CALL FOR PAPERS - INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR THE SEMIOTICS OF LAW - SPECIAL ISSUE - On Ricoeur: Justice, Hermeneutics, Responsibility, and Personal Identity

 CALL FOR PAPERS
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR THE SEMIOTICS OF LAW
SPECIAL ISSUE
On Ricoeur: Justice, Hermeneutics, Responsibility, and Personal Identity

Volume 38 (2025)

Guest Editors – Peter Langford & Rafe McGregor

(Edge Hill University)

The work of Paul Ricoeur is animated by an insistent philosophical engagement with the position and orientation of human existence. An integral aspect of Ricoeur’s philosophical engagement concerns the relationship between individual existence, as a question of personal identity, and co-existence, as a question of social life. This engagement is shaped by a reflexive interpretation – a hermeneutics – of these aspects of human existence in a manner that has been termed a ‘hermeneutics of the human condition’ (Domenico Jervolino, Paul Ricoeur, Une herméneutique de la condition humaine, 2002).

The presence of law within the framework of this reflexive interpretation arises through the question of justice, which situates law in relation to both personal identity and human co-existence. The passage from the individual to human co-existence becomes that of the interconnection between responsibility and justice. In this manner, law becomes a domain or region of reflection in and through its connection to morality, ethics, and politics. Law is a distinct, but neither self-contained nor self-sufficient, domain whose distinctiveness is to be considered through its interconnection with these other domains. The position accorded to law is thus the expression of a wider, reflexive reconfiguration of the interrelationship of all these domains.

The reconfiguration results from an overarching process of reflexive interpretation that involves the selection of, and interpretative orientation to, the texts which form the material or corpus for this overarching process. It is in this selection and interpretation that the distinctive character of Ricoeurian hermeneutics is elaborated, the question of justice raised, and the domain of law accorded its particular position. We invite proposals that explore one or more of these themes of this special issue on the work of Paul Ricoeur.

Submissions should be addressed to: Peter Langford (langforp@edgehill.ac.uk) and Rafe McGregor (mcgregor@edgehill.ac.uk).

- Abstracts of 300 words (maximum) by 1 January 2025.

- After selection, final papers (10,000 words maximum, including endnotes and references) should be submitted by 1 June 2025.

Law and Evil The Evolutionary Perspective

Law and Evil

The Evolutionary Perspective

Wojciech Załuski

Law and Evil presents an alternative evolutionary picture of man, focusing on the origins and nature of human evil, and demonstrating its useful application in legal-philosophical analyses. Using this representation of human nature, Wojciech Załuski analyses the development of law, which he interprets as moving from evolutionary ethics to genuine ethics, as well as arguing in favour of metaethical realism and ius naturale.

(Subjects: philosophy of law, evolution, natural law, evil)

ARTICLE ANNOUNCEMENT: Legal Reasoning and Stereotypes in the Case Law from a Comparative Family Law Perspective

By elena Faletti
The aim of this paper is the analysis of gender stereotypes in comparative family law, focusing on English and Italian case law, especially to the traditional gender roles: male-female, husband-wife, father-mother. Indeed, analyzing the grounds of the judgments in an area with a strong influence of political, philosophical, religious and social issues as family law, we find that stereotypes, especially gender stereotypes, could hide themselves behind apparently neutral concepts. But what is a “stereotype”? Especially a “gender stereotype”? It concerns the sex of a person, especially his or her failure to conform with socially accepted sexual behaviour about what “real” men or women do or don't do.

Click here to download this paper.

ARTICLES ANNOUNCEMENT: Philosophy of Law eJournal

We suggest two interesting articles from Philosophy of law eJournal. Click here to view the full table of content of the current issue.

"Law Is Made of Stories: Erasing the False Dichotomy between Stories and Legal Rules" 
Legal Communication & Rhetoric: JALWD, Vol. 11, 2014

STEPHEN PASKEY, State University of New York (SUNY), Buffalo, SUNY Buffalo Law School
Email: sjpaskey@buffalo.edu

When lawyers think of legal analysis, they think chiefly of logic and reason. Stories are secondary. As Michael Smith explains, our legal system “is not founded on narrative reasoning” but on “a commitment to the rule of law.” The article suggests that this dichotomy between “rule-based reasoning” and “narrative reasoning” is false, and that narrative and stories are central to legal reasoning, including rule-based reasoning. In doing so, the article uses literary narrative theory to show that every governing legal rule has the structure of a “stock story”: the elements of the rule correspond to elements of a story. It follows that lawyers do not rely on stories simply because they are persuasive. They do so because a story is literally embedded in the structure of governing rules, and those rules can be satisfied only by telling a story. Thus, many analytical moves we label “rule-based reasoning” can be understood as a type of narrative reasoning, in which a client’s story is compared to and contrasted with the stock story embedded in the rule.

