May 2013
QEH, Mansfield Rd, Oxford
Full details and registration

Further details of the accompanying workshop and a full listing of all events, including our Annual Lecture in Law & Society on 13 June, are available at the link below. 

All upcoming FLJS Events

ARTICLE: Poldnikov on Legal History and Legal Theory

Dimitry Poldnikov's 'Arguments from Natural Law Reevaluated Through a Dialogue between Legal History and Legal Theory' is now on SSRN. The abstract reads:

The paper suggests several ways to rediscover the legacy of early modern and classical natural law of the 18th century in contemporary legal thought through the joint efforts of legal history and legal theory with particular reference to the domain of contract law. Additionally, the paper justifies the revival of the research in the domain of natural law in connection with legal argumentation.

JURIS DIVERSITAS: Register Now - Juris Diversitas Annual Conference

Register now for the Juris Diversitas Annual Conference!

DIFFUSION: AN INTERNATIONAL, INTERDISCIPLINARY CONFERENCE ON COMPARATIVE LAW

Co-Sponsored by the Swiss Institute of Comparative Law and Juris Diversitas
3 and 4 June 2013
Lausanne, Switzerland

The programme is available here.

For additional information, contact Marie Papeil at marie.papeil@isdc-dfjp.unil.ch

I hope to see you there. Seán Patrick Donlan

ARTICLE: Edelman on Educating and Qualifying Transnational LAwyers

Diane Edelman’s ‘Educating and Qualifying Transnational Lawyers: A US Perspective’ is now on SSRN. The abstract reads: 


Recent years have seen an explosion of programs at American law schools designed to educate transnational lawyers, and this past year has seen new developments in the United States regarding qualifying lawyers from abroad to practice in the United States. This paper will highlight some of these developments, and, hopefully, spur or enhance your interest in this burgeoning area of legal education. 

WORKSHOP: Irregular Migration and Southern Europe Workshop

10th Annual IMISCOE Conference Crisis and Migration- Perceptions, Challenges and Consequences
Malmö, Sweden, 25-27 August 2013

Call for Papers
Irregular migration and southern Europe
Workshop: Irregular migration and southern Europe
Workshop convenors: Daniela DeBono, Russell King and Ioanna Tsoni

The aim of this workshop is to explore irregular migration in southern European countries such as Portugal, Spain, Italy, Malta, Greece, Cyprus and others. There will be an attempt to identify issues, patterns and processes common to countries in this region, as well as differences. Researchers working in this field are aware of the dearth of spaces available for such discussions. This is reflected in the lack of edited collections or special issues focusing specifically on this phenomenon in this region. If there is enough material, the papers presented in this workshop could be presented to a publisher.

Southern European countries, in particular current EU Member States, share similar migration histories, being traditionally countries of emigration but now having to deal with large numbers of immigrants. Being geopolitically located on the southern EU borders, these countries are likely to continue receiving large irregular migrant flows in spite of the current economic crisis and high unemployment. In addition, the Dublin System has created a situation whereby these countries remain ‘responsible’ for asylum seekers, including those which ‘move on’ to northern European countries. Many of these countries, with a dark track record of violations of human rights of irregular migrants, are now dealing with increasing challenges to maintain fair asylum determination systems while irregular migrants are facing increasing hostility from host communities.

Although the rationale for this workshop is built on similarities within the region, the general tendency to project ‘southern European countries’ as a homogenous area will be consciously avoided and contributions of a comparative nature highlighting differences will be welcome.

COURSE: Deadline Extended - Commission on Legal Pluralism Course on Legal Pluralism

AN INTERNATIONAL COURSE ON LEGAL PLURALISM

1-4 AUGUST, 2013

UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER

[NOTE: The deadline for applications has been extended to 31 May 2013.]

Overview

In August 2013 the Commission on Legal Pluralism will organize a course in Manchester, UK, about theories, knowledge and methodologies of legal pluralism. The purpose of the 3½-day course, which precedes the IUAES 17th World Congress, is to familiarize the participants with the current international debates and insights in socio-legal studies and legal pluralism and to offer them a comparative perspective allowing them to rethink their own research and practical work. At the center of the discussion will be issues pertaining to rights protection, gender, natural resource management and land tenure, and dispute management in the context of globalizing economic, political and legal developments.

