January 28, 2019

The Nice Young Serial Killer Next Door @prospect_uk @evershedmegan

Megan Evershed discusses the psychology of serial killers as television presents them, here in "Sympathy for the Devil," an article for Prospect.


Have you ever wanted to peer inside the mind of a killer—even if just for a little while?
Admittedly, this question is a tease. It’s impossible to take a dip into anybody’s psyche—including that of a murderer. To get even close to doing so, we have to turn to fiction.
A very interesting read, even without fava beans and a nice Chianti.

Fleury on Social Scientists on Crime After World War II Univ @UniversiteCergy

Jean-Baptiste Fleury, THEMA-Universite de Cergy-Pontoise, has published Social Scientists on Crime After World War II. Here is the abstract.
This paper addresses the history of social scientific work on crime after World War II. We argue that the mid-1960s marked a turning point that profoundly transformed the way in which the public discourse, policy programs, and social scientific work addressed crime. Up to the mid-1960s, crime was not a central concern for the average American and the Federal government had a very limited role in fighting it. Within social science, sociological studies dominated the analysis of crime. The mainstream of research mixed the influence of Robert Merton’s theory of anomie with the Chicago-school ecological approach, relegating biological and psychological explanations to a backstage status. It located the origins of delinquent behavior in relative deprivation and dysfunctional neighborhoods. This broad outlook framed the way in which various social scientific notions infused the study of crime and eventually made their way to Washington, making the idea of relative deprivation central to Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. From then on, crime fell under the prerogatives of the Federal government and gradually gained prominence. At the same time, the social turmoil of the 1960s challenged the consensus about the so-called “rootcauses” of crime and their treatment though welfare programs and community empowerment. By the end of the decade, crime rates had skyrocketed and riots erupted throughout the country. The fear of crime nurtured the rise of a conservative view that emphasized the significance of law enforcement and punishment. The figure of the criminal as a responsible decision-maker became increasingly popular. Social scientists involved in the public attack on crime also shared increasing doubts about social-deprivation explanations. Even though they did not go as far as James Q. Wilson in urging criminologists to become “policy analysts” and relinquish the socioeconomic rootcauses of crime, the social scientific study of crime increasingly emphasized a “control” approach to crime. That approach brought together insights from economics, operations research, political science, sociology and psychology so as to address cost-effective law enforcement and deterrence. In effect, criminology became increasingly dependent on policy concerns. Public support from urban development or health agencies was progressively replaced by funds from criminal justice and law enforcement agencies, further illustrating the changing orientation in public policy. Within a number of universities, the creation of criminal justice departments also provided a new institutional setting to further this multi-disciplinary outlook and respond to the ever-increasing public demands for professional training in crime combat. By the end of the 1970s, control theories of crime represented a sizable chunk of the literature, though they were not influential enough to define a new consensus. On top of the unresolved debates on how policy-oriented research should handle crime, a number of social scientists rejected criminology’s dependence on the State and the development of policy analysis. Emerging from the counterculture of the 1960s, another approach brought together radical economists, historians, sociologists and psychologists, in analyzing lawmaking and the criminal justice system as tools used by those in power to enforce their own interests. Instead of taking the legal definition of crime for granted, they urged social scientists to analyze crime with their own tools. These were not the only theories to push for a thorough redefinition of crime in disciplinary terms. Neoliberal economic analysis of law, championed by Richard Posner and Gary Becker, also offered to redefine crime as “market bypassing” in order to promote wealth maximization. Very influential in the expansion of the boundaries of economics into the law, the movement did not stand in stark opposition to control theory if only because it also focused on deterrence. As a result of the important transformations of American society, politics and social sciences during the 1960s, knowledge about crime became specialized and increasingly discipline-oriented, even under the broad umbrellas of control theories and critical criminology. In the process, the boundaries between the social sciences shifted. The socioeconomic causes of crime used in sociology to understand individual trajectories toward criminal behavior gave increasingly way to a broader focus on crime and law enforcement, grounded on rational choice and cost benefit analysis.
Download the article from SSRN at the link.

