ARTICLE: Mahasned and Critchlow on Jordanian Legal Education

Nisreen Mahasned and George Critchlow, "A Dialogue on Jordanian Legal Education" has been published on SSRN:

This is a readable article about the need for legal education reform in Jordan. It grew out of the experiences, discussions, and shared interests of the co-authors – a Jordanian female law professor and an American male law professor who have worked with the American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative (ABA ROLI) and Jordanian law faculties to develop strategies for strengthening legal education in Jordan. The article is unusual in that it is presented as a dialogue in order to identify and reflect the authors’ different professional and cultural perspectives. The text is supported by citation to authority in conventional footnotes. 

Jordan’s system of legal education is challenged by the need to produce lawyers who have the knowledge and skills necessary to represent clients in traditional settings and to meet the demands of modern transnational commerce, democratization, and the rule of law, including human rights law. The traditional mode of learning in most Jordanian law classes is passive. The article describes and discusses learning theory that emphasizes the need for students to be engaged in a variety of interactive learning experiences. The concept of separating theory and practice (which underpins the traditional Jordanian legal education model) is addressed by reference to critiques of legal education in the United States. The article argues for more integration of theory and practice as a means of fostering critical thinking and problem-solving skills. It concludes with concrete recommendations that Jordanian (and other) law professors might find useful for introducing more integrated, active learning experiences into their classrooms. 

While the article is about Jordanian legal education, it has obvious relevance for educators who operate in similar models of legal education throughout the Arab world. It also provides a readable summary of learning theory and teaching strategies for law teachers everywhere. 

BOOK: Maleshin et al on Civil Procedure in Cross-Cultural Dialogue

Dmitry Maleshin (ed)’s Civil Procedure in Cross-Cultural Dialogue: Eurasia Context, has been published on full on SSRN:

The Idea of the book is to discuss the evolution of civil procedure in different societies, not only in the well-known civil or common law systems, but also in different countries of Eurasia, Asia, etc. Civil procedure in Europe and North America is a subject of enormous scientific and practical importance. We know a lot about these systems. But we do not know enough about civil procedure in the rest of the world. How does it work and what are the main principles? Culture is one of the main factors that makes civil procedure of these countries different. Therefore it is necessary to discuss the main links between different systems of civil procedure. The discussion was held on the basis of National reports from 24 countries.

The contributors include:

JOURNAL: PoLAR

 

 The new issue of PoLAR is available here:

VOLUME 36, ISSUE 1

Editors’ Introduction
John Conley and Justin B. Richland

ARTICLES

“It Wasn’t Written for Me”: Law, Debt, and Therapeutic Contracts in Greek Psychiatry
Elizabeth Anne Davis

Professional Discourses on Single Parenthood in International Adoptions in Spain
David Poveda, María Isabel Jociles, and Ana María Rivas

Discourse, Organization, and the Welfare State in the Former East Berlin
Kenneth McGill

Past Loss as Future? The Politics of Temporality and the “Nonreligious” by a Japanese NGO in Burma/Myanmar
Chika Watanabe

The Object of Activism: Documents and Daily Life in Namibian NGOs
Sabine Höhn

A Tale of Two Courts: How Organizational Ethnography Can Shed New Light on Legal Pluralism
Ido Shahar

Being Part of the Parade – “Going Native” in the United Nations Security Council
Niels Nagelhus Schia

Navigational Tools for Central African Roadblocks
Louisa Lombard

BOOK REVIEWS

ARTICLE: Helleringer and Bergé on Applied Global Legal Pluralism

A blog I've been unaware of--DROIT et PLURIEL/LAW and PLURAL--posted the following:

Helleringer, Genevieve and Bergé, Jean-Sylvestre

Applying the Law in the National, International and European Context: Applied Global Legal Pluralism (July 2013).

Oxford Legal Studies Research Paper No. 70/2013.

Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2293290

Abstract: 

CALL FOR PAPERS: Ottawa Law Review

CALL FOR PAPERS OTTAWA LAW REVIEW 2013-2014

The Ottawa Law Review is currently accepting submissions for publication in Volume 45. The Review is seeking scholarly articles that contribute to a diversity of opinions on legal issues, including articles with an international, theoretical or comparative focus. We are accepting submissions immediately.

The Review’s mandate to publish submissions that exhibit the highest quality legal research and writing has resulted in its articles being widely cited. We distribute printed copies to subscribers internationally and reach a large audience through online databases. Our authors are also free to publish their article on a personal website or on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN).