"The East African Court of Justice: Towards Effective Protection of Human Rights in the East African Community" 
Max Planck Yearbook of United Nations Law, Volume 17, 2013, p.173-195

ALLY POSSI, Centre for Human Rights, University of Pretoria
Email: allypossi@gmail.com

Human rights in Africa are under the microscope of regional and sub-regional mechanisms. The regional mechanism is under the auspices of the African Union (AU), in which human rights come under the scrutiny of the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights. Sub-regional organizations, established as Regional Economic Communities (RECs), have recently developed their own jurisprudence in promoting and protecting human rights through their institutions. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the East African Community (EAC) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) have emerged as front runners in realizing human rights in African sub-regional organizations. The EAC is an intergovernmental organization which aims at improving the living standards of its citizens through cooperation in economic, social and political aspects among its Partner States. The principles governing the operations of the EAC in meeting its objectives include the promotion and protection of human rights. The EAC has established the East African Court of Justice (EACJ), tasked with interpreting and ensuring the application of the EAC Treaty. This article pinpoints key challenges that the EACJ is currently encountering and tries to find possible solutions which can improve the functioning of the EACJ to effectively protect human rights in the Community.

BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT: What Makes Law - An Introduction to the Philosophy of Law

This book offers an advanced introduction to central questions in legal philosophy. What factors determine the content of the law in force? What makes a normative system a legal system? How does law beyond the state differ from domestic law? What kind of moral force does law have? These are all questions about the nature of law. The most important existing views are introduced, but the aim is not to survey the existing literature. Rather, this book introduces the subject by stepping back from the fray to sketch the big picture, to show just what is at stake in these old debates. Legal philosophy has become somewhat arid and inward looking. In part this is because the disagreement between the main camps on the important questions is apparently intractable. The main aim of the book is to suggest both a diagnosis and a proper practical response to this situation of intractable disagreement about questions that do matter.
Click here to read more about this book.

eJOURNAL ANNOUNCEMENT: New issue of Philosophy of Law eJournal

A new Issue of Philosophy of Law eJournal, Vol. 7, No. 86: Oct 13, 2014, has just been published, click here for the table of content.

We suggest the following articles:

"How to Balance Interests: Comparative Legal Aspects on the Limitation of Copyright in International Law" 
Higher School of Economics Research Paper No. WP BRP 41/LAW/2014

TATIANA BRAZHNIK, National Research University Higher School of Economics - Faculty of Law
Email: brazhnik.tata@gmail.com

"Towards a Fruitful Cooperation between Legal Philosophy, Legal Sociology and Doctrinal Research: How Legal Interactionism May Bridge Unproductive Oppositions" 
Forthcoming in Festschrist Roger Cotterrell
Erasmus Working Paper Series on Jurisprudence and Socio-Legal Studies No. 14-02

SANNE TAEKEMA, Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR), Erasmus School of Law
Email: taekema@law.eur.nl
WIBREN VAN DER BURG, Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR) - Erasmus School of Law, Queen Mary University of London, School of Law
Email: vanderburg@frg.eur.nl

ARTICLE ANNOUNCEMENT: Introduction: Philosophical Foundations of the Law of Torts

A new interesting article from Social and Political Philosophy eJournal

"Introduction: Philosophical Foundations of the Law of Torts"
Philosophical Foundations of the Law of Torts, John Oberdiek (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press 2014

JOHN OBERDIEK, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey - School of Law - Camden This Introduction to Philosophical Foundations of the Law of Torts (John Oberdiek, ed., Oxford University Press, 2014) provides a brief history of the discipline of tort theory, maps out current debates in the field, and introduces the volume's nineteen chapters. Along the way, this Introduction addresses many of the core problems in the philosophy of tort law, draws connections between them.

ARTICLES ANNOUNCEMENT: Philosophy of Law eJournal

From the new issue of Philosophy of Law eJournal, we suggest the following articles:

"Juries, Social Norms, and Civil Justice" 
Alabama Law Review, Vol. 65, No. 5, 2014
William & Mary Law School Research Paper No. 09-282

JASON M. SOLOMON, Stanford Law School
Email: jsolomon@law.stanford.edu

At the root of many contemporary debates and landmark cases in the civil justice system are underlying questions about the role of the civil jury. In prior work, I examined the justifications for the civil jury as a political institution, and found them wanting in our contemporary legal system.

This Article looks closely and critically at the justification for the civil jury as an adjudicative institution and questions the conventional wisdom behind it. The focus is on tort law because the jury has more power to decide questions of law in tort than any other area of law. The Article makes three original contributions.