January 24, 2019

Call For Papers: Black Panther and Postcolonial Critique @CambridgeUP @theblackpanther


Call for papers
Call for Papers Black Panther and Postcolonial Critique Submission deadline: 1 March, 2019
The smashing success of Ryan Coogler’s 2018 blockbuster Black Panther has stimulated countless interpretations built on terms orbiting around developments in the US, but there is another interpretative frame hiding in plain view that needs to be explored: the film's heavy reliance on dominant tropes of postcolonial critique, particularly its Black Atlantic/Black Studies inflections. Adeleke Adeeko is guest editing a special issue on Black Panther for The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry that proposes to examine this important film’s entanglements in the global histories that center on the Indian and Atlantic oceans and move from slave trading through Afropolitanism and négritude, to migritude and afro-futurism. Especially welcome are contributions that explore the film’s intertextual affiliations to discourses of diaspora and homelands. We invite explorations of the ethics of insularity and the reliance on Pan-Africanist ideals of liberation that pervade the film. We seek as well re-evaluations of the function of reflexive rituals of power and consciously artful sacralization as modes of governmentality, as well as the status of women in the construction and maintenance of utopias. Connections between the film and the history of Marvel's Black Panther comic books is also welcome.
8,000-word essays should be sent to the Editorial Assistant, Adwoa Opoku-Agyemang (pli@cambridge.org), to reach her no later than 1 March, 2019.

January 22, 2019

European Award For Legal Theory: Call For Submissions By April 1, 2020 @hartpublishing

From The Netherlands Association for Philosophy of Law/Vereniging voor Wijsbegeerte van het Recht and Hart Publishing:

         The European Award for Legal Theory

The European Award for Legal Theory is presented to the author of the best doctoral thesis in the area of legal theory and philosophy of law, successfully defended at a university in Europe.

The award entails publication of the thesis by Hart Publishing Ltd. (Oxford), and offers the opportunity to deliver a seminar on the LL.M. in Legal Theory at Frankfurt.

The award will be granted once every two years, the next to be in 2020.
Authors should submit their thesis before April 1, 2020.
 
More information here.

January 19, 2019

Law and Literature 2019: A Course at the University of Ghent

From the mailbox:




Law and Literature 2019
Organising Committee
The course is co-organized by prof. dr. Elizabeth Amann (Literary Studies, Ghent University), prof. dr. Andrew Bricker (Literary Studies, Ghent University) and prof. dr. Georges Martyn (Legal History, Ghent University). 
The members of the scientific committee are: Sascha Bru (Literature, KU Leuven), Vivian Liska (Literature, University of Antwerp), Gertrudis Van de Vijver (Philosophy, Ghent University). 
Topic 
Storytelling is ubiquitous in the law, and the law is the focus of many canonical texts and popular literary genres. In the past few decades, the intersection between these two fields has attracted the interest of legal and literary historians alike and has given rise to a wide range of approaches. The goal of the course is to help students to make their way in the heterogeneous and interdisciplinary field of “Law and Literature” and to introduce them to methodologies useful for analysing the relations between law and literature. Through lectures and seminar-style discussions with experts in the field, the course will encourage doctoral students to apply insights from “Law and Literature” to their research. 
Objectives 
• to teach students to analyse representations of legal concepts, institutions and procedures in literary texts (“law in literature”) • to familiarize students with narratological approaches to legal texts and genres (“law as literature”) • to clarify the role of the law and legal institutions in the literary field (censorship, trials, regulation)• to introduce students to the complicated legal issues surrounding new media• to explore the intersection between law and literature and new critical theoretical fields such as ecocriticism and the anthropocene.
Dates and programme 
(detailed descriptions of the sessions will be posted in February)Monday 04/03, 14:00-17:00: Gary Watt (University of Warwick) and Eva Brems (Ghent University): Introduction to the field of law and literature. This session will be followed by a social event in the evening.
Tuesday 05/03, 9:30-12:30: Greta Olson (University of Giessen): Law as literature: legal narratologyWednesday 20/03, 14:00-17:00: Martin Zeilinger (Anglia Ruskin University) and Eva Lievens (Ghent University): New technologies and the law. This session will be followed by a happy hour.
Wednesday 27/03, 9:30-12:30: Kevin Curran (University of Lausanne), Geert Van Hoorick (Ghent University) and Hendrik Schoukens (Ghent University): Law, literature and the environmentThursday 23/05, 14:00-17:15: Simon Stern (University of Toronto), Sebastiaan Vandenbogaerde (Ghent University), Caroline Laske (Ghent University) and Elizabeth Amann (Ghent University): Law in literatureTuesday 28/05, 14:00-17:00: Catherine O’Leary (University of Saint Andrews), Marc Cools (Ghent University) and Andrew Bricker (Ghent University): Censorship, press regulation and literature on trial. This session will be followed by a happy hour.
VenueGhent University, Law Faculty, Voldersstraat, Facultaire Raadzaal 
Registration feeFree of charge for members of the doctoral schools of Arts, Humanities and Law of UGent 
RegistrationDoctoral students who would like to include this course in their Doctoral Training Program are requested to register by February 25 by email to elizabeth.amann@ugent.be. For practical reasons, other participants are also asked to RSVP to this email. The course is also open to non-Ghent researchers.

