REVIEW (Juris Diversitas Series): A Study of Mixed Legal Systems: Endangered, Entrenched or Blended

This review just appeared in the Journal of Legal Pluralism: 'This book's collection of interesting case studies of hybrid legal systems not only provides us useful insights regarding the ongoing process of mixing in general, but also in reference to the particular cases presented. It, therefore, is an important addition to the literature on mixed legal systems and comparative law in general, and will undoubtedly prove a boon to further research.' See the review or information on the book and the series.

CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT: LEGAL PLURALISM IN EUROPE AND THE ORDRE PUBLIC EXCEPTION: NORMATIVE AND JUDICIAL PERSPECTIVES

Trento, Faculty of Law, 16 and 17 April, 2015 

The International Workshop draws its inspiration from the circumstance of several countries in Europe experiencing a growing number of cases in which individuals (mainly immigrants) claim to have a series of family and personal matters regulated by the law of their country of origin, under international private law.

In so far as this foreign law corresponds to – or is largely influenced by – Islamic law (or other religious law), domestic legal systems in Europe face the problem of reviewing the compatibility of such religiously inspired foreign law with domestic (and European) fundamental rights standards, mainly by applying the public policy (ordre public) exception which prevents the administrative application or the judicial enforcement of foreign law or foreign judicial or administrative decisions that are qualified as incompatible.

The International Workshop aims at considering the current attitude shown  by  the judiciary in legal systems strongly influenced by Islamic law as well as in some European states, while ultimately focusing  on whether a shared European ordre public exception in the field of family law is emerging in case law.

The program of this event is available from this link.

BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT: Fundamental Rights in the EU

A Matter for Two Courts

Edited by Sonia Morano-Foadi and Lucy Vickers

This collection joins the new and expanding scholarship on the protection of fundamental rights in Europe and reflects on the relationship between the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). The book questions whether the changes introduced by the Lisbon Treaty align the CJEU to the ECtHR’s interpretation and methods, triggering different processes of institutionalisation within a coherent European system. These issues are explored through a contextual analysis of areas of law such as equality rights in employment law, citizenship and migration, internet law and access to justice. This volume includes perspectives from the scholarly community as well as practitioners, judges and European policy makers. It also examines the state of accession of the EU to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and considers the legal implications of the interactions of the two courts for the protection of the fundamental rights of EU citizens and individuals legally residing in Europe.

The volume is essential reading for practitioners, judges, European policy makers and members of the scholarly community working in this area of law.

Sonia Morano-Foadi is a Reader in Law and Lucy Vickers is a Professor in Law, both at Oxford Brookes University.

Click here for further information on this title.

BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT: Europe’s Justice Deficit?

Edited by Dimitry Kochenov, Gráinne de Búrca and Andrew Williams

ENDORSEMENTS

"The question of the EU’s justice deficit could not be of greater relevance. Both scholars and politicians have often argued that the economic and other benefits of the EU compensate for any democratic failings. Yet, as the eurocrisis renders these benefits less apparent, it becomes more appropriate than ever to ask whether it distributes them and any accompanying costs in a just way. The  responses of the contributors to this volume prove as disturbing  as they are informative."

Professor Richard Bellamy, Director of the Max Weber Programme, European University Institute, Florence

"This is a remarkable volume which addresses a long-neglected question about the EU: situated between integration through market freedoms and an emerging constitutional project, how does the EU contribute to the achievement of justice? A set of lively, engaged and scholarly contributions which extend the boundaries of the debate. A must-read for all interested in European Studies."

Professor Seyla Benhabib, Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University 

"The list of authors reads like a veritable “Who's Who of European studies”...The outcome is fascinating, enormously rich and diverse (with the authors occasionally disagreeing with each other) – just as Europe is. Once you have read it, you realize what an important void it has filled. It opens up a new, fresh perspective within the European studies, and I can safely predict that it will become a canon, by reference to which we will be discussing “justice in/of Europe” in the years to come."

Wojciech Sadurski, Challis Professor of Jurisprudence, The University of Sydney Faculty of Law

"By arranging a multi-disciplinary discussion about justice in the EU “as a flow of ideas” this most engaging book offers a gripping account of justice as the proverbial contested concept…The editors have succeeded in bringing together a group of feisty scholars keen to present their rather diverse, and at times even exclusive, take on the meaning of justice...A must read for all interested in justice, nothwithstanding their own disciplinary home."