Participation is limited to 25 people to allow for maximum discussion. The participants are academics and/or practitioners, e.g. NGO activists or government officials, who deal with issues related to legal pluralism, informal justice systems and social justice in their academic or professional work. As in past courses (held amongst others in Wellington (New Zealand), Accra (Ghana), Williamsburg (USA), Moscow (Russia), Chiang Mai (Thailand), Fredericton (Canada), Jakarta (Indonesia), Zurich (Switzerland), and Cape Town (South Africa)) the teaching team will consist of senior academics of various backgrounds drawn from the Commission on Legal Pluralism and colleagues from the host country, in this case from the United Kingdom. The course will give participants an opportunity to discuss their work with fellow participants and the teaching staff, and directly engage with leading scholars and practitioners in their fields, allowing them to become part of a growing international network.

Topics for the course will include:

 Theoretical and methodological aspects of legal pluralism,

 Legal empowerment, gender and human rights,

 Natural resources management and governance,

 Land tenure and customary law,

 Rights of indigenous communities and economic development,

 Informal justice and policing,

 Access to justice, legal reform and the role of international development agencies.

Selection, Tuition, and Funding

OPPORTUNITY: The Juris Diversitas Web Team!!

In order to further expand the types and amount of information we provide, Juris Diversitas seeks volunteers for its Blog, Facebook, and Twitter pages:

A Web Editor would have primary responsibility for the development of the Blog and related pages. The Editor would work closely with our Executive and additional bloggers. At most, only a few hours a week would be required and individuals needn’t have previous blogging experience.

Guest Bloggers would be permitted to create discursive, opinion-oriented posts, within the bounds of our aims, for an agreed period of time. The time commitment is likely to be minimal and individuals needn’t have previous blogging experience.

Numerous individual Bloggers would commit to making the occasional informative or discursive posts, largely by collating existing information on events, publications, etc. The time commitment for this will be minimal and individuals needn’t have previous blogging experience.

Note, too, that individuals can always submit information directly to us for posting, though we ask that you prepare a draft post in advance.

This is easier than you think--hell, I've been doing it--but essential to our future. Interested individuals should contact me at Seán Patrick Donlan.

JOURNAL: Ratio Juris

The latest issue of Ratio Juris is available on Wiley Online Library. Its articles include:

Politics in a State of Nature (pages 149–186) William A. Edmundson Article first published online: 9 MAY 2013 | DOI: 10.1111/raju.12009 Communal Ties and Political Obligations (pages 187–214) Dorota Mokrosinska Article first published online: 9 MAY 2013 | DOI: 10.1111/raju.12010 Legal Rights and the Limits of Conceptual Analysis: A Case Study (pages 215–234) Charles Lowell Barzun Article first published online: 9 MAY 2013 | DOI: 10.1111/raju.12011 Fighting Discrimination with Discrimination: Public Universities and the Rights of Dissenting Students (pages 235–261) Jacob Affolter Article first published online: 9 MAY 2013 | DOI: 10.1111/raju.12012 The Objectivity of Beliefs, Reasonable Disagreement and Political Deliberation (pages 262–281) Felipe Oliveira De Sousa Article first published online: 9 MAY 2013 | DOI: 10.1111/raju.12013 Eyes Wide Shut: On Risk, Rule of Law and Precaution (pages 282–301) Lyana Francot-Timmermans and Ubaldus De Vries Article first published online: 9 MAY 2013 | DOI: 10.1111/raju.12014 Kant and Habermas on International Law (pages 302–324) Kjartan Koch Mikalsen Article first published online: 9 MAY 2013 | DOI: 10.1111/raju.12015

LAUNCH/PANEL: Islam and English Law

ISLAM AND ENGLISH LAW

Book Launch and Panel Discussion

Temple Church, London, 3 June, 6 pm

Panel Chairman: Stephen Hockman, QC

Panellists to include: The Rt Rev and Rt Hon Lord Williams of Oystermouth (Rowan Williams), former Archbishop of Canterbury and Professor Maleiha Malik, King’s College London

The book to be launched is Robin Griffith-Jones (ed), Islam and English Law: Rights, Responsibilities, and the Place of Shari'a (Cambridge University Press, 2013). The book:

begins with the foundational lecture given for the Temple Church by Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, on an ‘inevitable’ accommodation between shari‛a and British law. The book’s following chapters – by lawyers, sociologists and theologians – look back on developments since the Archbishop spoke and forwards along trajectories, in family law and human rights, opened by his lecture. This evening we pursue these questions further. How are the rights of all citizens to be respected and their responsibilities met?

If you wish to attend, contact catherine@templechurch.com, 0207 353 8559, www.templechurch.com.

Thanks to Prakash Shah and Pluri-Legal for the information.