NOTICE: New Law and Humanities

The Winter 2011 issue of Law and Humanities is now available online.

The articles include:

• Christian Biet, Law, Literature, Theatre: The Fiction of Common Judgment
• Mark Fortier, Education, Aesop, Roger L’Estrange, and Equity
• Melanie L Williams, Conceptions of Moral Luck, Culpability, and The Reader
• Martin A Kayman, The Bill of Rights: ‘Icons’ of Liberty and Law in the Early Twenty-First Century
• Helge Dedek, The Splendour of Form: Scholastic Jurisprudence and ‘Irrational Formality’
• Catrin Fflur Huws, What is the Significance of the Mortgage in Love’s Labour’s Lost?

NOTICE: Tucker Lecture (Louisiana State University)

The Center for Civil Law Studies of the LSU Paul M Hebert Law Center presents the 36th John H Tucker, Jr. Lecture in Civil Law:

"The Quest to Implant Civil Law Method and Restrain Judicial Lawmaking:

Tracing the Origins of Judicial Methodology in Louisiana"

Dr Vernon V Palmer

Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 5:30 pm

Louisiana State University Paul M Hebert Law Center

McKernan Auditorium

Reception to follow in the Tucker Room

RSVP by 10 November 2011 to ccls@law.lsu.edu or 225-578-7831

CALL FOR PAPERS: Entanglements in Legal History: Conceptual Approaches to Global Legal History

I've been asked to post the following, exciting Call for Papers related to (what I call) the historical 'diffusion' of laws:

Entanglements in Legal History:

Conceptual Approaches to Global Legal History

Conference of Legal Historian, Lucerne – 2-6 September 2012

Conference MPI, Frankfurt -

Global History, World History, Imperial History, Atlantic or Pacific History: the variety of transnational historiography is growing ever larger. Hitherto, legal historians have rarely participated in these discourses. On a favourable interpretation, one could argue that legal historians have always thought, researched and worked transnationally – yet this might have different reasons.

It is certain that, in legal history, the exchange and overlapping of different normative spheres beyond territorially-constrained statehood has been the norm: the tiered territorial and legal spheres of influence of antique empires, stratified societies with their regulations tied to civil status, the coexistence of secular normativity and clerical normativity intersecting the secular realm, and finally the complex processes of the period of the ‘Reception’ belong to the classic objects of legal historical research. It has also become clear that the encounter of two hitherto co-existing normative orders, through the intensified exchange and communication since the 16th and particularly during the 19th century in two waves of globalisation, has attracted the interest of legal history.

NOTICE: Dupret on Adjudication in action and Practices of truth

Our member Baudouin Dupret (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (France) and Centre Jacques-Berque (Morocco)) has just released two books.

The first, published by Ashgate, is Adjudication in action: an ethnomethodology of law, morality and justice:

Adjudication in Action describes the moral dimension of judicial activities and the judicial approach to questions of morality, observing the contextualized deployment of various practices and the activities of diverse people who, in different capacities, find themselves involved with institutional judicial space. Exploring the manner in which the enactment of the law is morally accomplished, and how practical, legal cognition mediates and modulates the treatment of cases dealing with sexual morality, this book offers a rich, praxeological study that engages with 'living' law as it unfolds in action.

Inspired by Wittgenstein's later thought and engaging with recent developments in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, Adjudication in Action challenges approaches that reduce the law to mere provisions of a legal code, presenting instead an understanding of law as a resource that stands in need of contextualization. Through the close description of people's orientation to and reification of legal categories within the framework of institutional settings, this book constitutes the first comprehensive study of law in context and in action.

The second, published by the John Benjamins Publishing Company, is Practices of truth: an ethnomethodological inquiry into Arab contexts:

The claim of this book is that truth is a matter of language games and practical achievements: it is a “member phenomenon”. To document this statement, it proceeds to the investigation of instances of truth-related practices in various Arab contexts. Bearing on the constitution of actions and events, on what is factual or objective, on predictability, consequentiality, intentionality, causality, and on the many ways people orient to them, such a varied set of questions appears thoroughly moral. The praxeological respecification this book undertakes leads to important considerations regarding the question of morality in ordinary reasoning, and the categories and categorizations on which that morality is based: moral values are publicly available; morality has a modal logic; moral values and conventions have an open texture; objectivity is a practical achievement carried out by members of society; the moral order is an omnipresent, constitutive characteristic of social practice.