First, I undermine the claim that the breach question in negligence is inevitably one for the jury by revisiting a famous debate between Cardozo and Holmes about the possibility of judge-made rules around breach in tort. Second, I draw on social and cognitive psychology to question the conventional wisdom that juries applying general standards are ideally suited to identify and apply social norms. And third, I sketch a middle-ground approach on breach, which involves presumptive rules that defer to indicia of social norms such as statutes and regulations, custom, and the market. 

"Human Rights Through the ATS after Kiobel: Partial Extraterritoriality, Misconceptions, and Elusive and Problematic Judicially-Created Criteria" 
6 Duke Forum for Law & Social Change 31 (2014)
U of Houston Law Center No. 2014-A-75

JORDAN J. PAUST, University of Houston Law Center
Email: jpaust@central.uh.edu

The evident split in Kiobel has, in the words of Justice Kennedy, left open a number of significant questions regarding proper elaboration and explanation of the extraterritorial reach of the Alien Tort Statute. Among these are whether a presumption against extraterritoriality should apply and, if it is used, whether inconsistent and ambiguous criteria are preferable in deciding when it is displaced. Extraterritoriality of some sort has been affirmed, but there is an evident lack of consensus on rationales, doctrines, and criteria.

For this reason, its is important to reconsider what the full set of early cases and opinions of Attorneys General add for proper decisionmaking regarding the statute’s evident reach; what is compelled by adequate awareness of the nature of the law that is expressly incorporated by reference and its jurisdictional attributes and substantive grasp; how congressional endorsement of the Filartiga line of cases should displace a judicially-created presumption as well as supposed “foreign relations” concerns and provide needed guidance; how the Charming Betsy rule supplements the need to interpret the statute consistently with universal jurisdiction and responsibility as well as human rights of access to courts and to an effective remedy under international law; and how the rationale in the Bowman exception to a presumption of non-extraterritoriality supports that requirement. This article provides a basis for such an inquiry. Part III identifies evident misconceptions in some of the opinions and is organized into eight areas.

"War for the Wrong Reasons: Lessons from Law" 
11 Journal of Moral Philosophy 454 (2014)

GABRIELLA BLUM, Harvard Law School
Email: gblum@law.harvard.edu
JOHN C. P. GOLDBERG, Harvard Law School
Email: jgoldberg@law.harvard.edu

In Ethics for Enemies, Frances Kamm argues that, under certain conditions, it is morally permissible for a state to launch a war for opportunistic reasons. We consider how law might shed light on Kamm’s argument. Part I addresses the application of criminal and tort law to individual acts of violence analogous to the acts of war analyzed by Kamm. It primarily argues that these bodies of law rely on a framework for determining legal permissibility that runs counter to, and perhaps demonstrates weaknesses in, Kamm’s framework for assessing moral permissibility. Part II considers the law of war. It maintains that, although modern law permits certain opportunistic acts of war, the law does so on terms that cut against Kamm’s claim as to their moral permissibility.

SSRN ARTICLE:Towards a Comparative and Localized Study of Brazilian Law and Literature

A new article from: Philosophy of Law eJournal

Click here to browse all articles of the Journal

"Towards a Comparative and Localized Study of Brazilian Law and Literature" (Free Download)
Direito e Literatura na Virada do Milênio/Law and Literature at the Turn of the Millennium. Ed. Sonja Arnold and Michael Korfmann. Porto Alegre: Editora Dublinense, 2014. 15-38.
GRETA OLSON, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen
Email: Greta.Olson@anglistik.uni-giessen.de
I am grateful to the editors of this volume for allowing me to contribute in the atypical form of a comment on the subject of the volume rather than with a scholarly essay. Composing an essay that might have made manifest in print what the title of my talk at the conference Literatura e Direito na virada do milênio/Law and Literature at the Turn of the Millennium had promised turned out to be an impossibility. In entitling my talk “Law and Literature in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany (and Brazil): Comparing Legal Systems, Literatures, and Cultural Preoccupations,” I discovered that I had promised too much. As an expatriate US American living in Germany and teaching British and American studies, I could not match the knowing I have of German, British, and American legal systems, literatures,and social issues with enough information about Brazil in a short time and without facility in Brazilian Portuguese. Thus the following has the character of a programmatic sketch rather than an analytic description.