January 17, 2019

Chen on Law and Literature: Theory and Evidence on Empathy and Guile @Daniel_L_Chen

Daniel L. Chen, Directeur de Recherche, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Toulouse School of Economics, Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, University of Toulouse Capitole, Toulouse, France, is publishing Law and Literature: Theory and Evidence on Empathy and Guile in the Review of Law and Economics. Here is the abstract.
Legal theorists have suggested that literature stimulates empathy and affects moral judgement and decision-making. I present a model to formalize the potential effects of empathy on third parties. Empathy is modeled as having two components–sympathy (the decision-maker’s reference point about what the third party deserves) and emotional theory of mind (anticipating the emotions of another in reaction to certain actions). I study the causal effect with a data entry experiment. Workers enter text whose content is randomized to relate to empathy, guile, or a control. Workers then take the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET) and participate in a simple economic game. On average, workers exposed to empathy become less deceptive towards third parties. The result is stronger when workers are nearly indifferent. These results are robust to a variety of controls and model specifications.
Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Davies on The Bimetallic Question in "The Valley of Fear"

Ross E. Davies, George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School, has published The Bimetallic Question in the Valley of Fear at 33 Sherlock Holmes Journal 156 (Summer 2018). Here is the abstract.
The vicissitudes of post-Civil War currency policy are reflected in variations in the text of Arthur Conan Doyle's novel, "The Valley of Fear."
Download the article from SSRN at the link.

January 15, 2019

Patrick on a Brief History of Disgust and the Law

Carlton Patrick, University of Central Florida, is publishing When Souls Shudder: A Brief History of Disgust and the Law in Research Handbook on Law and Emotions (Susan Bandes, Jody Lyneé Madeira, Kathryn Temple, and Emily Kidd White) (forthcoming). Here is the abstract.
This chapter takes a look back at the past three decades of disgust and the law. Reviewing many of the empirical findings of the behavioral sciences as well as the normative scholarship of legal scholars and other social scientists, it attempts to provide a bird’s eye view of the links between disgust, morality, and jurisprudence, and of the debates that emanate from those links.
Download the chapter from SSRN at the link.

Daniel and Woude on Making Sense of the Law and Society Movement @LeidenLawBlog @Maartje_W @LeidenLaw

Daniel Blocq, Leiden Law School, and Maartje van der Woude, Leiden Law School, Institute for Criminal Law & Criminology, are publishing Making Sense of the Law and Society Movement in volume 11 of the Erasmus Law review (2018). Here is the abstract.
This article aims to deepen scholarly understanding of the Law and Society Movement (L&S) and thereby strengthen debates about the relation between Empirical Legal Studies (ELS) and L&S. The article departs from the observation that ELS, understood as an initiative that emerged in American law schools in the early 2000s, has been quite successful in generating more attention to the empirical study of law and legal institutions in law schools, both in- and outside the US. In the early years of its existence, L&S – another important site for the empirical study of law and legal institutions – also had its center of gravity inside the law schools. But over time, it shifted towards the social sciences. This article discusses how that happened, and more in general explains how L&S became ever more diverse in terms of substance, theory and methods.
Download the article from SSRN at the link.