Prof Antje Wiener, Chair in Political Science, especially Global Governance, University of Hamburg

The gradual legal and political evolution of the European Union has not, thus far, been accompanied by the articulation or embrace of any substantive ideal of justice going beyond the founders’ intent or the economic objectives of the market integration project. This absence arguably compromises the foundations of the EU legal and political system since the relationship between law and justice—a crucial question within any constitutional system—remains largely unaddressed. This edited volume brings together a number of concise contributions by leading academics and young scholars whose work addresses both legal and philosophical aspects of justice in the European context. The aim of the volume is to appraise the existence and nature of this deficit, its implications for Europe’s future, and to begin a critical discussion about how it might be addressed. There have been many accounts of the EU as a story of constitutional evolution and a system of transnational governance, but few which pay sustained attention to the implications for justice.

The EU today has moved beyond its initial and primary emphasis on the establishment of an Internal Market, as the growing importance of EU citizenship and social rights suggests. Yet, most legal analyses of the EU treaties and of EU case-law remain premised broadly on the assumption that EU law still largely serves the purpose of perfecting what is fundamentally a system of economic integration. The place to be occupied by the underlying substantive ideal of justice remains significantly underspecified or even vacant, creating a tension between the market-oriented foundation of the Union and the contemporary essence of its constitutional system. The relationship of law to justice is a core dimension of constitutional systems around the world, and the EU is arguably no different in this respect.

The critical assessment of justice in the EU provided by the contributions to this book will help to create a fuller picture of the justice deficit in the EU, and at the same time open up an important new avenue of legal research of immediate importance.

Click here for further information

BOOK: Non-State Justice Institutions and the Law: Decision-Making at the Interface of Tradition, Religion and the State

Palgrave Macmillan has just published Non-State Justice Institutions and the Law: Decision-Making at the Interface of Tradition, Religion and the State, edited by Matthias Kötter, Tilmann J. Röder, Gunnar Folke Schuppert, and Rüdiger Wolfrum.

The book blurb reads:

Traditional forms of dispute resolution have become an important aspect in the political and academic debates on law and development and in numerous cases of constitution-making and judicial reform. This book focuses on decision-making by non-state justice institutions at the interface of traditional, religious, and state laws. The authors discuss the implications of non-state justice for the rule of law, presenting case studies on traditional councils and courts in Pakistan, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Bolivia and South Africa. Looking at the legitimacy of non-state justice from various angles, this collection explores the ways in which non-state legal systems and governmental structures are embedded in official state justice institutions and how this affects the protection of human rights.

The book includes a chapter by our own Christa Rautenbach (North-West University (South Africa)) and Brian Z Tamanaha (Washington University (USA)), plenary speaker at our upcoming conference.

CALL FOR PAPERS: Appointing Judges in an Age of Diversity: An International Conference on the JAC’s 10th Anniversary

Venue: University of Birmingham 

Date: 6 and 7 November 2015

The Institute of Judicial Administration at the University of Birmingham is hosting an SLSA-funded workshop to mark the 10^th anniversary of the Judicial Appointments Commission.

Confirmed speakers include Lady Hale, Graham Gee (Birmingham) Cora Hoexter (Wits), Alexander Horne (House of Commons), Rosemary Hunter (Queen Mary), Kate Malleson (Queen Mary), Andrew Lynch (NSW) Alan Paterson (Strathclyde), Erika Rackley (Birmingham) and Lorne Sossin (Toronto). 

Three speaker slots have been reserved for PhD students. Abstracts (of around 250 words) are invited from PhD students working on judicial appointments, broadly conceived to include issues of legitimacy, diversity, independence and accountability in the UK and elsewhere.

Please send abstracts to  g.d.s.gee@bham.ac.uk by 30^th April 2015. 