ARTICLES: Philosophy of law eJournal

Two new, interesting articles from the last issue of the Philosophy of law eJournal:

"Preface for: Kafka's Law: 'The Trial' and American Criminal Justice" 

Preface in Kafka's Law: "The Trial" and American Criminal Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2014)
Northwestern Public Law Research Paper No. 14-35

ROBERT P. BURNS, Northwestern University - School of Law
Email: r-burns@law.northwestern.edu

Justice Kennedy famously claimed that Kafka's great work, "The Trial," expressed the reality of the American criminal justice system, at least from the defendant's point of view. This essay, the first sections a book just released by the University of Chicago Press, first summarizes the book's argument that the Justice got it just right, and then provides a close reading of "The Trial." This reading agrees with Hannah Arendt's view that the novel is centrally about institutional issues of justice and that it provides an "organizational gothic" vision of contemporary bureaucratic governance in criminal procedure.

"Human Rights Through the ATS after Kiobel: Partial Extraterritoriality, Misconceptions, and Elusive and Problematic Judicially-Created Criteria" 

6 Duke Forum for Law & Social Change 31 (2014)
U of Houston Law Center No. 2014-A-75

JORDAN J. PAUST, University of Houston Law Center
Email: jpaust@central.uh.edu

The evident split in Kiobel has, in the words of Justice Kennedy, left open a number of significant questions regarding proper elaboration and explanation of the extraterritorial reach of the Alien Tort Statute. Among these are whether a presumption against extraterritoriality should apply and, if it is used, whether inconsistent and ambiguous criteria are preferable in deciding when it is displaced. Extraterritoriality of some sort has been affirmed, but there is an evident lack of consensus on rationales, doctrines, and criteria.

For this reason, its is important to reconsider what the full set of early cases and opinions of Attorneys General add for proper decisionmaking regarding the statute’s evident reach; what is compelled by adequate awareness of the nature of the law that is expressly incorporated by reference and its jurisdictional attributes and substantive grasp; how congressional endorsement of the Filartiga line of cases should displace a judicially-created presumption as well as supposed “foreign relations” concerns and provide needed guidance; how the Charming Betsy rule supplements the need to interpret the statute consistently with universal jurisdiction and responsibility as well as human rights of access to courts and to an effective remedy under international law; and how the rationale in the Bowman exception to a presumption of non-extraterritoriality supports that requirement. This article provides a basis for such an inquiry. Part III identifies evident misconceptions in some of the opinions and is organized into eight areas.

BOOK: Legal Thought And Philosophy

Another new publication from Edward Elgar Publishing:

Legal Thought And Philosophy


What Legal Scholarship is About
Bert van Roermund, Tilburg University, The Netherlands
‘This book proves to be an excellent guide through the labyrinth of law. Its crucial point is legal order viewed from the perspective of a situated “We”. Jurisprudence appears as an implicit sort of thinking, embedded in moral, political, epistemological, and linguistic contexts. Numerous example cases lead us from everyday issues to the abysses of violence. Anyone who practises or studies law will highly profit from reading this book. One sees how law functions by being more than mere law.’
– Bernhard Waldenfels, Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany

Legal Thought and Philosophy clarifies background questions in legal research projects, such as the relationship between law and justice, law and politics, law and knowledge, facts and norms, normativity and validity, constituent and constitutional power, and rule and context. It provides advanced students in law and philosophy with an account of legal thinking that combines analytical and phenomenological insights.

From a conception of justice as principled political self-restraint, the book explains why there are moral reasons to separate law from morality conceptually and in what sense a legal order is positive – that is, set by authority and bound up with history. The book explores the conditions under which law may become an object of knowledge and theorising, before finally discussing how these features come together in law as rule-following by citizens, officials, judges, and legislators alike.

Addressing advanced students in law and philosophy, this key book:

• bridges separate traditions in legal philosophy (in particular analytical philosophy and phenomenology)
• develops a view of law as an institution of authority from a conception of justice in the socio-political relationship between ‘we’ and ‘the others’
• presents a systematic account of normativity and validity
• explains in what sense law is ‘doing things with rules’.

PROGRAMMES: LLM in History and Philosophy of Law

Applications are now open for the LLM by Research in History and Philosophy of Law at the University of Edinburgh. The degree:

builds on the Law School’s international reputation in Legal History and Philosophy of Law to offer an advanced training in legal history and legal theory. Our goal is to develop the next generation of leading legal historians and legal theorists through a combined programme of teaching and research.

The programme is designed to promote cross-fertilization between the fields of Legal History and Philosophy of Law, while allowing students to focus on the areas that interest them the most. Certain courses (such as Traditions of Legal Enquiry) expressly explore the relations between research in Legal History and research in Legal Philosophy, while others focus on more discrete areas of legal enquiry. Students are encouraged to choose (under the guidance of the programme director) specialised optional courses and a dissertation topic that reflect their interests, under the supervision of a member of School.

More information on the LLM may be found here.

Recommended. SPD