January 14, 2019

Bezemek on The Alien and the State

Christopher Bezemek, University of Graz, Faculty of Law, Institute of Law and Political Science, is publishihng Stranger in a Strange Land: The Alien and the State in the Indonesian Journal of International & Comparative Law (2018). Here is the abstract.
The relationship of the stranger and the political community has traditionally been at the very core of various theoretical, historical and mythical accounts; in defining membership, in answering who is to be included, accepted and (thus) protected, in safeguarding a group’s position and its coherence. The essay argues that many of these accounts still prove to be of great value in a legal and political perspective: None of the questions raised today when it comes to the phenomenon of migration and inclusion are particulary new; rather they have been addressed frequently in sociology and political philosophy over the last centuries. We would be well-advised to rely on a broader perspective, on the teachings of history, and the insights of political philosophy when facing the intellectual and political challenges of our time.
Download the article from SSRN at the link.

CFP: Islands and Remoteness in Geography, Law, and Fiction: Conference at the University of Verona, November 21-22, 2019

From the mailbox:

CFP:  Islands and Remoteness in Geography, Law, and Fiction, a conference convened by Matteo Nicolini, University of Verona, Law Department, and Thomas Perrin, UFR de Géographie et d’Aménagement, Université de Lille. The conference will take place at the University of Verona November 21-22, 2019.

The conference seeks to explore how, in many ways, islands appear to be “geographical
paradoxes”. Indeed, they are spatially remote places, which are, at the same time, bound to a continent by social conventions. The grounds of such puzzle are manifold. It is firstly a matter of spatial area. Secondly, the puzzle depends on how political power projects authority over circumscribed spatial realms, including non-continental realms. In so doing, authority forges the concepts of remoteness and bounds.

Proposals for papers are due by May 31, 2019 and should be sent to matteo.nicolini@univr.it and thomas.perrin@univ-lille.fr. Please also direct questions about the conference to them. They will make acceptances known by June 24, 2019.

The selected papers will be published in Pólemos – Journal of Law,
Literature and Culture,volume 14 (2020) Issue 2. The deadline for first draft papers submission is due by 15 January 2020.

For more information, see the link here. 

January 8, 2019

Northwestern Center For Legal Studies and Jack Miller Center for Teaching America's Founding Principles and History Seek Applications for Two Year Post Doc Fellowship

From the mailbox:
Northwestern’s Center for Legal Studies is pleased to continue a collaborative partnership with the Jack Miller Center for Teaching America’s Founding Principles and History. We seek applications for the centerpiece of the partnership: a two-year post-doctoral fellowship held in residence at Northwestern University’s Center for Legal Studies beginning September 1, 2019.

A strong preference will be given to candidates working at the intersections of constitutional innovation, politics, and law in the context of the rise of eighteenth century invention, new understandings of property, the Enlightenment, and the creation of the United States. Particularly encouraged to apply are candidates in legal history, the history of political and economic thought, and/or political theory whose work is empirically grounded in the eighteenth century but has significant contemporary implications for questions of constitutionalism, liberty, equality, and democracy.

The post-doctoral fellow will offer three courses per year on topics pertaining to early American and Atlantic Enlightenment history, political and economic thought, and/or social science. In addition to engaging in an active research and publishing agenda, the candidate is expected to provide a reasonable amount of assistance with organizing other activities associated with the Fellowship and the Legal Studies Program. The annual salary for the fellow is $50,000, plus fringe benefits and a $1,500 renewable annual research budget. The fellow is required to organize and participate in several activities associated with Jack Miller Center events at Northwestern. These activities include producing an essay on the fellow’s work; participating in the Annual Jack Miller Faculty Development Summer Institute for professors; working with Legal Studies faculty hosting a website that features the fellow’s work and other activities related to the Jack Miller Center; and planning, attending, and participating in the Law in Motion Lecture series. Generous funds are available to bring in scholars central to the fellow’s own scholarship for such events. This is a nine-month faculty appointment, and applicant must have a Ph.D. in hand by September 1, 2019.

Applicants should submit a cover letter stating qualifications and field of interest, a CV, a writing sample, a sample syllabus of a proposed course, and two letters of recommendation. Northwestern University is an Equal Opportunity, Affirmative Action Employer of all protected classes, including veterans and individuals with disabilities. Women, racial and ethnic minorities, individuals with disabilities, and veterans are encouraged to apply. Hiring is contingent upon eligibility to work in the United States. Applications should be submitted no later than February 15, 2019.

Please contact Ann Kelchner a-kelchner@northwestern.edu with questions.