CALL FOR PAPERS: AAA 2015 call of papers

B/Ordering Infrastructures: Mediating Encounters across Difference

Panel Discussant: Professor Kregg Hetherington (Concordia University) 

Infrastructures underpin everyday life, mediating our experiences of space and time, and enabling --or obstructing-- the circulation of peoples, goods, knowledge, and meaning. Infrastructures are thus positioned at the center of contemporary struggles over access to resources, citizenship, and mobility. This panel will examine these concerns by considering how infrastructures shape, and are shaped by, forms of difference and inequality, producing material and metaphorical borders that organize social worlds. We seek papers on b/ordering infrastructures, that is, papers that explore how infrastructures work as bordering and ordering technologies.

Papers will consider (but are not restricted to) the following questions:

· How do infrastructures produce boundaries --but also encounters-- across difference? That is, how do infrastructures function as technologies of inclusion and exclusion?

· How do infrastructures organize human and nonhuman difference, mediating mobilities and exchanges that define landscapes and territories? How can infrastructures, as they are practiced and enacted, support or subvert regimes of governance and citizenship?

· Finally, how might attention to borders make us reimagine infrastructure? And how might attention to infrastructure make us reimagine borders?

The panel aims to bring into dialogue diverse approaches to mobility, materiality and power. While the anthropology of infrastructure conversant with science and technology studies and affect theory produces insights on the encounters of state and society, nature and culture, and people and things, social theory concerned with the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class interrogates borders (as metaphors but also as infrastructures) to illuminate the politics of translation, transgression, mediation, and encounter. We welcome papers engaging these frameworks and their interstices to consider infrastructure as built structures such as roads, pipes and checkpoints but also more-than-human configurations of bureaucracies, legal systems, emergency services, and other kinds of institutions. Contributions from advanced graduate students and recent PhDs preferred.


Submission deadline for abstracts (no more than 250 words): April 1, 2015. Interested participants please emailsmccall1@ucsc.edu. Please include an abstract, title, affiliation, and current status (PhD candidacy post fieldwork, Post Doc, Faculty position).

Panel Organizers:
Rosa Elena Ficek (Wesleyan University)
Stephanie Mc Callum (University of California, Santa Cruz)

Mediterranean Encounters: The Incommensurability of Difference

Panel Organizers: Netta Van Vliet (College of the Atlantic) & Carla Hung (Duke University)

This panel focuses on encounters with difference across the Mediterranean that consider the irreducible alterity and singularity of the other. The Mediterranean, that which is between lands, has long been narrated as a space of cultural and commercial exchange. At a time when the prevailing response to encounters with the foreign and the strange is through political and discursive assimilation, we ask what alternatives there might be to tolerance and inclusion. How can we understand encounters across the Mediterranean without recourse to a logic of equivalence? Anthropology?s interest in the study of difference has populated the discipline with a variety of tools, both conceptual and methodological, which can engage with what Jim Siegel (2008) has called "the objects and objections of ethnography." Circulating through feminist theory, postcolonial studies, and literary theory but beginning with and returning to anthropology's unique method of participant-observation, this panel tries to understand difference without folding it into an ontology of the self-same or "making the familiar strange and the strange familiar.? In so doing, it provides an opportunity to challenge anthropology's foundational concepts of culture, identity, and community. The panel examines the implications of such an approach for questions of politics, human rights, the law, and the tension between the universal, the particular, and the singular. What can be learned when ethnographic experience is understood in terms of products of representation rather than as evidence?

The Mediterranean has historically been a site of linguistic, political, economic and material encounters between East and West, North and South, Europe and its others, between Arab and Jew, European and African, refuge and asylum seeker.  Taking the Mediterranean as a site through which to conduct close readings of  the geopolitical and temporal movements across land and water, East and West, North and South, Europe and its others that have taken place on both sides of its shores, the panelists strive to think about the strange without making it familiar.  This panel is interested in addressing the questions posed by incommensurable difference through a diverse set of ethnographic examples, including engagements with movement between madness and reason, religious and secular, life and death, diaspora and at home, and human and inhuman.

Please send a 250 word abstract and a title for your proposed contribution to Carla Hung carla.hung@duke.edu by Wednesday April 1, 2015. Authors of accepted proposals will be notified by April 5th.

