ARTICLE: Legal Transplant of Undue Influence:

Mindy Chen-Wishart's "Legal Transplant of Undue Influence: Lost in Translation or a Working Misunderstanding?" has appeared on SSRN:


Is legal transplant possible? The stark bipolarity of a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer attracted by such a question is much less interesting and revealing than the question: what shapes the life of legal transplants? The answer to the latter question is contingent on a wide range of variables triggered by the particular transplant; the result can occupy any point along the spectrum from faithful replication to outright rejection. This case study of the transplant of the English doctrine of undue influence into Singaporean law asks why the Singaporean courts have applied the doctrine in family guarantee cases to such divergent effect, when they profess to apply the same law. The answer owes less to grand theories than to a careful examination of the nature of the transplanted law and the relationship between the formal and informal legal orders of the originating and the recipient society raised by the particular transplant. 

JOURNAL: European Property Law Journal

The following post appeared on the Maastricht European Private Law Blog yesterday:

Special Issue of the European Property Law Journal on M-EPLI’s round table on the functional method in property law

On Friday 17 June 2011, M-EPLI hosted its first Round Table Conference on the Use of the Functional Method in Comparative and European Property Law. The contributions to this Round Table Conference are now published in a special issue of the European Property Law Journal.

CALL FOR PAPERS: The Journal of Comparative Law in Africa

The Centre for Comparative Law in Africa, headed by our own Salvatore Mancuso, has announced both their latest newsletter and a new journal:

 
The Journal of Comparative Law in Africa is a peer-reviewed annual academic legal journal founded in 2013 and published by the Centre for Comparative Law in Africa, at the University of Cape Town (South Africa).

We invite scholars and jurists to submit manuscripts of original articles for possible publication in any then-current issue of the Journal by 31 July for the November issue.

For further details go to Call for papers on the link below
http://www.comparativelaw.uct.ac.za/
 

ARTICLE: Parolin on the (Re)Arrangement of State/Islam Relations in Egypt's Constitutional Transition

Our Gianluca Parolin has posted his

(Re)Arrangement of State/Islam Relations in Egypt’s Constitutional Transition on SSRN:

After briefly framing state/shari‘ah relations in pre-2011 Egypt, the paper (1) describes the negotiations behind the (re)arrangement of shari‘ah-provisions in the new constitution, (2) analyzes the content of the new provisions in their Hegelian relation to the previous Supreme Constitutional Court jurisprudence — expounding on the complex articulation of the explanatory note to art. 2 (art. 219) — and (c) considers the ramifications of the new arrangement, focusing on the impact of the mandatory referral to al-Azhar.

ARTICLES: Picker on International Economic Law/Peerenboom on Legal Transplants

Our own Colin Picker has just published 'Comparative legal cultural analyses of international economic law: a new methodological approach' in the new Chinese Journal of Comparative Law.

The abstract reads:

The effective development and operation of the law faces many obstacles. Among the more intractable yet hidden barriers to the law are legal cultural disconnects and discontinuities. These occur when opposing legal cultural characteristics from different legal cultures are forced to interact as part of the implementation of the law across two different legal cultures. This conflictual interaction can impede or block the success of that law. While present in domestic legal systems, these conflicts are more likely, and may be deeper, between the many different legal cultures involved in the international legal order. Identification of such legal cultural disconnects and discontinuities is the first step towards developing strategies to ameliorate potential conflicts between opposing legal cultural characteristics. This identification requires the examination of the relevant legal systems with legal culture in mind—a legal cultural analysis. However, this methodology is rarely employed. To the extent that we do see legal cultural analyses, they are applied almost exclusively in the domestic arena. When it is applied across legal systems, it becomes a part of comparative law methodology. This merger of comparative law and legal cultural approaches is unusual, indeed almost unheard of in the international legal arena. This article explores this methodology and argues that it is possible and valuable.

Note, too, Randall Peerenboom's 'Toward a methodology for successful legal transplants':

The results of many reform projects focused on the substance of legal transplants, which have prescribed particular laws, practices, or institutions, concepts, norms, and attitudes, have been disappointing. The lacklustre results have called attention to the need to develop a workable methodology for legal reforms, focusing on the processes of reform. One of the shortcomings of the current rule of law promotion programs is that they tend to prescribe a common set of ‘best practices’ for all countries. Relatively little work has been done to differentiate developing countries and develop categories or ideal types based on the types of challenges they face. Accordingly, this article lays the groundwork for a methodology of legal reforms based on differential analysis by distinguishing between three ‘exceptional cases,’ including failed states, post-conflict states, and transitional states, as well as between low-income countries and middle-income countries, and it develops a preliminary methodological framework for assessing legal reforms and legal transplants.                 

NEW JOURNAL: The Chinese Journal of Comparative Law

The Chinese Journal of Comparative Law:
New from Oxford University Press in 2013!
Now open for submissions

The Chinese Journal of Comparative Law (CJCL) is an independent, peer-reviewed, general comparative law journal published under the auspices of the InternationalAcademy of Comparative Law (IACL) and in association with the Silk Road Institute for International and Comparative Law (SRIICL) at Xi’an Jiaotong University, PR China.
 
CJCL aims to provide aleading international forum for comparative studies on all disciplines of law,including cross-disciplinary legal studies. It gives preference to articlesaddressing issues of fundamental and lasting importance in the field ofcomparative law and is particularly interested in publishing works having closerelevance to the development of the Chinese legal system and the widerdeveloping world.
 
For full access to the first issue of CJCL (March 2013), please view the table of contents.
 
Interested in submitting your work for consideration?
 
To read through manuscript submission instructions, please click here.

CONFERENCE: Crossing Over

5th Crossing Over International Symposium 11th to 13th October 2013 Cleveland, United States of America The Crossing Over International Symposium focuses on border studies. It analyzes borders as a physical, psychological and symbolic experience that affects relationships and negotiations among people around the world. We welcome papers about encounters, conflicts and resolutions between cultures, countries, races, religions, genders, ideologies, languages, neighborhoods, generations, social classes, etc. We are interested in an interdisciplinary dialogue within the Humanities and the Social Sciences. Keynote: Junot Diaz. Enquiries: crossingovercsu@gmail.com Web address: http://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crossingover/ Sponsored by: Cultural Crossings/Humanities Consortium

ARTICLE: Hendry on Legal Translation

Comparative Law and the (Im)Possibility of Legal Translation by Jennifer Hendry :: SSRN |sco.lt/9Je1B3
— Stephane Cottin (@cottinstef) May 16, 2013

BOOK: Fineman and Zinsstag on Feminist Perspectives on Transitional Justice:

Intersentia has published Martha Albertson Fineman and Estelle Zinsstag (eds), Feminist Perspectives on Transitional Justice: From International and Criminal to Alternative Forms of Justice:

Truth-seeking mechanisms, international criminal law developments, and other forms of transitional justice have become ubiquitous in societies emerging from long years of conflict, instability and oppression and moving into a post-conflict, more peaceful era.

In practice, both top-down and bottom-up approaches to transitional justice are being formally and informally developed in places such as South Africa, Liberia, Peru, Chile, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, and Northern Ireland. Many studies, conferences and debates have taken place addressing these developments and providing elaboration of theories relating to transition justice generally.

However, rarely have these processes been examined and critiqued through a feminist lens. The position of women, particularly their specific victimisation, typically has not been taken into account in any systematic manner. Seldom do commentators specifically consider whether the recently developed mechanisms for promoting peace and reconciliation will actually help the position of women in a society moving out of repression or conflict. This is unfortunate, since women’s issues are often overlooked and post-conflict societies, because they must rebuild, are ideally poised to introduce standards that would enable and ensure the active participation of the entire population, including women, in rebuilding a more stable, fair and democratic polity.

This book offers some insights into women’s perspectives and feminist views on the topic of transitional justice or ‘justice in transition’. Bringing feminism into the conversation allows us to expand the possibilities for a transformative justice approach after a period of conflict or insecurity, not by replacing it with feminist theory, but by broadening the scope and vision of the potential responses.

BOOK: Praduroux on the Protection of Property Rights in Comparative Perspective

Europa Law Publishing has published Sabrina Praduroux's The Protection of Property Rights in Comparative Perspective. A Study on the Interaction between European Human Rights Law and Italian and French Property Law:

The book offers a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to the issue of property rights protection in Europe. This approach explores the tensions between the European and the national level. This is done by highlighting the different understanding of the constitutional role of property within different legal cultures and legal orders. The interaction and dialogue between national law and supranational human rights law in the area of property law is therefore at the centre of the work. The book concentrates on the emerging conflicts between fundamental rights, the horizontal effect and the positive obligations of States in the area of property law, but also provides new insights on what the protection of property rights at the European level implicates for national legal orders. Investigating the constitutional dimension of private property, which currently appears to be particularly fragmented and complex due to the ever increasing influence of European human rights l aw over national laws, the work thus contributes to a critical understanding of the dynamic of property law in Europe today.

Sabrina Praduroux holds a PhD in Comparative Law from the University of Palermo and in May 2012 she was granted a PhD from the Faculty of Law of the University of Helsinki. Her experiences as trainee at both the European Court of Human Rights and the European Agency for Fundamental Rights, as well as a period as Visiting Scholar at McGill University, were of considerable value in writing the book. Her main fields of interest concern European human rights law and private law. Much of her work is comparative and interdisciplinary.