Workshop: Macao at the Crossroads of Different Legal Systems

Workshop: Macao at the Crossroads of Different Legal Systems

Objective: Macao is a civil law based legal system that is different from other jurisdictions, namely China and Hong Kong, but due to its geographic proximity to Hong Kong, for instance, there is an intercorrelation with the common law system. As such, it is a good case in point of how such legal systems can co-exist and learn from each other and provide a good opportunity to discuss if the differences between these legal systems remain relevant in an increasingly integrated world of “different” legal systems. An analysis of this framework is a very useful means to enrich and update our knowledge about the relations between different legal systems. Under this new context, this workshop aims at providing a platform that brings together different leading comparative law scholars, experts and legal professionals from the region to share their professional legal knowledge on this important contemporary legal theme.

One session will be dedicated to the issue of legal hybridity.

For more information and the program visit: http://www.ieem.org.mo/

NOTICE: Halpin on 'Conceptual Collisions'

Andrew Halpin has reviewed two important recents works on jurisprudence and non-state law. The review, entitled 'Conceptual Collisions', is currently available on SSRN:

 

This review essay considers two recent attempts to produce a concept of transnational, or loosely speaking, global law, in Keith Culver and Michael Giudice, Legality’s Borders: An Essay in General Jurisprudence, and Detlef von Daniels, The Concept of Law from a Transnational Perspective. Both works seek to expand upon Hart’s approach to finding a concept of purely municipal law, and both also differ from legal pluralism. Their argument with legal pluralism is not with the identification of a plurality of legal phenomena, but with a diversity of concepts of law in the theory covering those phenomena. The subject matter of the essay naturally provides a setting to reflect more widely on the use of concepts in theory formation, on the relationship between theoretical-conceptual understanding and empirical data, on the isolation of subjects through discrete concepts, and on the relationship between global and municipal legal phenomena. A further theme encountered is the nature of engagement with academic traditions, which is key to the link developed by von Daniels between Habermas and Hart. The ways in which each of the two projects are undertaken through processes of subtracting from Hart, discovering more in Hart, and adding to Hart, are examined in detail. The suggestions of joining or linkage between different types of legal systems (or orders, or regimes) is treated as having a particular significance in the respective attempts of the authors to demarcate a grouping of distinctively legal phenomena, as opposed to other social or moral phenomena. However, questions concerning the role state law occupies in the web of interconnections between different forms of legality, and whether greater harmony or more intense contestation might occur across those forms, remain to be answered. As does the puzzle which both projects accuse Tamanaha’s legal pluralism of failing to deal with: how a broad collection of diverse phenomena can possess analytical or explanatory bite. In conclusion, the essay considers the development of theory as depending not simply on the elucidation of concepts but also on the rejection of concepts that collide with empirical data; and suggests that a singular concept of law may have to be abandoned by a mature theory of law.

 

Note: Hat Tip to Larry Solum's very fine Legal Theory Blog.

NOTICE: Van Erp on the WSMJJ Congress and on 'Teaching Law in Europe'

Sjef van Erp has given his (continental) take on the recent Congress of the World Society of Mixed Jurisdiciton Jurists on the Maastricht European Private Law Blog. You might have a look.

Sjef also cites, quite appropriately, his own 'Teaching Law in Europe: From an Intra-Systemic, Via a Trans-Systemic to a Supra-Systemic Approach'.

NOTICE: New Issue of Jurisprudence: An International Journal of Legal and Political Thought

The newest volume of Jurisprudence: An International Journal of Legal and Political Thought is out and includes, in addition to numerous book reviews, the following:

Articles

Raymond Plant - The Jurisprudence Annual Lecture 2010: Freedom, Coercion, Necessary Goods and the Rule of Law

Katrin Flikschuh - On the Cogency of Human Rights

Eoin Daly - Non-Domination as a Primary Good: Re-Thinking the Frontiers of the ‘Political’ in Rawls’s Political Liberalism

Hans Lindahl - Boundaries and the Concept of Legal Order

Discussion: A Symposium on the Nature of Legal and Political Authority

Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco - Accountability or Preemption
Stephen Darwall - Authority, Accountability, and Preemption
Andrei Marmor - The Dilemma of Authority
Daniel Star and Candice Delmas - Three Conceptions of Practical Authority
Andrea C Westlund - Autonomy, Authority, and Answerability

NOTICE: Law and the Postcolonial

Glass House Books - Routledge Law has announced a new series on Law and the Postcolonial: Ethics, Politics, & Economy. The series is edited by Prof Denise Ferreira da Silva (Queen Mary University of London), Dr Mark A. Harris (La Trobe University), and Dr Brenna Bhandar (University of Kent):

Law and the Postcolonial: Ethics, Politics, & Economy seeks to expand the critical scope of racial, postcolonial, and global theory and analysis, focusing on how the global juridico‐economic apparatus has been, and continues to be, shaped by the Colonial and the Racial structurings of power. It includes works that seek to move beyond the previous privileging of culture in considerations of racial and postcolonial subjectivity to offer a more comprehensive engagement with the legal, economic and moral issues of the global present.