CALL FOR PAPERS: Mid-Winter Meeting of the Canadian Law and Society Association

A Call for Papers has been issued for the Mid-Winter Meeting of the Canadian Law and Society Association:

The Canadian Law and Society Association’s (CLSA’s) Mid-Winter meeting will take place at the University of Ottawa on January 27th and 28th, 2012 and will be co-hosted by the Justice Studies and Research Laboratory at the University of Ottawa. The mid-winter meeting provides an opportunity for members to get together to discuss professional and intellectual issues in a small, informal context. All presentations will be held on Friday, January 27th, 2012 and the Board meeting will be on Saturday, January 28th, 2012. (Board members are asked to attend since this is the main Board meeting of the year.)

RE: The Future of Law and Society (3-4 November 2011)

The Fiftieth Anniversary Conference of Berkeley's Center for the Study of Law and Society looks very exciting:

THE FUTURE OF LAW AND SOCIETY

Bancroft Hotel

November 3-4, 2011

The response to the announcement of the Center for the Study of Law and Society's 50th Anniversary Conference on the Future of Law and Society has been enthusiastic. To accommodate the growing numbers, the Conference sessions have been relocated to Booth Auditorium at Berkeley Law, just up the block from the Bancroft Hotel.

For those of you who have not yet registered, you are invited and encouraged to register (free) at the Conference. Online registration has been closed because Thursday dinner and Friday lunch have reached room capacity (at the Bancroft Hotel). But there is plenty of room at all the conference panels in Booth on Thursday and Friday, and you are welcome to partake of the continental breakfast on Friday and attend the Closing Reception on Friday. We hope to see you there.

REMINDER: The Concept of 'Law' in Context

REMINDER REMINDER REMINDER

'The concept of "law" in context: comparative law, legal philosophy, and the social sciences' Conference will be held this weekend (21-22 October 2011) at the Swiss Institute of Comparative law (SICL).

NOTICE: Brown and Donlan on The Laws and Other Legalities of Ireland, 1689–1850

One or two of you might be interested in a book I've just edited, with Michael Brown (Aberdeen), and published, with Ashgate. The Laws and Other Legalities of Ireland, 1689–1850:

is the first to concentrate attention on the actual relationship that existed between the Irish population and the state under which they lived from the War of the Two Kings (1689–1691) and the Great Famine (1845–1849). Particular attention is paid to an understanding of the legal character of the state and the reach of the rule of law, addressing such themes as how law was made and put into effect; how ordinary people experienced the law and social regulations; and how Catholics related to the legal institutions of the Protestant confessional state. These themes will help to situate the study of Irish society into the mainstream of English and European social history.

Other members should feel free to post similar information. Contact me and I'll add you as a blogger.

The contents of The Laws and Other Legalities of Ireland, 1689–1850 include:

NOTICE: Framing Multicultural issues in Terms of Human Rights

A one-day Seminar on ‘Framing multicultural issues in terms of human rights: solution or problem?’ will be held at the Utrecht University Law School on Monday 14 November 2011:

Building further on our special issue of the Utrecht Law Review of June 2010 called ‘Human rights law as a site of struggle over multicultural conflicts; Comparative and multidisciplinary perspectives’, we at Legal Theory in Utrecht felt the need to address the question which role human rights play in framing specific multicultural issues. Take for example the refusal to shake hands with the other sex. This ‘problem’ can easily be resolved, as often happens, in an informal and pragmatic manner. It can however also be framed in terms of ‘reasonable behaviour of an employee’, but just as well, it seems, in terms of a ‘horizontal working of human rights’: ‘freedom of speech/expression’ or ‘freedom of religion’ vs ‘non discrimination’ and ‘gender equality’.

We want to investigate whether it makes a difference (for whom, in what sense?) to frame an issue one way or the other, and what the role is that the (human rights) law itself plays. Do human rights, especially the ready availability of for example ‘freedom of religion’ these days, steer towards and thus influence certain solutions? If so, what are the consequences in terms of ‘backfire’ for the human rights system and for social relations (both on micro and macro level)? What are the gains, and for whom? And not the least interesting: what does a comparison between countries teach us? These questions partly need to be addressed empirically, like whether framing multicultural issues in terms of human rights is a recent phenomenon and whether shifts in the use of specific human rights can be discerned.

NOTICE AND CALL FOR PAPERS: ELSA Malta Law Review

ELSA MALTA, the Maltese chapter of the European Law Students' Association (ELSA) have recently launched the ELSA Malta Law Review, a new annual law review supported by the Chamber of Advocates (the Bar Association of Malta):

The aims of the Law Review are to provide students with exposure and to publish their research; to provide opportunities for students and young practitioners to enhance their academic writing and editing skills; to provide greater accessibility to legal scholarship for practitioners, academic and students; to publish research by academia.

Submissions are now being accepted for the second edition. The contents of the first issue include: