JOURNAL: Transnational Legal Theory

(2012) 3:4 Transnational Legal Theory is now published. It includes:

Articles
Lex Mercatoria, International Arbitration and Independent Guarantees: Transnational Law and How Nation States Lost the Monopoly of Legitimate Enforcement
Cristián Gimenez Corte

Accidental Cosmopolitanism
Alexander Somek

National Sovereignty and the Constitution of Transnational Law: A Sociological Approach to a Classical Antinomy
Chris Thornhill

Review

Cosmopolitan Pluralism as an Approach to Law and Globalisation: A review of Paul Schiff Berman, Global Legal Pluralism: A Jurisprudence of Law Beyond Borders by Lars Viellechner

ARTICLE: Licari on Rabbinical Arbitration

Member François-Xavier Licari (Lorraine) has made his 'L'ARBITRAGE RABBINIQUE, ENTRE DROIT TALMUDIQUE ET DROIT DES NATIONS (RABBINIC ARBITRATION, BETWEEN TALMUDIC LAW AND THE LAW OF THE GENTILES' available on SSRN. The abstract reads:

Rabbinical arbitration has existed for two thousand years, but remains largely unknown. After a long period of decline which lasted until the middle of the twentieth century, it is now in widespread use, and is participating in a renaissance of confessional arbitration throughout the world. Even though it applies fundamental mechanisms which are familiar to us, it is singular in several respects, the most significant being that rabbinical arbitration is not a form of alternative dispute resolution. For members of a Jewish community, it is – or should be – the principal mode of dispute resolution since, in principle, recourse to secular courts is prohibited by Talmudic law. Our study will start with the very nature and scope of this prohibition. Certain aspects of procedure before rabbinical tribunals also merit close examination. After having explored arbitration from an "internal" perspective, i.e. from Talmudic sources, we will examine this from an "external" viewpoint, i.e. from that of the law of nations, in other words the national legal system into which it must be inserted. Such insertion is not straighforward, since even though Talmudic law and the law of nations diverge in many respects by reason of their radically different nature (one is revealed, the other is contingent), in other respects they appear to be on a head-on collision course (witness evidence from women, inheritance rights in particular). This therefore raises questions as to the recognition and enforcement of rabbinical arbitral awards, and on the role of public policy in this respect.

The article was just published in (2013) Revue de l'arbitrage57.

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

SEMINAR: Shah on the Dysfunctional Legal Effects of Secularization

I've recently become aware of a seminar delivered by Prakash Shah (Queen Mary) at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (US).

The seminar was 'The Dysfunctional Legal Effects of Secularization: South Asians and Muslim Law in England'. It was jointly hosted by the Global Legal Studies Center and Center for South Asia at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, on 4 April 2013. The audio, and much more, can be found here.

 

SUMMER SCHOOL: Law Summer School (LSS) Bangalore 2013

We are pleased to announce that the call for applications has been launched for the Law Summer School (LSS) Bangalore 2013.

The LSS Bangalore, which is scheduled from August 25 to September 19, 2013, is an intensive course in international law, organized by the Faculty of Law at the University of Zurich in cooperation with the National Law School of India University (NLSIU) in Bangalore. Admission to the LSS Bangalore is open to 18 to 35 students who have a Bachelor’s or an equivalent degree in law.

The LSS Bangalore offers students an opportunity to intensify their legal knowledge in selected areas of specialization and, simultaneously, to acquire a reflective understanding of the Indian legal system within an intensive intellectual and cultural experience.

The following modules will be taught:

- Religion, Family, Gender and the Law
- European Economic Law
- Climate Change
- Comparative Constitutional Law

Participants may, in principle, enrol for two modules and will be required to take an exam or write a paper for each module. Following successful completion, graduates will be awarded six ECTS credit points per module. In addition, they will receive a Certificate of Attendance. The LSS Bangalore courses are fully recognized by the University of Zurich.

The application deadline is 15 May 2013. For further information and details regarding admission requirements, tuition fees, etc., please visit http://www.rwi.uzh.ch/lehreforschung/alphabetisch/buechler/lss.

REGISTRATION: Irish Society of Comparative Law Conference

Registration for the fifth annual Irish Society of Comparative Law (ISCL) Conference is now open here.

The School of Law at NUI Galway, Ireland will host the conference on 24-25 May 2013.

For additional information, contact Charles O’Mahony (charles.omahony@nuigalway.ie).

CONFERENCE: Crime, Media and Popular Culture

5th Annual International Crime, Media and Popular Culture Studies Conference: A Cross Disciplinary Exploration
23rd to 25th September 2013
Terre Haute, Indiana, United States of America

We invite those who are engaged in research, teaching and practices associated with the relationship between crime, deviance, social justice, and/or policy and law and that of media and popular culture. Each presentation must have a media or popular culture component. We accept both qualitative and quantitative research from all disciplines. In addition to the traditional panel presentation this conference also provides nine featured speaker sessions and entertainment each night of the conference. Each year we have presenters from 10 to 15 countries from a wide variety of backgrounds.

Abstracts and registration payments are due by May 6, 2013.

Enquiries: cmpc@indstate.edu
Web address: http://www.indstate.edu/ccj/popcultureconference/

CONFERENCE: Borders, Walls and Security

Borders, Walls and Security

International conference organized by the Raoul Dandurand Chair at the University of Quebec at Montreal in association with the Association for Borderlands Studies
University of Quebec at Montreal, Quebec, Canada October 17th and 18th, 2013
Fields: Political Science, Geography, Anthropology, Sociology, Law, Economics, Design, Biology, Art, Environmental studies, Feminist Studies.
Grad Students are welcome to submit a proposal.

In the post-9/11 world, fences and towers reinforce and enclose national territories, while security discourses link terrorism with immigration, and immigration with illegality, criminal violence and radical Islam. The European Union (EU) claims to tear down walls, while building external walls ever higher. At the same time, the US considers how best to deploy towers and walls along its border zones while implementing an integrated border management regime. This development is not limited to these two world regions, however. Elsewhere in the global world walls dissecting borderlands are becoming higher. In Asia, India is finishing up its fence around Bangladesh. On all four continents, changes in border policy go along with a heightened discourse on internal control and a shift from borderlines to an ubiquity of control. Such walls are ‘walling in’ as well as ‘walling out’. By this we mean that the traditional geopolitics of bordering are supplemented, rather than fully replaced, by a national biopolitics, involving new definitions of who belongs and who does not belong, who is potentially represented as a threat and a risk internally, and who should be removed from the body of the state.
 
The experience of migrations, asylum-seekers, targeted ethnicities, and non-citizen residents has also been profoundly touched by securitization assessments rooted in geopolitics emanating from assessments of conditions outside of the state. Law-enforcement agencies at national and even international level, problematize ethnicity and identity in context of terrorism and criminality, or associated geopolitical orientations based upon nationalist and ethnicity. Systems and facilities for monitoring and gathering data on migrants and asylum seekers, are a product of the opportunity offered by border control, and are now an important component of a counter-terrorist agenda. They too, demand walls in which to embed their technologies.
 
Participants are encouraged to critically examine the role of wall in security discourses, particularly with respect to immigration and citizenship, and to consider some of the following questions:
 

POSITIONS: The Competition of Normativities

2 Full-time PhD Positions on the Competition of Normativities

Perelman Centre for Legal Philosophy

Brussels, Belgium

The Interdisciplinary Seminar for Legal Studies of the Université Saint-Louis - Brussels; The Perelman Centre for Legal Philosophy at the Université Libre de Bruxelles; The Department of Moral and Political Philosophy at the Université de Liège are calling for applications for:

Two full-time PhD positions (+/- 1700€ net/month) to join a research project on the competition of normativities. The appointed persons are due to start on September 15th 2013 for a 2-year period, renewable once.

Research Project

The research project is funded by the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (F.R.S.-FNRS, FRFC project). The objective is to explore how “new normativities” replace, compete with or complement classical legal instruments. ISO standards, international accounting standards, managerial standards in the domain of justice, indicators, rankings, ratings and other European technical standards appear to constitute a new mode of regulation characteristic of “societies of control”, which differs from the legal and political model of sovereignty. The project aims to laid down a theoretical and critical model of standardization that would account, on the one hand, for the consistency and the articulation of these normative devices and, on the other hand, for their interactions with legal rules. The project relies on a theoretical framework of legal philosophy and legal theory with a strong focus on practice. It will also draw on insights from other disciplines - in particular sociology and economics.

BOOK: The Use of Foreign Precedents by Constitutional Judges

The Use of Foreign Precedents by Constitutional Judges
Edited by Tania Groppi and Marie-Claire Ponthoreau

In 2007 the International Association of Constitutional Law established an Interest Group on 'The Use of Foreign Precedents by Constitutional Judges' to conduct a survey of the use of foreign precedents by Supreme and Constitutional Courts in deciding constitutional cases. Its purpose was to determine - through empirical analysis employing both quantitative and qualitative indicators - the extent to which foreign case law is cited. The survey aimed to test the reliability of studies describing and reporting instances of transjudicial communication between Courts. The research also provides useful insights into the extent to which a progressive constitutional convergence may be taking place between common law and civil law traditions. The present work includes studies by scholars from African, American, Asian, European, Latin American and Oceania countries, representing jurisdictions belonging to both common law and civil law traditions, and countries employing both centralised and decentralised systems of judicial review. The results, published here for the first time, give us the best evidence yet of the existence and limits of a transnational constitutional communication between courts.

Tania Groppi is Professor of Public Law at the University of Siena.

Marie-Claire Ponthoreau is Professor of Constitutional Law and Comparative Law  at the University of Bordeaux.

Please click here for more details about the Hart Studies in Comparative Public Law Series

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