The following categories of works have been identified which would fit with the aims and objectives of the series:

1. Architectures, Apparatuses, and Procedures: with a focus on the legal‐economic institutions, frameworks, agreements, and processes, including multilateral agreements, the state, international financial institutions, International NGOs, etc.
2. Dispossession, Displacement and Obliteration: with a focus on the various strategies of appropriation of land and resources, exploitation of labour, processes that create forced and voluntary displacement of populations, or threaten or cause the eradication of local population
3. Occupation, Intervention, and Detention: with a focus on policing strategies and the related moral statements that sustain them, including humanitarian interventions, military occupations, the criminalization and detention of migrant works; the criminalization of economically dispossessed urban populations and racial and ethnic collectives
4. Grammars, Discourses, and Practices: with the focus on structures and mechanism of symbolic representation, and related moral (including religious), and legal frameworks, such as the Human Rights framework, with particular attention to how they enable the articulation of political subjects

This interdisciplinary series welcomes exclusively theoretical essays that engage with the conceptual and analytical questions detailed above and discussions of how particular conceptual approaches can illuminate existing processes and help in the study of the global landscape. In addition monographs and edited volumes, using qualitative and quantitative methods with a strong theoretical grounding, which deal with these questions and processes are also welcomed.

To discuss or propose an idea for a book, please contact the series editors at d.ferreiradasilva@qmul.ac.uk, B.Bhandar@kent.ac.uk, or Mark.Harris@latrobe.edu.au.

Guidelines for preparing a book proposal can be found at: www.routledge.com/info/authors.

NOTICE: JURIS DIVERSITAS Membership

Juris Diversitas has opened up to general membership and invites interested individuals to apply.

Juris Diversitas is an international, interdisciplinary community for the study of legal and normative mixtures and movements. Originally comparatists, we've opened up a conversation with anthropologists, geographers, historians, philosophers, and sociologists, both within the law and beyond.

Membership fees have been waived for 2011. In addition to being able to vote in elections, membership benefits will include a discount or exemption on conference fees. Individuals interested in becoming members should contact visit the Juris Diversitas blog for 'Membership Information'. All applications are evaluated by the Executive Committee.

NOTICE: International Conference on Sociology of Law (10-12 September 2011)

The International Conference on Sociology of Law has been announced for 10-12 September. The conference is the the Joint Annual Conference of the Research Committee on Sociology of Law (RCSL) and the International Sociological Association (ISA), with the Central University of Himachal Pradesh. The 'Welcome Note from the Organizing Secretary' reads:

It is indeed a great moment for me personally and for my university institutionally that an International Conference on Justice, Peace & Development is being organized under the joint aegis of the Central University of Himachal Pradesh and the Research Committee on Sociology of Law (RCSL) of International Sociological Association (ISA) at Dharamshala from 10-12 September 2011. I extend a cordial welcome to all the delegates of this Conference and look forward to facilitate intellectually very rigorous and meaningful interaction on behalf of my university as Organizing Secretary.

The end of Era of Enlightenment led to explosion of two major myths, i.e., the Myth of Liberation and the Myth of Truth as the Post-Modernists would argue. But there is no doubt that there were serious introspective debates regarding the legal solutions for the after-effects of war and invasion, the Nuremberg Trials after the World War II. These focused on those who committed massive crimes. It is a classic example not only of an International Criminal Law but also of the legal construction of justice for peace, which has been opted by those victors of a conflict to choose the LAW as a tool defining the responsibilities for an international community and also were held accountable before the international community. This is one of the milestones of legal solution towards conflict leading to PEACE, JUSTICE and DEVELOPMENT as every body knew how the nations stung by defeat and also the nations of victors chose legal solution towards DEVELOPMENT out of the war-ravaged destruction for a reformulated and also for a directed socio-economic and political transformation.

All these assert the fact that the closure of the war is not just an end to violence but to build sustainable peace. In the words of the Nuremberg Prosecutor Justice Robert H. Jackson: “That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay on the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgement of law is one of the most significant tributes that power has ever paid to reason”. These are of international and regional and local variants to contest the conflict caused tensions to result in peace and development with justice. Similarly, the war torn atmosphere turned out to be the beginning of aspirations among the colonized nations and subjects among the different continents. Again the closure of Colonization was the beginning of the Development, Justice leading to a peaceful transition to a nation hood and these had plethora of legal packages.