Entangled Border Crossings:  Identity Construction, Disciplinary Boundaries, and Asian Diaspora

Taking Asian and Asian American identities as dynamic and often times contested processes, the focus of this panel explores the multiple ways in which these subjectivities are constructed and renegotiated in a complex world characterized and shaped by active technological changes, flows of migrants and travelers, and capital assemblages. Even for those whose physical movement is limited, the trends and flows that transcend geographic and political borders are difficult to ignore. Examining these processes highlights the dynamism of Asian and Asian American identities, where the familiar/strange dynamic that is the theme of this year’s conference often comes into play as subjects encounter the Asian/Asian American “other.” The panel draws from ethnographic work conducted among people of Asian descent in specific sites in Asia, the U.S., or elsewhere to shed light on the challenges and opportunities created by the complex process of identity construction, which draws from a multitude of local and global resources.  What competing narratives do we find about Asian American or Asian identity and its relationship to a larger Asian diaspora?  What salient concepts or motivations are linked to various contemporary ideas of “Asian identity?”  Furthermore, the multi-sited, ethnographically rooted insights which characterize anthropological perspectives can help further push the boundaries of area studies approaches typified by Asian and Asian American Studies by providing grounded research on specific contexts of power, governmentality, and cultural politics that shape the very impact of these flows.  This panel seeks to scrutinize and unpack the complex processes that individuals find themselves in various cultural contexts to examine how a range of individuals imagine, interpret and understand this dynamic and at times contested process of identity construction.

Submission deadline for abstracts (no more than 250 words): April 1, 2015.

Interested participants please email both jheung@stmarys-ca.edu and louie@msu.edu.  Please include an abstract, title, affiliation, and current status (PhD candidacy post fieldwork, Post Doc, Faculty position).  Authors of accepted proposals will be notified by April 5th.

New Sending Communities and New Receiving Communities in Dialogue with Migration Theory 

In the past decade, theorists have argued that the notion of migrant networks at the heart of cumulative causation and transnational theories of migration requires revisiting. These theorists assert that because research tends to report on already existing networks, a number of key questions remain. This critique suggests that research on new sending and new receiving communities is well-poised to evaluate and contribute to migration theory. New sending and receiving communities often garner little attention, especially when located in marginalized parts of countries or regions that already have a strong presence in international migration streams.  This panel takes as its starting point a dialogue between these communities and migration theory. From the perspective of sending communities, what is the connection between international sojourns and historical antecedents of localized moves? Cumulative causation theory posits a few individuals--people whose nonconformity in their own societies lead them to travel outside it--open paths for prospective migrants. Nonconformists are not necessarily trendsetters. Thus, we ask: How do their actions become popularized and, in some cases, self-reinforcing? From the perspective of new receiving communities, this panel questions: how do employers, landowners, shopkeepers, and other residents establish the social capital and cultural skills required to operate in changing cultural settings? In both new sending and new receiving communities, how does migration work to alter social constructs such as class, race, gender, kin, and other power relations? Which beliefs, ideas, and behaviors--at home and abroad—are most vulnerable to migration’s effects at its outset? While these questions respond to today’s prominent theories, the panel also considers how the ethnography of new sending and receiving communities opens possibilities for novel considerations and explanatory frameworks.

Panel Organizers:  Nora Haenn, North Carolina State University and Michelle Moran-Taylor, University of Denver

Panel Discussant: Deborah Boehm, University of Nevada, Reno

Potential participants should send their abstracts (250 words max) to Nora Haenn (nora_haenn@ncsu.edu) by April 3rd, 2015. Please include the title of the paper, author’s name, affiliation, and email. Thank you.

Making the Familiar Strange: experimenting with cultures of biomedical interventions

Anthropologists have long worked with and along biomedical interventions. Such research has explored areas of medical treatment, hygiene, child maternal care, epidemics, vaccination, and drug development. Drawing from a rich literature of medical anthropologists and science and technology scholars, these studies have raised issues of generalizability across populations and individuals, characterizations of research subject, recruitment procedures, and methodologies of comparison.

This panel is interested in particular forms of interventions that are associated with specific and notions of evidence, namely, the growing reliance on so-called evidence based methods, and the associated method of the RCT that is dominating health and social policy in the US, UK, and across Europe.  As anthropologists becoming entangled in these processes of clinical trial implementation, this panel will raise questions as to whether or not we are becoming too familiar with the language and culture of biomedical interventions. And, to address this concern, contributors will discuss ways to engage and experiment with intervention research in order to make the familiar and assumed dependable research method of the RCT appear strange and incomplete.

