CALL FOR PAPERS: Society of Legal Scholars (SLS) Annual Conference (Legal History Section)

SLS Legal History Section: Call for Papers for 2014 SLS Annual Conference at University of Nottingham 

The overall theme of the conference this year will be 'Judging in the 21st Century'.

The Legal History section will meet in the second half of the conference on Thursday11 and Friday 12 September. We welcome proposals for papers on any issue relating to legal history, including, but not confined to, those addressing this year's conference theme. Alternatively, if you would like to propose a topic of current interest for a panel or roundtable discussion, please do get in touch to see if this can be arranged.

If you are interested in presenting a paper, please email a proposed title and short abstract to r.auchmuty@reading.ac.uk by 20 March.  

Please note that whilst you need only send a proposed title and abstract at this stage, speakers are encouraged to submit a full paper to the SLS paperbank before the conference. The SLS offers a Best Paper Prize which can be awarded to academics at any stage of their career. The Prize carries a £250 monetary award and winning papers are published in Legal Studies. Further details about the Prize are available at http://sections.legalscholars.ac.uk/best-paper-prize.cfm, though please note that to be eligible all authors must be fully paid-up members of the SLS and the paper must not

• have been published previously or have been accepted or be under consideration for publication; or
• exceed 10,000 words.  

All speakers will need to book and pay to attend the conference. Booking information will be circulated in due course.

ARTICLE/BOOK: Ginsburg, Monateri, and Parisi on Classics in Comparative Law

In advance of Tom Ginsburg, Pier Giuseppe Monateri, and Francesco Parisi (eds), Classics in Comparative Law (Elgar, 2014), a three-volume collection of previously-published articles on the subject, the editors have made available their introduction on SSRN. 

The abstract there reads:

Legal scholars often criticize comparative law for being an overreaching discipline, lacking a coherent methodology and a well-defined domain. Nevertheless, there remains something exciting and potentially enlightening about comparative law. In these 3 volumes, we present a selection of 77 articles and essays that in our view illustrates the importance of comparative legal analysis. We survey, in a necessarily selective and incomplete way, the modern era of comparative law, beginning in the late 19th century. In this introduction, we summarize many of the themes in the collection, with special attention to three enduring questions in the field: how do law and legal systems develop? How do we understand variation? And why should we care?

CALL FOR PAPER: GLOCALISM, JOURNAL OF CULTURE, POLITICS AND INNOVATION

“Glocalism”, a peer-reviewed, open-access and cross-disciplinary journal is currently accepting manuscripts for publication. We welcome studies in any field, with or without a comparative approach, which address both the practical effects and theoretical import. 

All articles should be sent to:
p.bassetti@globusetlocus.org, davide.cadeddu@unimi.it
Articles can be in any language and of a length chosen by the author, while the abstract and keywords
must be in English.
Papers deadline extended to: 15 May 2014. This issue is scheduled to appear in end-June.
Website: www.glocalismjournal.net

Direction Committee: Arjun Appadurai (New York University); Zygmunt Bauman (University of Leeds); Seyla Benhabib (Yale University); Sabino Cassese (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa); Manuel Castells (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona); Fred Dallmayr (University of Notre Dame); David Held (Durham University); Robert J. Holton (Trinity College Dublin); Alberto Martinelli (Università degli Studi di Milano); Anthony McGrew (University of Southampton); Alberto Quadrio Curzio (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano); Roland Robertson (University of Aberdeen); Saskia Sassen (Columbia University); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Columbia University).

ARTICLE: Dan Priel on Lon Fuller's Political Jurisprudence of Freedom

We are pleased to inform you about Dan Priel (York University - Osgoode Hall Law School)'s new article "Lon Fuller's Political Jurisprudence of Freedom".

Abstract:

Lon Fuller wrote extensively on freedom, but these writings are now largely unread. It is rare to find them mentioned, rarer still to see any attempt to relate their ideas to Fuller’s writings on law and legal theory. Perhaps reflecting the widely-accepted dichotomy between jurisprudence (conceptual) and political theory (normative), these works are thought irrelevant to discussions on the nature of law. Fuller himself, however, never accepted this dichotomy, so in this essay I try to offer an alternative reading of Fuller’s Morality of Law in light of his writings on freedom. I argue that Fuller’s book should be understood as part of a broadly "republican" view of freedom, which sees both law and freedom as the opposite of tyranny. I argue that there is considerable textual support both in The Morality of Law and in his writings on freedom for a normative account of the nature of law, one that does not exist peacefully alongside (let alone presuppose) a conceptual inquiry, but rather challenges the possibility of value-neutral conceptual analysis of law.