All these developments after the beginning of the second half of twentieth century pertaining to Peace, Development and Justice were full of a quest for a flawless law for establishing a NEW WORLD ORDER. In this regard, what was stated by Hans Corell, Under-Secretary-General for Legal Affairs for the UN, (at the All Africa Conference on Law, Justice and Development at Abuja, Nigeria, on 4th February 2003 with the title “Law, Justice and Development: A Challenge for Africa in the 21st Century”), is relevant here. Hans Corell has focused very briefly on six issues of interest to this Conference:

1.The role of lawyers,
2.The importance of regional experience,
3.Rule of law and human rights,
4.Criminal law,
5.Commercial law, and
6.Legal technical assistance.

While there are several theoretical assumptions of the production of law and more particularly of the social production of law , the argument of Habermas that law at the post-conventional level of social evolution is still based on moral principles which remain open to discussion: ‘The particular accomplishment of the positivization of the legal order consists in displacing problems of justification, that is, in relieving the technical administration of the law of such problems over broad expanses — but not in doing away with them’ (Theory of Communicative Action – Habermas, 1984:261). Modern law as a whole remains in need of justification, and can be criticized, precisely in order to unveil its systemic nature, under the abstract conditions of universalistic validity claims on normative rightness. Habermas further argued that people’s will and their sovereignty defines and redefines the focus of law, especially the legal codification of welfare rights of individuals. Universal Declaration of Human Rights is an essential factor protecting the human rights that respects international, public and personal law as a fundamental value of variant legal systems. A conference like the annual conference of the Research Committee of Sociology of Law of International Sociological Association cannot ignore the current development of the legal construction of gender, minorities, marginalized, oppressed, underdeveloped and their perspective towards the quest for PEACE, JUSTICE and DEVELOPMENT.

Once again, I wish to express my thanks to our Hon’ble Vice-Chancellor, Prof. Furqan Qamar, for all his encouragement and support. I would be failing in my duty if I do not acknowledge the perseverance, encouragement and generosity of RCSL President, Prof. Vittorio Olgiati, the members of RCSL Board and Prof D. Sundaram. I am also grateful to all my colleagues at the Central University of Himachal Pradesh for having extended a very smiling support and all help towards this event.

Prof. Arvind Agrawal

Please see the conference site for more details, including the call for papers.

CALL FOR PAPERS: 2011 Law and Development Institute Conference

Just received through the "Law and Development Review":

Call for Papers: 2011 Law and Development Institute Conference

The Law and Development Institute (LDI) is pleased to announce a call for paper proposals for the 2011 annual conference, entitled, "Law and Development at the Microlevel: From Microtrade to Current Issues in Law and Development". The conference will be co-hosted with Seattle University School of Law on December 10, 2011. The LDI calls for papers on any aspect of microtrade, which is a new system of international trade designed to alleviate populations of least-developed countries of extreme poverty (for a concept paper, click here), as well as for papers on other law and development issues that can be considered broadly at the "micro level", including but not limited to: microfinance, microinsurance, green growth and development, etc.

Paper proposals should be limited to a 500 word abstract, which must be received by July 15 at the latest. Accepted conference papers should be completed by November 15 for circulation among the participants in advance of the conference. All proposals must be sent by email to the Law and Development Institute, info@lawanddevelopment.net (with a cc to wtogeneva@hotmail.com). The paper proposals will be peer-reviewed by members of the editorial board of the The Law and Development Review. It is anticipated that paper selection will be completed by July 31, 2011. The selected authors will be invited to present their papers at the Conference. The conference venue is Seattle University School of Law, located in Seattle, United States. The invited speakers are expected to cover their own expenses to attend the conference.

Posted by Salvatore Mancuso

NOTICE: Donlan on Hybridity?

For those that missed it, the Third International Congress of the World Society of Mixed Jurisdiction Jurists was a great success. There'll be more news on it here shortly.

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One interesting topic that came up in Israel, admittedly more often after hours than during sessions, was the use of 'hybridity' as distinct from 'mixity'. The former, for me, includes not only state laws, but non-state norms. Obviously, this is very close to the many schools of 'legal' or 'normative pluralism', but I think there are differences that I hope to explore more fully in the future. While I've already repeatedly used--arguably abused--this notion of 'hybridity' in several articles, I'd welcome any feedback (preferably directly by email) from members on its definition, its utility, etc, etc.