The panel will therefore address how it is that RCTs and the concept of the intervention has become so normalised, familiar, standard, and even boring, and in what ways anthropology might unsettle this. These experiment could include creative conceptualisations of biomedical interventions and research designs, explorations of how biomedical research methods encapsulate specific worldviews, and how imaginaries of places, people, and bodies are enacted in the development of the research design.

We are also interested in what does not normally get included in the formal research protocols or publications of evidence based medicine. A running theme will therefore also be the notion of surplus information or the “remainders” (Strathern 1991) of trial research.  As anthropologists that study interventions and research design (rather than simply contribute to their operation) we invite papers that capture the residual or strange knowledge that does not get registered in usual systems of knowledge production. These can be explorations into the body of excess data production, the unintended consequences or outcomes that are not typically acknowledged, or novel analytical ways to think and write about the mundane processes of standardization and research design.

We invite papers that explore questions related to:

· How global standards (such as research questionnaires, research protocols, systems of measurement and analysis etc.) travel across boundaries and are applied in locally situated trials?

· How data become standardized in the context of pooling international clinical trial data from various consortiums?

· What kinds of labour are involved in using animals models to support/justify the interventions applied in clinical trials on humans?

· What kinds of research design allow for the generation of new questions in the ongoing process of trial or study implementation?

· How are clinical trials that test behavioural interventions used to expand research on diabetes, obesity, cancer, and HIV?

· What kinds of locally specific practices are used in the everyday implementation of multi-sited clinical trials?

· What labour is involved in standardizing clinical trials in the everyday? What kinds of “random effects” or variability are masked in the process of standardizing ?

We invite scholars whose work examines research design and interventions broadly defined, to join us for the 2015 American Anthropological Association meeting in Denver, Colorado. Please e-mail your abstract of no more than 250 words to Natali Valdez nvaldez919@gmail.com by April 9, 2015.

If you have any questions, please contact one of the following panel organizers:
Line Hillersdal (University of Copenhagen) njh933@hum.ku.dk
Jonas Winther (University of Copenhagen) tsn797@hum.ku.dk
Natali Valdez (University of California, Irvine) nvaldez919@gmail.com

Going Public / Becoming Private: Collaboration, Nontransparency, and Hybridity between Government and Industry

Conditions of late capitalism, socialism and post-socialism have demonstrated that when it comes to relations between government and industry, myriad configurations are possible. NGOs and state-owned enterprises push the boundaries of what might be considered a business or a corporation, while privatization and corruption circumscribe new and strange members within constellations of the state, government agencies (Stark 1996), public property (Verdery 1997), and public money. Mindful that what we consider to be public must be made public (Latour and Weibel 2005), and that multiple economic systems operate, cheek by jowl, in the same spaces and institutions (Gibson-Graham 2006), papers on this panel ethnographically examine how forms of relationality between industry and government at all levels reshape our understandings of the state, local government, small and medium enterprises, and corporations, and reconfigure notions about what institutions, property, and forms of value are public or private. Ultimately, we explore how understandings of government-industry relations come to be, and the effects these understandings bring about in the world.

Papers for this panel might consider:
NGOs, State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs)
Special Economic Zones (SEZs)
Corporate governance
Public-private partnerships
Corruption, transparency and nontransparency
Taxation or insurance sweetheart deals
Intellectual property rights guarantees
Utility monopolies
Government land seizures and eminent domain
Too-big-to-fail financial institutions, moral hazard

Please send expressions of interest by March 27 or ASAP, and abstracts by April 3, to Leksa Lee at achmiele@uci.edu.

JOURNAL: (2015) 2:1 Critical Analysis of Law - New Historical Jurisprudence & Historical Analysis of Law

(2015) 2:1 Critical Analysis of Law, an International & Interdisciplinary Law Review, is out. 

Its theme is

New Historical Jurisprudence & Historical Analysis of Law

The New Historical Jurisprudence issue highlights and encourages a trend in recent legal scholarship, or rather scholarship on law, that--like the original historical jurisprudence--pursues a historical analysis of law, as a form of critical analysis of law, rather than legal history, as applied historiography. Generated by theorists with a historical sensibility, and historians with theoretical curiosity, this emerging body of work exploits and challenges the intersection of history and jurisprudence in innovative and exciting ways.

