CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS: Mediterranean Hybridity Roundtable

An interdisciplinary roundtable on the legal and normative hybridity of the Mediterranean region will be held in Catania on Monday, 25 October 2010. Organised with Juris Diversitas and hosted at the University of Catania, the event is part of the Mediterranean Hybridity Project launched in Malta in June 2010.

The extraordinary legal and normative hybridity of the Mediterranean was produced in a complex history of conquest, colonisation, and social and legal diffusion across shifting and porous boundaries. But studies of the subject have been isolated, sporadic, and too often framed within narrow jurisdictional and disciplinary constraints.

The Mediterannean Hybridity Project is creating a collaborative interdisciplinary network of experts to study both (i) the state laws that are the domain of lawyers and (ii) the wider normative orders typically studied by social scientists. The project marries conceptual and empirical models from the legal and social sciences, especially earlier analyses of ‘mixed legal systems’ and normative (or legal) pluralism.

Our intention is to create multidisciplinary jurisdictional reports, resulting in a published collection, and a database on the laws and non-state norms of the region. The roundtable will allow the project leaders to select the participants involved over the course of the project and to finalise the questions to be posed.

The outcome of the project will be more accurate, useful, and accessible accounts of Mediterranean legalities. It may produce an analytical model more useful than existing taxonomies and methods for new research in the region, in Europe, and around the world.

The project leaders are Dr Seán Patrick Donlan (University of Limerick), Dr David Zammit (University of Malta), and Dr Simon Mercieca (University of Malta).

While the organisers will not be able to fund expenses, there is no cost to attend. We are especially eager to include participants (i) from the Balkans, the Levant, and North Africa and (ii) anthropologists, geographers, historians, and sociologists.

For additional information, contact Dr Seán Patrick Donlan (sean.donlan@ul.ie) or, after 1 September, Dr Biagio Andò (bando@lex.unict.it).

NOTICE: Juris Diversitas Membership

Juris Diversitas will soon be accepting membership applications. Information will be posted shortly on our blog.

In addition to being able to vote in future elections, members will be charged reduced fees for conferences held in the year of their membership. Additional benefits are being negotiated.

Individuals interested in membership should sign up for alerts.

Anyone willing to assist Juris Diversitas in our work or with suggestions should contact Dr Seán Patrick Donlan (sean.donlan@ul.ie).

NOTICE: Transnational Legal Theory

I've just received notice that the latest (second) issue of Transnational Legal Theory has been published.

Having reviewed again the editor's introduction to the journal, I was surprised how close its aims were to our own. I've included the introduction in full below:

Welcome to the inaugural issue of Transnational Legal Theory (TLT), a peer-reviewed journal published by Hart Publishing. As Convening Editor charged with initiating and overall editing of TLT, I am both delighted and humbled by the response to TLT in its formative stages. In particular, a second-to-none group of scholars from around the world, spanning a number of sub-disciplines and a range of theoretical approaches within the legal academy, has enthusiastically signed on as TLT’s editorial team. Almost to the person, each expressed the view that just this sort of journal is needed at this juncture in the evolution of legal scholarship worldwide.

TLT will publish high-quality theoretical scholarship that addresses transnational dimensions of law and legal dimensions of transnational fields and activity. We seek to be a journal of first recourse for scholars seeking to push the boundaries of contemporary legal theory in ways that take seriously how transnational contexts, forces and ideations affect debates within existing traditions, schools of legal thought, or subject-matter fields of law. Similarly, TLT aspires to challenge scholars debating general theories about law, as well as those working in the particular jurisprudence of a variety of fields (criminal law, family law, tort law, the law of evidence, and so on), to integrate the relevance of transnational contexts and dimensions into their work.

Transnational Legal Theory’s mandate includes theoretical work that explores fresh (or revived) understandings of both international law and comparative law ‘beyond the state’ (and the interstate). In particular, we seek works that explore the interfaces, intersections and mutual embeddedness of public international law, private international law and comparative law, in terms of whether and how such inter-relationships are reshaping and blending these sub-disciplines in directions that are in important respects ‘transnational’ in nature.