Chesler and Sneddon on Telling Tales: The Transactional Lawyer as Storyteller @ASUCollegeofLaw @MercerLAWSchool

Susan Chesler, Arizona State University College of Law, and Karen J. Sneddon, Mercer Law School, are publishing Telling Tales: The Transactional Lawyer as Storyteller in volume 15 of Legal Communication & Rhetoric: JALWD (2018). Here is the abstract.
Transactional documents, whether employment contracts or lease agreements, encapsulate the wishes, hopes, and fears of the transacting parties. The documents share a series of events, identify the key actors in the event, and anticipate particular outcomes. In other words, the transactional documents are narratives. The transactional lawyer is thus more than a transactional intermediary. The transactional lawyer is the narrative agent or storyteller. Equating a transactional lawyer to Aesop, the Brothers Grimm, and Scheherazade may appear to be an ill-fitting comparison. Yet, the comparison is surprisingly apt. Transactional lawyers weave together provisions and clauses to craft documents that will promote, guide, and control the relationship of those parties. This article shares five strategies to demonstrate how narratology can be used by transactional lawyers to draft documents that more effectively tell their client’s stories.
Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Dane on Robert Cover and Legal Pluralism @perrydane

Perry Dane, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, Rutgers Law School, has published Robert Cover and Legal Pluralism. Here is the abstract.
This short talk focuses on three aspects of Robert Cover's brand of legal pluralism: First, Cover's account of legal pluralism went beyond the simple recognition of non-state legal orders; just as important for him was the claim that non-state communities could generate and defend distinct readings of the state's own legal order. Second, Cover's jurisprudence assigned a central role to state violence and non-state communities' resistance. Violence and resistance were vital to his account not only because they are the way of the world but because they help render legal pluralism real. Third, Cover's well-known focus on the narrative dimension of the law was intertwined with his famous image of the law as a bridge between the present world and the ideal. Both the real and the ideal are narratives – stories – and that law is, in a sense, the feat of engineering that connects these two separated narratives.
Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

January 7, 2019

Finchett-Maddock on Re-worlding: A Theory of Art/Law @SussexLaw

Lucy Finchett-Maddock, Sussex School of Legal Studies, has published Re-worlding: A Theory of Art/Law. Here is the abstract.
This piece seeks to account for an increased interest in the intersection of art and law within legal thinking, activism, and artistic practice, arguing there to exist the phenomena and movement of ‘Art/Law’. Art/Law is the coming together of theory and practice in legal and political aesthetics, understood as a practice, (im)materially performed. It is seen as a natural consequence of thinking law and resistance in terms of space and time, accounting for a turn towards the visual, practical, and the role of affect, within ways of knowing. Art/law is a symptom of the end of art and end of law, synchronically rendered. Divisions between legal and aesthetic form have been well rehearsed within legal aesthetics scholarship, from law and literature, to critical legal studies’ work with images, text and performativity, and now law’s Anthropocene. Art/Law as a practice, however, is argued as an emergent onto-epistemic-ethics of necessity, a movement of seeing, being and knowing in response to the advancement of spectacle. It is the simultaneous reunion of law, art and resistance as one, breaking down the institutional artifice of art worlds and law worlds, offering a form of ‘resistant (in)formalism’, that accounts for matter and change. It is an inclusion of the uncertain and the disordered, as an opening of justice. This resistant (in)formalism describes the role of form, audience and practice within property, legal and aesthetic establishment, offering a countering of separatism at the end of art and the end of law, through a praxeology of Art/Law in seeing, thinking and action.
Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Adler on Art's First Amendment Status @nyulaw