It includes:

New Historical Jurisprudence: Legal History as Critical Analysis of Law Markus D. Dubber

On the Coloniality of Modern Law Samera Esmeir

Radbruch’s Rechtsstaat and Schmitt’s Legal Order: Legalism, Legality, and the Institution of Law Mireille Hildebrandt

The Judicialization of Police Aaron T. Knapp

Transatlantic Functionalism: New Deal Models and European Integration Peter L. Lindseth

“Society Owes Them Much”: Veteran Defendants and Criminal Responsibility in Australia in the Twentieth Century Arlie Loughnan

Private Law Codification, Modernization and Nationalism: A View from Critical Legal History Heikki Pihlajamäki

“Comparing” Jewish and Islamic Legal Traditions: Between Disciplinarity and Critical Historical Jurisprudence Lena Salaymeh

The Riddle of Sub-judice and the Modern Law of Contempt Galia Schneebaum, Shai J. Lavi

Regarding Untimeliness: Medieval Legal History and Modern Law Karl Shoemaker

The Rejection of Horizontal Judicial Review During America’s Colonial Period Robert J. Steinfeld

ARTICLE: Ramadan on Islamic Legal Hybridity and Patriarchal Liberalism in the Shari'a Courts in Israel

I'm pleased to report that another paper linked to our Doing Justice: Official and Unofficial ‘Legalities’ in Practice Colloquium, held at the Centre Jacques-Berque (Rabat, Morocco) from 15-16 June 2012, has been published. 

Moussa Abou Ramadan (Strasbourg)'s 'Islamic Legal Hybridity and Patriarchal Liberalism in the Shari'a Courts in Israel' has been published in the Journal of Levantine Studies. Its abstract reads:

The civil judicial family law system and the shari‘a courts in Israel are a fascinating site for the study of legal hybridity, particularly with regard to cases involving the legal and religious rights of women. Legal hybridity is found both in the shari‘a courts, even when ruling on cases that are under their exclusive jurisdiction, and in the family courts that apply provisions of Islamic and Israeli law. In this article, I examine as a case study of the problem of appointing a woman as arbitrator between quarelling spouses in the shari‘a court arbitration process. This example shows how a shari‘a court operates under pressure from the secular civil judicial system. It is discernible how a system of legal hybridity gives rise to multiple discourses deriving from different normative systems and various players—such as human rights organizations, Islamic feminist movements, secular feminist movements, and the Israel Supreme Court—seeking to navigate the discourse in pursuit of their interests. My central thesis is that this system of legal hybridity is enhancing a patriarchal liberalism that is filled with obstacles and hurdles preventing full equality. 

ARTICLE ANNOUNCEMENT: Introduction: Religious Law in the 21st Century

By Michael A. Helfand Pepperdine 
University School of Law

Professor Helfand introduces this symposium on Religious Law in the 21st Century. Helfand notes that a recurring theme in recent debates over the relationship between law and religion is the unique challenge of reconciling conflicts not just between law and religion, but between the law of the nation-state and “religious legal communities” -- that is, communities that primarily experience their religious norms through the prism of legal rules. Muslim and Jewish communities serve as prime examples of such religious legal communities, and the challenges faced by these communities often parallel each other in important ways. Thus, an important subset of contemporary religious controversies -- from circumcision bans to anti-Sharia laws -- emerge as not only conflicts between law and religion, but as conflicts between law and law. And it is to this unique set of questions that the jointly-sponsored program of the Islamic Law and Jewish Law Sections of the American Association of Law Schools was addressed. The program was split into two thematic panels, and the articles in this symposium reflect those themes. The first -- titled “Religious Law in U.S. Courts” -- considered the various contexts in which U.S. courts have been asked to address religious questions that touch upon religious law. The second -- titled “Religious Law in the Secular State” -- considered contemporary issues related to the practice and implementation of religious law in secular democracies. Together, these papers bring new insight to these questions and serve as a springboard for discussion and debate about how religious law will fit into the ever-evolving landscape of the 21st century.

Click here to download this paper.