The journal is also much interested in pushing into new terrain the study of the interaction of legal systems or legal orders in such contexts as the following examples: constitutional law theory on the reception of various forms of external law by states’ legal orders; jurisdictional theory on the external projection of states’ legal order; public law theory on the evolution of regional legal orders such as that of the EU; theorisation of law as ‘global’ in contradistinction to law as either international or transnational; and processoriented approaches to policy formation, decision-making, and operationalisation of law, from transjurisdictional litigation to delocalised arbitration to multi-level governance. Importantly, it should be emphasised here that the journal’s mandate is ecumenical in an important sense, namely in that the work of the journal is not governed by any specific definition of ‘transnational’. Most particularly, ‘transnational legal theory’ need not be understood as synonymous with theories of or about something to be called ‘transnational law’. Indeed, contributors are in no sense expected to accept the existence and/or desirability of a form or forms of law best styled ‘transnational law’ and are further welcome to critique such conceptions.

There is another sense in which the journal is pluralistically minded. The ‘legal theory’ of Transnational Legal Theory is understood broadly to encompass a variety of inter- and sub-disciplinary theoretical approaches to law or to law-like normativity, including, to name only some, philosophy of law, legal sociology, legal history, law and economics, international relations theory, and political and moral theory. It further includes the best of what one might call doctrinal-theoretical explorations of subject-matter fields commonly understood by field insiders as transnational in some meaningful sense (fields such as commercial arbitration law, maritime law or law of the internet)—on condition that readers be able to distill important general lessons from the article on the shape of law outside the confines of purely state-law or interstate-law assumptions. Such it is that, as Convening Editor, I approach ‘transnational legal theory’ as une salle polyvalente (a wonderful term I first came across 15 years ago as signage on community centres throughout southern France). To push the metaphor somewhat inelegantly, Transnational Legal Theory is an edifice still at the planning stages and, in the spirit of the networked epistemologies of the contemporary world, I invite everyone to join in as co-architect.

Craig Scott, Professor of Law,
Osgoode Hall Law School, Toronto

That second issue's contents include:

Articles

Transnational Legal Pluralism
Peer Zumbansen

Constitutional Tipping Points: Sustainable Constitutionalism in Theory and Practice
Victor V Ramraj

Global Corporate Social Responsibility, Human Rights and Law: An Interactive Regulatory Perspective on the Voluntary-Mandatory Dichotomy
Radu Mares

Reviews

Framers and Problematisers: Getting to Grips with Global Governance
Roger Brownsword

Defining the Crime of Aggression
RA Duff

Citizenship and Injustice in Immigration
Colin Grey

An ‘Empire of Law’? Controlling Executive Power in a Worldwide Polity
Martin J Wiener

The Worlds of the Trusts at McGill

The Quebec Research Centre of Private and Comparative Law announces a conference entitled The Worlds of the Trust/La fiducie dans tous ses États, 23-25 September 2010, at the Faculty of Law, McGill University.

Until recently, the trust was often described as foreign to the logic of the law of property in the civilian tradition. This assertion is increasingly untenable, as the profile of the trust in legal systems with a civilian law of property continues to develop and expand. This conference seeks to explore the multiple ways in which civilian and mixed legal systems have embraced the trust, with the goal of allowing jurists from different jurisdictions to better understand their different approaches to this increasingly important legal institution.

This conference promises to be a new point of departure in the comparative study of trust law. Twenty papers will be presented which examine issues relating to the nature and operation of trusts in civilian and mixed legal systems. Commentary on the papers will be provided by commentators with expertise in the common law trust. The working languages of the conference will be English and French. Simultaneous translation will be provided.

Speakers at the conference include: François Barrière, Université Paris-II(Panthéon-Assas); Alexandra Braun, Oxford University; François du Toit, University of the Western Cape, Republic of South Africa; Thomas Gallanis, University of Iowa; George Gretton, University of Edinburgh; Lusina Ho, University of Hong Kong; Mr. Justice Nicholas Kasirer, Quebec Court of Appeal; Paul Matthews, King's College London.

Commentators include: Gregory Alexander, Cornell Law School; Aline Grenon, University of Ottawa; John Langbein, Yale Law School; Ben McFarlane, Oxford University; Tina Piper, McGill University; Robert Sitkoff, Harvard Law School; Lionel Smith, McGill University; Donovan Waters, University of Victoria (Emeritus).