We strive to ensure a timely and transparent process. Each submission is internally reviewed to ensure it is in accordance with our general guidelines, including word limits, which can be found on our website at www.rdo-olr.uottawa.ca. Once it passes our internal review, the submission is sent out to two expert peer-reviewers. Upon receiving the assessments, the student Editorial Board will then consider the submission for publication. Authors whose articles are not selected for publication will still have the benefit of receiving detailed Editorial Board comments along with the expert assessments. Throughout this process, the Review employs a strict confidentiality policy to ensure that both authors and assessors remain anonymous.

We welcome any submissions—articles, essays, case comments, book reviews—that are original and not being considered by other publications. Student submissions must be accompanied by a professor’s reference. Works are published in English or French, reflecting the bilingual spirit of the University of Ottawa. The Review invites you to submit an electronic copy of your work in Word format to the Editor-in-Chief at articles@uottawa.ca. Please visit our website at www.rdo-olr.uottawa.ca for more information.

JOURNAL - SPECIAL ISSUE: No Foundations on Judging Democracy, Democratic Judgment

A special issue of (2013) 10 No Foundations: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Law and Justice [NoFo], on 'Judging Democracy, Democratic Judgment', is out. 

It includes:

ARTICLES

Judging Democracy in the 21st Century: Crisis or Transformation?
Alessandro Ferrara

Political Judgment for an Agonistic Democracy
Albena Azmanova

Neoliberal Politics of the ‘Market’
Sakari Hänninen

The Politics of Public Things: Neoliberalism and the Routine of Privatization
Bonnie Honig

The Democracy in Courts: Jeremy Bentham, 'Publicity', and the Privatization of Process in the Twenty-First Century
Judith Resnik

‘The Greatest Enemy of Authority’—Arendt, Honig and the Authority of Post-Apartheid Jurisprudence
Jaco Barnard-Naudé

ARTICLE: Richland on Jurisdiction

Justin Richland's 'Jurisdiction: Grounding Law in Language', due to appear in the (2013) 42 Annual Review of Anthropology, is on SSRN:

Jurisdiction, a concept often demarcating law’s territorial scope, and thus the bounds of state sovereignty, is offered here as a theory of legal language and its relation to law’s social force. Reconsidered in light of its etymology as “law’s speech,” new theories of jurisdiction suggest how law is simultaneously founded and enacted through language both spectacular (such as courtroom arguments or in the preambles of constitutions) and mundane (such as in legal aid in-take exchanges, or in the forms of bureaucratic records). Jurisdiction points up how the force of law, and the sovereignty that law’s force presupposes, can be seen as being made, and made seemingly unassailable, in the discursive and textual details of law’s actual accomplishment. This review considers a segment of legal language scholarship produced in recent decades, while arguing for the ground that language, as jurisdiction, always holds for law and sovereignty. 

JURIS DIVERSITAS: Rautenbach on Legal Pluralism, Cultural Diversity, etc, etc

Christa Rautenbach, friend and Juris Diversitas colleague, has just posted a very large number of papers on academia.edu. 

She notes that her:

principal area of interest is the relationship between the state and unofficial legal orders. My research topics include matters of legal pluralism and cultural diversity, as well as the use of foreign precedent by constitutional court judges (empirical results accessible at http://www4-win2.p.nwu.ac.za/dbtw-wpd/textbases/ccj.htm).

You can find the papers here.

CALL FOR PAPERS: Glocalism - A Peer-Reviewed and Cross-Disciplinary Journal

Somehow, I've only just become aware of Glocalism:

“Glocalism”, a peer-reviewed and cross-disciplinary journal, is currently accepting manuscripts for publication. We welcome studies in any field, with or without comparative approach, that address both the practical effects and the theoretical import. All articles should be sent to: p.bassetti@globusetlocus.org, davide.cadeddu@unimi.it

Article could be in any language and length chosen by the author, while its abstract has to be in English.


Deadline: September 15, 2013.


This issue is scheduled to appear at the end of October 2013.

The theme of the new issue is, you guessed it, Hybridity:

The genetic pool, social customs, scientific discoveries, political experiences and technical innovations have always tended to merge together, giving rise to new realities, which alter the very essence of humanity. The intensification of human relationships on a global scale feeds the speed, breadth and depth of this hybridization process, which involves every realm of nature and human life. And yet, contrary to its etymological roots, hybridity is not so much the manifestation of hybris (which for the Ancient Greeks implied the violation of rules and order in nature), and more the very essence of all that exists. In particular, human beings have a hybrid nature, which finds new ways of manifesting itself, with through crises of identity or changing relationships. If, in general, it is the role of politics to transcend the present, with its networks of relationships and multiple identities, by highlighting the shared goals of particular communities, then globalisation seems to forge a new path, which is inherently hybrid, and is required to respond, in different places and times, to the new demands of citizenship, to new rights and duties, and new dangers for human life. Hybridity can be understood in terms of the relationship between the objective and subjective, between nature and culture, local and global, or human and inhuman, but it always produces new outcomes; politics can only take on the most important challenges with the aim of achieving an ordered coexistence. It is, though, clear that this question, perhaps more than others, needs to be faced, both theoretically, by those who seek knowledge, and practically, by those who attempt to guide our future, in line with an interdisciplinary approach. In what new ways does the relationship between globalisation and hybridity manifest itself? What is a political hybrid in today’s world? Does hybridity imply development or decline? The comparison between contrasting views will provide for more complete answers to the questions posed by natural history and mankind.

See the Call for Papers here.

CALL FOR PAPERS: Edinburgh Postgraduate Law Conference 2013

 

Abstracts are invited for the Edinburgh Postgraduate Law Conference, to be held December 2-3, 2013 at the University of Edinburgh, UK. The conference aims to provide a forum for postgraduate students to present and receive feedback on their work and to network with other researchers working in their area.

Conference theme

The theme of the conference is “Law, Individual, Community”. We invite papers from all areas of law and related fields, including but not limited to commercial law, constitutional law, criminal law, critical approaches to law, human rights, intellectual property law, international law, legal theory, and medical law. Possible topics of investigation include:

§  Liberalism versus communitarianism,

§  Problematizing the subject of law (the collective subject, sub-state subjects in international law etc.),

§  Rights and responsibilities, including group rights and indigenous peoples’ rights,

§  Law and the excluded,

§  Community and the welfare state,

§  The role and position of shareholders against the corporation,

§  Corporate social responsibility and corporate governance,

§  The principle of self-determination and sub-state territorial autonomy,

§  The rise of global governance,

§  Community interests and the protection of the environment,

§  Biobanking and participation in medical research,

§  Intellectual property rights and access to medicines.

Keynote speakers

The keynote speakers for this year’s conference will be Martin Loughlin, Professor of Public Law at LSE, and John Harris, Sir David Alliance Professor of Bioethics at the University of Manchester.

JOURNAL: European Constitutional Law Review

I just received the following message:

To mark the announcement of the European Constitutional Law Review's (EuConst ) latest impact factor, we are pleased to offer free access to the most-cited articles.

EuConst's impact factor is now 0.5 and the journal was ranked 88th out of 134 journals.

You can access the most-cited articles without charge until the end of 2013 by following this link.

You can register to receive news, offers and table-of-contents alerts from EuConst by registering with Cambridge Journals Online here.

We hope you enjoy this sample issue. To ensure you have access to every issue of EuConst, you should recommend a subscription to your serials librarian.

BOOKS: Hart Publishing on Gender and Judging, Unjust Enrichment, and Normative Patterns and Legal Developments in the European Union

Hart Publishing has announced the publication of:

Gender andJudging

Edited by Ulrike Schultz and Gisela Shaw

Does gender make a difference to the way the judiciary works and should work? Or is gender-blindness a built-in prerequisite of judicial objectivity? If gender does make a difference, how might this be defined? These are the key questions posed in this collection of essays, by some 30 authors from the following countries; Argentina, Cambodia, Canada, England, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, Ivory Coast, Japan, Kenya, the Netherlands, the Philippines, South Africa, Switzerland, Syria and the United States. The contributions draw on various theoretical approaches, including gender, feminist and sociological theories.

The book's pressing topicality is underlined by the fact that well into the modern era male opposition to women's admission to, and progress within, the judicial profession has been largely based on the argument that their very gender programmes women to show empathy, partiality and gendered prejudice - in short essential qualities running directly counter to the need for judicial objectivity. It took until the last century for women to begin to break down such seemingly insurmountable barriers. And even then, there are a number of countries where even this first step is still waiting to happen. In all of them, there remains a more or less pronounced glass ceiling to women's judicial careers.

UnjustEnrichment in South African Law

Rethinking Enrichment by Transfer

Helen Scott

Conventional thinking teaches that the absence of liability-in particular contractual invalidity - is itself the reason for the restitution of transfers in the South African law of unjustified enrichment. However, this book argues that while the absence of a relationship of indebtedness is a necessary condition for restitution in such cases, it is not a sufficient condition. The book takes as its focus those instances in which the invalidity thesis is strongest, namely, those traditionally classified as instances of the condictio indebiti, the claim to recover undue transfers. It seeks to demonstrate that in all such instances it is necessary for the plaintiff to show not only the absence of his liability to transfer but also a specific reason for restitution, such as mistake, compulsion or incapacity. Furthermore, this book explores the reasons for the rise of unjust factors in South African law, attributing this development in part to the influence of the Roman-Dutch restitutio in integrum, an extraordinary, equitable remedy that has historically operated independently of the established enrichment remedies of the civilian tradition, and which even now remains imperfectly integrated into the substantive law of enrichment. Finally, the book seeks to defend in principled terms the mixed approach to enrichment by transfer (an approach based both on unjust factors and on the absence of a legal ground) which appears to characterise modern South African law. It advocates the rationalisation of the causes of action comprised within the condictio indebiti, many of which are subject to additional historically-determined requirements, in light of this mixed analysis.