Forgive the shilling, but, for those interested, the following recent, relevant, and closely-related papers are available on my SSRN page:

• ‘Comparative law and hybrid legal traditions: an introduction’ and ‘Histories of hybridity: a problem, a primer, a plea, and a plan (of sorts)’ for E Cashin-Ritaine, SP Donlan, and M Sychold (eds), Comparative law and hybrid legal traditions (2010)

• ‘Remembering: legal hybridity and legal history’ (2011) 2 Comparative Law Review 1

• ‘The Mediterranean Hybridity Project: at the boundaries of law and culture’ to be published in the Journal of Civil Law Studies in mid 2011

These articles attempt to create a foundation, especially in my narrative of Western legal history, on which to build an analytical concept that can also be applied within comparative law. The ubiquity of hybridity in both the past and present is, or so I argue, of considerable imporatance to legal philosophy as well.

Finally, note that my paper in Israel was also on the Mediterranean Project and touched briefly on the use of 'hybridity' in Post-Colonial Studies. This is closely related to my understanding of the meaning of the concept. I hope to follow up on this relationship shortly, perhaps also linking my discussion to that on 'critical legal pluralism'. This would attempt to combine both objective and subjective perspectives at the level of the legal or normative order and individual respectively.

I'd welcome your thoughts.

NOTICE: New Law and Humanities on Law and Literature

(2011) 5:1 Law and Humanities has just been released:

To celebrate the 5th anniversary of Law and Humanities, Volume 5, Number 1 is a special issue on Law and Literature with papers arising from an international symposium titled ‘Law and Literature: Theory and Practice’. The Editorial by Paul Raffield and Gary Watt as well as the Introduction by Christian Biet and Lissa Lincoln are free to view.

For further information please see below for the table of contents, information about online access and details on how to subscribe.

CONTENTS

• Editorial
• Introduction: Law and Literature, Christian Biet and Lissa Lincoln

MAPPING THE QUESTION

 

Crossing the Borders

• Law & Literature (as an epistemological break in legal theory), Gilles Lhuilier
• Narrative and the Origins of Law, Allison Tait and Luke Norris
• Before the Temple of Justice: Reading Roman Law Reading, Leif Dahlberg

Theory and Post-Theories

• Law and (which?) Literature: New Directions in Post-Theory?, Klaus Stierstorfer
• Slot-thinking, or Categorisation, in Law and Literature, Sebastian McEvoy
• Piracy as Method: Nine Theses on Law and Literature, Laurent de Sutter

JUDICIAL FICTIONS & LITERARY FICTIONS

Middle Ages & Early Renaissance Period

• Legal Theory, Legal Practice and Drama (1200–1600), Marie Bouhaïk-Gironès, Simon Gabay, Jelle Koopmans and Katell Lavéant
• A Logic of Appropriation: Practical Relationships between Law and Literature in the Middle Ages, Joël Blanchard
• Law and Literature in the Humanist Period: Encyclopædic versus Specialised Thought, Bruno Méniel
• The Experience of Law and Art Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Benvenuto Cellini’s La Vita, Romain Descendre (translated by Jane Gillon)

Early Modern & Modern Period

• From Obsessive Metaphors to Juridical Myth: Some Proposals for a Metaphorical Reading of Early Modern Law and Literature, Romain Jobez
• Schools of Law, School of Drama, Dominique Goy-Blanquet
• A Possible Co-Constitution of Theatre, Literature and Law, through the Example of Seventeenth-Century England, Natacha Israël

THEORY & PRACTICE

Theory & Other Disciplines

• Freedom of the Theatre: A Matter of Law?, Stéphanie Loncle
• For Extending the Domain of Research between Law, Economics and Literature, Martial Poirson
• Creating an International Court: A Movie Project, Christian Delage

Literature & the Practice of Law

• The Future of Literary-Legal Jurisprudence: Mere Theory or Just Practice?, Jeanne Gaakeer
• Crime Stories: The Polish Secret Police File and the Conflation of the Legal and the Literary, Anna Krakus
• Law and Literature: A Conjunction Revisited, Barbara Villez

The Dream of Equity

• Equity: Assessing the Results of a Project, Daniela Carpi
• The To Be Of And: Reflections on the Bridge, Gary Watt
• The Oneiric Imagination and the Dream of Law, Paul Raffield

Law & Literature Present & Future

• Appearing, or ‘Face-to-Face’ Dialogue, Sandra Travers de Faultrier
• Judicial Spectacle Events as Reality and as Fiction, Guy Spielmann
• Justice Imagined: Albert Camus’ Politics of Subversion, Lissa Lincoln
• A-N-D, Richard H Weisberg