ARTICLE: Trubek on Law and Development

David M Trubek’s ‘Law and Development 50 Years On’ is available on SSRN. It’ll be included in the forthcoming International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences.

The abstract reads: 

Law and development refers both to organized efforts to transform legal systems in developing countries to foster economic, political and social development and to the academic projects stimulated by these efforts. Begun in the mid-20th century, law and development's dominant ideas and projects have changed over time as theories of development and agency priorities have changed. Law and development efforts accelerated in the 1990s as international financial institutions began to emphasize the rule of law. As the 21st century dawned, ideas and projects of the 20th Century were assessed and critiqued and new themes have emerged.

REMINDER: Pluri-Legal Discussion Group

Members might be interested in the excellent Pluri-Legal, an e-mail discussion group on JISC mail.

The group 'is devoted to issues regarding the legal accommodation of cultural, ethnic and religions minorities in Europe.'

It's often the site of informed and invigorating exchanges. 

You can join by going to: www.jiscmail.ac.uk/PLURI-LEGAL

JOURNAL - CALL FOR PAPERS: Post-Secularism: Between Public Reason and Political Theology

Post-Secularism: Between Public Reason and Political Theology

A Special Issue of THE EUROPEAN LEGACY

http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/cele20/current

 

Guest Editors: Camil Ungureanu (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona) and Lasse Thomassen (Queen Mary, University of London)

This special issue is scheduled for late 2014.

 

CALL FOR PAPERS:

 

In recent years, leading philosophers, including  Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and or John D. Caputo, have criticized "old-style" secularism and proposed instead  a post-secular model  for understanding the relation of religion and democracy, faith and reason. There are however profound theoretical and practical divergences in the post-secular models proposed. First, what are the precise characteristics of post-secularism as a philosophical alternative? In what sense could it be said to break with secularism? Second, what are the practical political and legal consequences of adhering  a post-secular approach? From a critical theoretical perspective, Habermas focuses on a revised concept of public reason and deliberation in promoting an active interaction of democracy and religion. From a hermeneutical perspective, Taylor’s recent work centres on the new "conditions of belief" and the dilemmas inherent to both religious and atheist experience. In contrast, Caputo and Richard Kearney develop a Derridean aporetic understanding of the nexus of democracy and religion, faith and reason, whereas Hent de Vries, William Connolly and Simon Critchley reject Habermas’s rationalist approach and propose a distinct understanding of post-secularism by focusing on Schmitt’s and Benjamin’s re-appropriation of the tenets of Saint Paul in their political-theological works. Although these trends have been studied to some extent, there has been no sustained attempt so far to subject them to a comparative analysis that would more fully address the issue of “post-secularism.”

 

REMINDER: Conference and Membership

REMINDER - CALL FOR PAPERS

DEADLINE: 15 January 2013

(one week away)

DIFFUSION:

an international,

interdisciplinary conference

3-4 June 2013, Lausanne, Switzerland 

Proposals should be submitted to sean.donlan@ul.ie. 

Don't forget that members receive discounts on conference fees (as well as other benefits); membership information is available here.

CALL FOR PAPERS - WORKSHOP: Minorities in the Colonial and Postcolonial Middle East

Call for Papers International workshop

The fragments imagine the nation?
Minorities in the colonial and postcolonial Middle East

Place and date: The Graduate Institute International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland, November 8–9, 2013.

Organizers: The International History Department at Graduate Institute International and Development Studies, Geneva, and the History Department at the University of Birmingham, UK.

Almost a century after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, scholarship on minorities in the Middle East shows a remarkable continuity. Minority politics have traditionally been considered as a problem, indeed as one of the main reasons for the “unsuccessful” consolidation of the nation-state in the region; they now appear, to many, as an obstacle to broader processes of democratization and liberalization within the context of the so-called “Arab Spring”. As Egypt struggles to elaborate a new constitution that would pave the way for the integration of all segments of its society, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon have witnessed an awakening of ethnic and religious tensions since 2011. Other states such as Iraq seem to be stunned by sectarian conflicts. In the face of these huge challenges, the Middle East is once more portrayed as a region doomed to endless ethnic and religious turmoil and, more importantly, their elites as incapable of getting rid of this “fatality”. And yet perceptions like these assume that such turmoil is primordial: a cause, rather than a symptom, of troubled times. They also, perhaps deliberately, elide the role of any external actors in fostering division and conflict.

REMINDER - CONFERENCE: A Plurality of Pluralisms

A PLURALITY OF PLURALISMS –

UNDERSTANDING LEGAL PLURALISM

SYMPOSIUM

REMINDER - REMINDER - REMINDER
14 JANUARY 2013
UNIVERSITY OF LAPLAND, ROVANIEMI, FINLAND

The world and the world of law are changing. Globalization and European integration have had a great impact on virtually every area of human life – social, economic, cultural, political, legal and technological. Simultaneously, we face mass migrations which inject new legal ideas and competing world views into national legal cultures. These developments are flanked by the rediscovery of old linguistic and ethnic internal pluralities within nation-states. Law today is increasingly more than state laws uniform to all, excluding other forms of law and administered by a single set of formal institutions. The legal traditions of indigenous peoples (eg, the Sámi, the Maori, etc) has also presented a renewed challenge to the state-centred paradigm of law. In short, legal plurality is today’s reality. Accordingly, debates about pluralism can no longer be confined the classical anthropological legal pluralism in colonial or post-colonial settings. Today, there are several forms of pluralism in law: constitutional, religious, disciplinary, philosophical, etc.

Several transnational processes have also transformed today’s legal professions: lawyers, attorneys, judges, public officials, translators, and scholars. Accordingly, the requirements for valid legal knowledge today are different from those of the past. The need for a comparative and non-national understanding of our plural laws, both within the state and without, and legal cultures is constantly growing. Accordingly, knowing how to deal with legal pluralism in practice is increasingly unavoidable. In order to be able to cope with pluralism, however, it is first necessary to understand it. The theoretical and methodological challenge of understanding legal pluralism is the scholarly core of this Symposium: rethinking conventional state-centred approaches to understanding law in terms of both methodology and substance.

Legal research (ie, the doctrinal study of law) in Continental Europe has traditionally been, and remains, nationally oriented. It is methodologically unequipped to deal with contemporary legal pluralisms and overlapping normative orders. This Symposium seeks to juxtapose and contrast theoretical and substantive perspectives on the plurality of legal pluralisms.

The Symposium is organised by the ULEP research project and LeCTra Research School (the University of Lapland) in cooperation with M-EPLI (the University of Maastricht).

The programme is available here.

SEMINAR: Minorities, Pluralism and Law

MINORITIES, PLURALISM AND LAW

9 January 2013

3-5pm

Room 313

Seminar Co-Hosted at the Queen Mary -- University of London School of Law by the  Legal Theory and Legal History Research Group and GLOCUL: Centre for Culture and Law

Professor Maleiha Malik, Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London

This paper takes current debates about religious law and religious tribunals, and especially sharia tribunals, that have been most recently discussed in the context of the attempts by Baroness Cox to regulate and criminalise religious arbitration (second reading of her private Arbitration and Mediation (Equality) Bill will be presented to the House of Lords on 19 October 2012). The paper uses methods from legal history and legal theory to challenge the assumption that there is, or should be, a reductionist picture summed up as 'one law for all'. It suggests that, contrary to popular contemporary assumptions that state law is the only valid form of normative regulation, an analysis of earlier historical periods, especially the medieval period, suggests a social field in which there were overlapping bodies of law, with very different geographical spheres, as well as co-existing systems of jurisdiction linked to distinct forms of communal life

This event is open to Queen Mary staff and PhD students. If you are not from Queen Mary and would like to attend, please contact Dr Maks Del Mar by email on m.delmar@qmul.ac.uk.

(Thanks to Prakash Shah)

BOOK: Cachard, Licari, et Lormant - The Thought of François Gény

I'm pleased to announce the imminent publication, by Dalloz, of:

La pensée de François Gény (2013)

Sous la direction de Olivier Cachard, François-Xavier Licari et François Lormant

Le présent ouvrage rassemble les contributions de spécialistes français et étrangers de la pensée de Gény, ainsi que celles de jeunes chercheurs, présentées lors du colloque sur la pensée de François Gény, organisé les 20 et 21 octobre 2011 à l’Université de Lorraine à l’occasion du cent cinquantenaire de sa naissance le 17 décembre 1861 à Baccarat. Lorsque Gény s’éteint le 16 décembre 1959 à Nancy, il laisse derrière lui une oeuvre monumentale et moderne.

Ce colloque est aussi l’acte de naissance de l’Institut François Gény, où le trait d’union entre les thèmes et projets réside précisément dans une approche méthodologique du droit, qui transcende la division contemporaine du droit en de multiples branches et rameaux.

Cet ouvrage sera suivi de la publication d’une sélection de fragments et d’inédits de Gény, rassemblés et présentés à l’issue des travaux de l’Atelier François Gény, pour que la communauté des juristes de ce siècle puisse continuer à trouver l’inspiration dans l’oeuvre du « juriste français le plus connu à l’étranger », selon l’expression du Professeur Philippe Malaurie.

Sommaire

BOOK: Hoeflich on the Law In Postcards & Ephemera

From The Lawbook Exchange:

JUST PUBLISHED- The Law In Postcards & Ephemera 1890–1962 by Michael H. Hoeflich. xi, 102 pp. color illustrations. ISBN 9781616193430 Hardcover. $75.


The prominence of law and lawyers in popular culture is shown in this full-color collection of late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century postcards and ephemera. From humorous cards depicting love, divorce, drinking and cute animals and children in legal garb to serious depictions of women lawyers, courthouses and law firm libraries, they are a rich source for understanding popular opinions of lawyers, the courts, and the law.

Contents: Introduction, Animal Lawyers, Child Lawyers, Dickensian Lawyers, Drinking Lawyers, Holidays, Ethnic Lawyers, Legal Humor, Law Buildings, Lawyers and Love, Lawyers and Money, Legal Advertising, Real Photo Cards, Women Lawyers, References to M. Galanter, Lowering the Bar.

Michael H. Hoeflich is the John H. & John M. Kane Professor of Law at the University of Kansas School of Law. He is the author of numerous books including Roman and Civil Law and the Development of Anglo-American Jurisprudence (1997), Sources of the History of the American Law of Lawyering (published by The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd., 2007) and Legal Publishing in Antebellum America (2010).

See also the The Lawbook Exchange's Facebook Page.

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS: Corpses, Contention, Colonialism Panel

The following invitation for abstracts for a Conference Panel Proposal was circulated on the H-Levant Discussion Network of H-Net:

“Corpses, Contention, Colonialism”
American Historical Association, January 2–5, 2014, in Washington, D.C.

The transnational flows of goods, ideas, and living bodies have attracted much attention from historians. These movements have often been accompanied by the movements of dead bodies for the purposes of burial, mourning, celebration, or display. Repatriations, exhumations, reburials, and taxidermies have often been used to assert and construct identities, heritages, boundaries, and hierarchies within the contexts of colonialism and decolonization. This panel will explore the meanings of these posthumous migrations of colonialism’s generals, victims, missionaries, and settlers, and of the fallen heroes of anti-imperialist movements, as well as more liminal bodies. The panel will examine the meanings of such corpse-flows and the ensuing debates, and situate them within our own debates about transnationalism and colonialism. (The AHA’s theme is “Disagreement, Debate, Discussion.”) 

The AHA encourages panels that are diverse in terms of institution type and stage of career. Julia Clancy-Smith, author of Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migrations, has agreed to serve as commentator. My own paper proposal would be tentatively entitled “The Decolonization and Disentanglement of the Dead: the 1960 Earthquake in Morocco.”

Please email abstracts and brief CVs (off-list) to ssegalla@yahoo.com as soon as possible: the conference deadline is early February, 2013.