The full programme is available at

http://www.mcgill.ca/crdpcq/activities/trust/

The online registration system will be available in late July. The conference will be accredited by the Barreau du Québec as part of its mandatory continuing legal education programme.

The Quebec Research Centre of Private and Comparative Law acknowledges with gratitude the financial support that it has received from the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel Foundation, from Quebec's Ministère du Développement économique, de l'Innovation et de l'Exportation, and from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

CALL FOR PAPERS: Legal Pluralism and Democracy (9-11 June 2011)

I recently received the following Call for Papers:

Legal Pluralism and Democracy: When does Legal Pluralism enhance,

when does it erode Legitimacy of and Trust in Democratic Institutions?

Workshop to be held at the International Institute for the Sociology of Law (IISJ) in Oñati, Spain, June 9-11, 2011 and convened by Mirjam Künkler (Princeton University) and Yüksel Sezgin (Harvard Divinity School)

The introduction of colonial (secular) law notwithstanding, many countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America have since independence adopted schemes of legal pluralism and multiple jurisdictions where pockets of law are adjudicated based on (positivized) religious and customary legal norms. Colonial administrations seldom imposed their own law in the realm of family- or personal status law, and sometimes also adjudicated in matters of criminal law based on local norms (or colonial interpretations thereof), rather than on the basis of standards in criminal law prevalent in their own societies. Since independence, many post-colonial states therefore function with multiple jurisdictions, often in order to accommodate cultural particularity. As a result, differentiations based on religion, gender and culture in both rights and duties often exist within the same politico-legal space. On the one hand, such differentiations, including group rights, may protect cultural particularity and enhance trust in central/national administrations by alleviating the burden of assimilation into a national culture. On the other, they may introduce unequal legal standards undermining internationally recognized civil and human rights. Especially in countries that have democratized and thus carry the promise of international rights standards, tensions may arise between accommodating for cultural particularity on the one hand, and delivering upon the promise of universal and equal citizenship on the other – both of which are crucial sources of legitimacy and trust in nascent democracies.

This workshop examines the implications of legal pluralism and multiple jurisdictions for the quality of post-colonial democracies. From Indonesia to Senegal, India to Peru, the Philippines to Mongolia, states have been faced with the trade-off between difference and inclusion, unity and equality, accommodating for particularity in their legal systems versus delivering upon their promise of unitary rights standards. The legitimacy and trust in democratic regimes hinge upon these mutually exclusive projects. For the purposes of the workshop, we understand as having legal pluralism both those states that officially recognize multiple jurisdictions (such as Indonesia with special qadi courts), those that within a unified judicial system apply different codes of law (such as India with “sharia” law for Muslims), and those states where informal justice is a common phenomenon (as in the application of non-codified customary law through non-state authorities like village elders).

We welcome paper proposal that specifically address questions such as: when does legal pluralism hinder or advance the support for and trust in democratic values and institutions? When and how can legal pluralism reconcile competing demands for equality, unity and particularity without disrupting democratic institutions and processes? While the workshop will focus on post-colonial democracies, we also welcome paper proposals that draw comparisons to democracies that did not emerge from a colonial context, but whose legal systems are plural.

The Workshop shall bring together junior and senior scholars of Law, Political Science, Anthropology and Sociology, as well as practitioners and activists involved in legal reform. We hope to strike a balance between accounts based on rich ethnographies, and those based on comparative-institutional analyses. Both types should allow us to inform a better theoretical understanding of the consequences of legal pluralism for the quality of long-standing and nascent democracies and the trade-offs states face in designing legal and judicial institutions that are perceived as culturally legitimate but also comply with universal rights standards.

Each participant will be asked to present a paper of 6,000-8,000 words, and panels will be organized comparatively. To open the discussion, one participant will be asked to offer a ten-minute commentary on a given paper, before the floor will be opened for discussion of the paper among all participants.

Papers shall be circulated eight weeks ahead of the workshop, and shall afterwards be edited and submitted for publication in the IISL working paper or book series.

Please email paper abstracts of 350 words and a short bio until August 10, 2010 to the Workshop Directors at legalpluralism-onati@hotmail.com

NOTICE: Malta Symposium Collection - Journal of Civil Law Studies

Juris Diversitas is pleased to announce that arrangements have been made to publish papers generated by the recent Maltese symposium (June 2010) in the Journal of Civil Law Studies (JCLS).

The JCLS is published by the Center for Civil Law Studies at the Paul M Hebert Law Center of Louisiana State University. The JCLS has a brief that overlaps with the themes of the conference.

Articles are likely to be published next spring and will be available both online and in print.

Note that more information will also be available soon on the Mediterranean project.

ERD Regional Conference

European University Institute - ROBERT SCHUMAN CENTRE FOR ADVANCED STUDIES

ERD Regional Conference

Promoting Resilience through Social Protection in Sub-Saharan Africa

Novotel Dakar - Avenue Abdoulaye Fadiga - Dakar - Senegal

28-30 June 2010

The Conference builds on a wealth of country-specific studies as well as on regional research mainly on Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) to address they key question of which types of social protection have worked and/or are expected to work best for the region. Some of the major challenges facing social protection design and implementation in SSA such as chronic poverty, state fragility, financial viability and donor involvement are assessed.

For additional information about the program, the registration formalities and other issues contact the European Report on Development Secretariat at

ERD.Secretariat@EUI.eu.

NOTICE: Von Daniels on Law from a Transnational Perspective

Ashgate's published another very interesting title: Detlef von Daniels' The Concept of Law from a Transnational Perspective:

This book brings together the fruits of different traditions in legal philosophy and draws on them to develop a systematic thesis on the concept of law. The work uses a legal model to explore the underlying question of how the current phenomena of transnational law are best understood, in combination with an examination of the traditions of Jürgen Habermas's critical theory and H.L.A. Hart's analytic jurisprudence. This leads the authors to conclude that the key to a fruitful dialogue and comprehensive understanding is to appreciate that the concept of law is not state-cantered and must reflect relationships to other legal systems.

NOTICE: 2011 Symposium on Comparative Early Modern Legal History - 'The Struggle for Land: Property, Territory, and Jurisdiction in Early Modern Europe and the Americas'

The 2011 Symposium on Comparative Early Modern Legal History at Chicago's Newberry Library will focus on 'The Struggle for Land: Property, Territory, and Jurisdiction in Early Modern Europe and the Americas'. It will take place from 9-5 on Friday, 8 April, 2011. The Symposium is organised by Tamar Herzog (Stanford) and Richard J. Ross (Illinois, Urbana-Champaign).

The description reads:

The struggle to possess and control land, both as property and as jurisdictional territory, was central to the formation of early modern European societies as well as their colonial domains. This conference will look at how Europeans defined the right to land both at home and overseas. We will examine how so-called European expansion influenced the conceptualization of property and territorial jurisdiction and the relationship between them. Conference participants may explore how notions of property and territoriality changed over time; and how colonial needs and the encounter with new cultures reshaped these notions. In what ways did “international competition” and the emergence of an “international law” (to use an anachronism) modify property and jurisdiction? How did economic, social, and political developments influence new ideas and experiences regarding the land? In what ways did these ideas and experiences shape practical strategies for claiming land and asserting rights to govern it and profit from it? We are particularly eager to know whether these encounters encouraged, consciously or not, borrowing between different European legal systems as well as between settlers and indigenous peoples. How was the movement and refashioning of legal knowledge bound up with the movement of peoples and refashioning of modes of control over land? We would like to encourage an interdisciplinary conversation among lawyers, historians, sociologists, geographers, and literary scholars.

NOTICE: 'Comparative Law and International Organizations: Cooperation, Competition and Connections' (Swiss Institute of Comparative Law, Lausanne, 9-10 September 2010)

The Swiss Institute of Comparative Law (SICL) has organised a Juris Diversitas-inspired colloquia on 'Comparative Law and International Organizations: Cooperation, Competition and Connections' from 9-10 September 2010.

 

 

The concept is as follows:

 

Contemporary comparative law is more than just a method of legal research. The explosion in numbers of international organizations after the Second World War dragged this “academic law” out of the shadows of legal libraries and made it become an instrument of and material for the construction of new legal institutions .

 

International organizations today are veritable laboratories of “living comparative law” where the practical implementation of comparative methods may be observed. In fact, the use of comparative law by international organizations occurs on several levels.

 

On the one hand, comparative law is applied in the construction of international entities. Indeed, international organizations and, in consequence, the international law they produce are “artificial legal orders” as opposed to the usual “naturally grown” legal orders of states. Historically, the national legal orders developed before international organizations, which, therefore, have been designed after the image of the former. Thus comparative law has become not only an instrument of construction, but also a sphere of competition among several legal traditions: the duel between the civil law and common law was followed by the increasing influence of the law of the Nordic countries as well as the Islamic legal tradition and the law of the former socialist countries. In order to be able to understand international organizations, it is essential to analyze this “competition of legal traditions” and to study the nature of international entities and of the law they produce: Is one legal tradition predominantly influencing an international organization – and what are the reasons and the consequences? Or is it actually a “chemical reaction” resulting in hybrid legal orders, for example somewhere between common and civil law, a fusion of elements from several legal families or traditions?

 

On the other hand, comparative law unquestionably also plays an important role in the daily work of international entities. Comparative studies concerning the legislation and practice within the member states are becoming an increasingly important part of the international organizations’ legislative process. This approach bears witness to the goal of finding a common denominator, a universally acceptable minimum standard, or a model-law conveying the most suitable solution. Within the work of international developmental organizations, comparative law is often a tool in the search for the best solution when proposing legislation to be adopted in assisted countries.

 

Furthermore, the case-law of the international courts facilitates the transposition of concepts from one legal tradition to another, thus contributing to blurring the boundaries between the major legal traditions. To give but one example: by interpreting the notion of “contractual obligations”, the European Court of Justice imposes on the British judge the duty to apply, in certain cases, a concept originating in the continental legal traditions.

 

Comparative law is therefore used as a reservoir for good practices, optimal legal solutions that enable international legislators and judges to propagate the models of law which best correspond to the objectives of the organization which they represent. By allowing for a “free movement of models of law”, the normative and judicial activities of international organizations contribute to the erasing of the borders separating the major legal traditions. The impact of this tendency on actual and future legal systems requires reflection: Which legal tradition shapes a changing legal system? Is it primarily one tradition, or does it incorporate the features of two or more legal traditions? What are the implications of “hybrid” models of law? And what are the reasons for the influence of a legal tradition? Is it the feature and quality of a legal tradition, geopolitical factors, the personalities involved, or pure coincidence that determines the influence of a legal tradition?

 

The aim of this conference is to lay the foundations for finding the answers to these questions. In three half-days, the conference endeavors to open up avenues for reflection on the functioning of international organizations, on the contents of the international legal rules they produce and on the crossed influences of the major legal traditions (e.g., civil law, common law, Islamic law, law of the Nordic countries, and law of the former socialist systems). Furthermore, the reverse influence of the international entities and their legal rules on the internal law of the member states will also be examined.

 

Taking examples such as the United Nations Organization, the European Union, the Council of Europe, the European Court of Human Rights, the World Trade Organization and the World Bank, this conference aspires to study the international organizations, on the one hand, as hybrid legal systems (1st half-day, 9th of September), and, on the other hand, as “consumers” and “producers” of comparative law, confronting their member-states’ national legal orders to search for and propagate the “most suitable solutions” (2nd half-day, 10th of September). These two topics will be brought together in a round table discussion on the various interactions between national and international legal orders and the different roles of comparative law in this process (3rd half-day, 10th of September).

 

The programme and registration information is available on the SICL Website. Speakers will include, among others,:

• International Legal Order’s Mixed Heritage - Colin B. Picker
• International Trade Law (WTO) - Gabrielle Marceau
• International Environmental Law - Markus W. Gehring
• International Law of Human Rights - Daniel Rietiker
• The ECJ’s Perspective - Ludovic Bernardeau
• International Commercial Arbitration (ICC’s) - Francesca Mazza
• The World Bank - Klaus Decker
• The Experience of International Development Agencies: UNDP - Ekaterina Kouznetsova
• The European Union in the Field of Consumer Law - Brigitta Lurger

 For additional information, contact Martine Do-Spitteler at martine.do@isdc-dfjp.unil.ch. Tel. +41(0)21 692 49 11 – Fax +41(0)21 692 49 49.