NormativePatterns and Legal Developments in the Social Dimension of the EU

Edited by Ann Numhauser-Henning and Mia Rönnmar

JOURNAL: The Journal of Legal Pluralism Goes Online

EXCITING NEWS FROM THE JOURNAL OF LEGAL PLURALISM

The Journal of Legal Pluralism Goes Online - The Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law (JLP) is devoted to scholarly writing and documentation on all aspects of legal pluralism and unofficial law everywhere in the world and at all times. Published since 1969, it is a refereed, independent, interdisciplinary, international journal.

As editor-in-chief of the Journal of Legal Pluralism I am happy to announce that our first two issues under the Taylor & Francis group are now available to subscribers online (see http ://www . tandfonline . com/toc/rjlp20/45/1# . Ud_9Z1OGGUc). Print copies for those who have opted for online + print will be available soon.

Remember that your Commission membership fees now include a subscription. For an annual membership of 31.26 Euro, members receive an online subscription to the JLP, or they can opt for online + print copy for 53 Euro a year.

The editorial board encourages you to send manuscripts to the JLP. Due to support from the Commission, the JLP, unlike many open access journals, does not charge publishing fees. - See more at: http ://www . commission-on-legal-pluralism . com/journal/#sthash . d9tHOlGZ . dpuf

Melanie Wiber
....
wiber@unb . ca

ARTICLE: Madden on the Limits of Comparative Law in the Context of Military Justice Law Reforms

Mike Madden has posted 'Keeping Up with the Common Law O'Sullivans? The Limits of Comparative Law in the Context of Military Justice Law Reforms' on SSRN:

Critics of the Canadian military justice system have recently suggested that Canada should follow developments in military law that have taken place in Ireland, particularly with respect to the expansive procedural rights that are now afforded to accused persons who face summary forms of trial within the Irish system. This article will demonstrate that these calls for comparative-based law reform fail to appreciate important differences in the Irish and Canadian environments within which the respective military justice systems operate, specifically through a case study that discusses the distinct international human rights law obligations that bind the two states, and the unique labour climates within the two armed forces. Ultimately, after illustrating how unwise any comparative-based law reforms would be for Canada in light of these differences, the article will refer to the Irish/Canadian case study in order to argue that knowledge of comparative law is now more useful to responsible scholars as a law reform shield than a sword: in an era of significantly improved access to foreign legal materials, the scholarly study of comparative law is needed more in order to critique and deconstruct unprincipled law reform proposals than to generate new law reform ideas.

Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2269098 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2269098. 

JOURNAL: European Law Journal – Review of European Law Context

We are pleased to announce that the new issue of the European Law Journal, Review of European Law Context,  is now available on Wiley Online Library. Edited by Francis Snyder, the European Law Journal represents an authoritative new approach to the study of European Law, developed specifically to express and develop the study and understanding of European law in its social, cultural, political and economic context. The journal fills a major gap in the current literature on all issues of European law, and is essential reading for anyone studying or practising EU law and its diverse impact on the environment, national legal systems, local government, economic organizations, and European citizens.

This latest issue includes:

• General Principles in EU Law between a Compensatory Role and an Intrinsic Value (pages 457–487)- Constanze Semmelmann
• Variations in Member States’ Preliminary References to the Court of Justice—Are Structural Factors (Part of) the Explanation? (pages 488–501) - Morten Broberg and Niels Fenger
• The Right to Have What Rights? EU Citizenship in Need of Clarification (pages 502–516) - Dimitry Kochenov
• The Development of EU Case-Law on Age Discrimination in Employment: ‘Will You Still Need Me? Will You Still Feed Me? When I'm Sixty-Four’ (pages 517–544) - Elaine Dewhurst
• The Protection of Traditional Foods in the EU: Traditional Specialities Guaranteed (pages 545–576) - Andrea Tosato
• Beyond Kyoto: The EU's Contribution to a More Sustainable World Economy (pages 577–591) - Beatriz Pérez de las Heras