Amy Adler, New York University School of Law, is publishing Art's First Amendment Status: A Cultural History of The Masses in volume 50 of the Arizona State Law Journal (2018). Here is the abstract.
This Article explores a little-known chapter in the cultural history of The Masses, the radical, iconoclastic, and artistically cutting-edge publication that was the subject of Learned Hand's landmark First Amendment decision in Masses Publishing Co. v. Patten (1917). The Article sets forth the story of an internal battle about freedom of expression in the arts that had shaken The Masses to its core in the year leading up to Hand's famous decision. The Masses was founded on two central premises: first, that absolute freedom of expression was necessary for its mission; and second, that art and politics must be inextricably intertwined in pursuing this mission because creativity was itself an act of political rebellion against capitalism. Yet this marriage between art and politics was a fragile one; indeed it collapsed in the year before Hand's opinion, as editors tried to constrain the political messages of the artists, leading to an artists' strike that forever changed the magazine. At stake in this conflict were urgent questions about the nature of art and the relationship between art and politics. Ultimately the magazine devoted to free speech and free artistic expression - the magazine that would later be pursued by the government for speaking too frankly - set limits on the free expression of its own artists. By exploring the artistic significance of The Masses and by unearthing this internal censorship battle at the magazine, my goal is to show how the conflict over art at The Masses presaged contemporary debates about the role of art in the First Amendment. The bitter internal struggle over freedom of expression at The Masses anticipated a longstanding problem in free speech law: how do we justify protection for art, often apolitical, irrational, and hard to reduce to a "particularized message," under a vision of the First Amendment that prizes political discourse and assumes a rational marketplace of ideas. The history of The Masses sheds light on our ongoing discomfort about the place of art in the First Amendment.
Download the article from SSRN at the link.

CFP: International Roundtable for the Semiotics of Law

From the mailbox:

Call for papers: The 20th International Roundtable for the Semiotics of Law (IRSL 2019). The theme is The Limits of Law. The conference will take place at the Instituto Juridico da Faculdade de Derito da Universidade de Coimbra. Comfirmed speakers include Francois Ost (Universite Saint-Louis, Brussels), Manuel Atienza (Universidad de Alicante), Pierre Moor (Unversite de Lausanne), Fernando Jose Bronze (Universidade de Coimbra), and J. M. Aroso Linhares (Universidade de Coimbra).

Abstracts of 300 words, maximum, should be submitted by January 15th, 2019 to Professor Aroso Linhares at jmarolinh@gmail.com and Anne Wagner at valwagnerfr@yahoo.com. Decisions will be made by January 30, 2019. Here's a link to the call.

January 3, 2019

Didikin on Law as a Linguistic Phenomenon

Anton Didikin, Higher School of Economics; Russian Academy of Sciences, Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of State and Law, has published Law As a Linguistic Phenomenon: Analytical Approach at 13 Proceedings of the Institute of State and Law of the RAS 40 (2018). Here is the abstract.
Law as a regulator of the conduct of social subjects cannot be directly equated with other methods of controlling the behavior in society. The grounds of legally significant actions allow determination of the context of the application of legal rules. The meaning of each legal term, as argued by L. Wittgenstein, depends on its “context of use” and the conventions of use at the moment. Therefore, the interpretation of the rules cannot be based solely on the principles of logic and be completely neutral. On the one hand, “we follow the rule blindly”, but at the same time, the repeatability of the behavior of other people and the ability to observe their behavior (by analogy with the mathematical concepts of addition and sum) encourage “learning” the rules and acting in accordance with the rules. The ascription of the legal language and the “imputation” principle of the legal interpretation of facts allow defining a key concept that cannot exist beyond the constructed social reality. The attempts to analyze non-legal factors appeal not to legal arguments but to other phenomena. The legal term in its nature not only describes empirical facts but also encourages action.The most dismal example of a change in philosophical argumentation and legal reasoning in the philosophy of law is the influence of Quine’s arguments. In the context of the methodology of legal explanation, the naturalization of the epistemology of law is possible only when the limitations and specifics of traditional methods of interpretation of legal reality are considered. The paper focuses on the analysis of some arguments made by the analytical legal philosophers regarding the linguistic content of legal rules with no reference to any social determination or formulation of the significant judgments about the linguistic nature of legal reality.
Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

January 2, 2019

Monti on Popular Legal Manuals as Sources and Mechanisms of Acquiring Legal Literacy

Annamaria Monti, Bocconi University Department of Law, has published Popular Legal Manuals as Sources and Mechanisms of Acquiring Legal Literacy in Legal Literacy in Premodern Society 191 (M. Korpiola, ed., Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2019).
In this article, I am arguing that we can include very different discursive forms and types of law manuals aimed at a wider public of non-jurists among the sources and mechanism of acquiring legal literacy. More precisely, most popularizing written works might be considered a specific form of literature in the field of law, like the legal manuals for laymen. To this purpose, popular legal manuals which were published both in Continental Europe and in common law countries during the nineteenth century formed a very interesting kind of popular legal literature which shared similar features. One might talk of a “transnational” legal literary genre addressed to a non-professional, or a lay public of readers.
Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Heinze on Theorizing Law and Historical Memory @Eric_Heinze_

Eric Heinze, Queen Mary University, London, School of Law, has published Theorizing Law and Historical Memory: Denialism and the Pre-Conditions of Human Rights as Queen Mary School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 290/1018. Here is the abstract.
States’ efforts to mould historical memory have long attracted scholarly attention. In recent years, however, a focus on the role of legal norms and mechanisms as tools in those efforts has steadily sharpened. Most scholarship examines that role through particularist analyses, narrowing a specific period of history down to some particular state or region. As such studies accumulate, however, more general patterns emerge. This article explores not any such particular situation, but instead pursues a project of theorising the discipline of law and historical memory as a whole. One conspicuously shared element, particularly within the framework of modern states, is that the histories examined directly involve or ultimately trace back to human rights abuses. As a general matter, then, states’ efforts to deny past or ongoing conduct certainly pose a pragmatic obstacle by obstructing investigations into abuses. Yet it is argued in this article that the relationship between denialism and human rights is (in a Kantian-Habermasian sense) transcendental: the very possibility for the existence of a human rights system presupposes a sphere for open, public scrutiny of state conduct. That condition is not ‘all or nothing’: the extent to which a human rights system becomes possible depends upon the extent of that sphere of public discourse. Unsurprisingly, states with the best human rights records also maintain the types of open public spheres which most reliably ensue against state denials of human rights violations, and thereby provide models of best practice.
Download the article from SSRN at the link.

January 1, 2019

Call For Applications: Fellowships, The Baldy Center for Law & Social Policy @baldycenter

From the mailbox:

The Baldy Center for Law & Social Policy at the State University of New York at Buffalo plans to award several fellowships to scholars pursuing important topics in law, legal institutions, and social policy. Applications are invited from junior and senior scholars from law, the humanities, and the social and natural sciences.

Fellows are expected to participate regularly in Baldy Center events, but otherwise have no obligations beyond vigorously pursuing their research. Fellows receive standard university research privileges (access to university libraries, high-speed Internet, office space, computer equipment, phone, website space, working paper series, etc.), and are encouraged to develop collaborative research projects with faculty members where appropriate.

Post-Doctoral Fellowships are available to individuals who have completed the Ph.D. or J.D. but have not yet begun a tenure-track appointment. Post-Doctoral Fellows will receive a stipend of $40,000, up to $2000 in annual professional travel support, and appropriate relocation assistance. Post-doctoral fellowships are ordinarily for a period of two academic years. Information on current and past Baldy Post-Doctoral Fellows is available here.

Senior Fellowships are available for established scholars who wish to work at the Center, typically during a funded sabbatical or research leave. Awardees will receive a living expense allowance of $1,800 per month during the period of their residence as well as appropriate relocation assistance. Senior Fellows typically spend one semester in residence, but other terms are possible. Information on current and past Baldy Senior Fellows is available here.

Application materials include:
(1) a description of the planned research (question, conceptual framework, method, possible findings, importance to the field),
(2) a complete academic and professional resume,
(3) an academic writing sample,
(4) the names and contact information of three academic references asked by the applicant to submit letters, and
(5) if a mid-career or senior applicant, the time period during which the applicant would work at the Center. Completed applications are due no later than Friday, February 1, 2019. (Apply by clicking the button below). For further information, see our answers to frequently asked questions. Additional questions about the Baldy Fellows Program should be addressed to Assistant Director Laura Wirth at baldyassistantdirector@gmail.com or (716) 645-2102.

Primary criteria for selection include intellectual strength of the proposal, demonstrated academic achievement, and promise of future success. Additional considerations include the overall mix of topics, disciplines, and backgrounds of the selected group of Fellows.
For information on current and past Baldy Fellows, see the Baldy Center website.

The Baldy Center for Law & Social Policy is an endowed, internationally recognized institute that advances interdisciplinary research on law, legal institutions, and social policy at the State University of New York at Buffalo. More than 200 faculty members from numerous departments participate in Baldy Center research, conferences, consortia, and publications. The Center maintains cooperative ties to other research centers and hosts distinguished scholars from around the world as visitors, fellows, speakers, and conference participants.

Apply by clicking this link:  Baldy Fellowships in Interdisciplinary Legal Studies 2019