A Conference On Legal Discourse, Narrative, and Representative, March 10-11, 2016

Via the European Society for Comparative Legal History (ESCLH), news of a conference and CFP:

"On Legal Discourses, Narrratives and Representations: Trials, Court Coverage and Fiction"
The conference will take place March 10-11, 2016 in Toulouse

Proposals in French or English will be sent in Microsoft Word file format to one of the organizers below before December 1, 2015: 

• Christine Calvet: calvet.ch@free.fr 
• Emeline Jouve: emeline.jouve@gmail.com 
• Lionel Miniato: miniatolionel@yahoo.fr

Submissions should include the paper title, a 3000 character-limit abstract and a short biographical note. 

The scientific committee will consider the proposal and inform the colleagues of their decisions before December 15, 2015

The Event

Trials, meant to solve conflicts and restore social peace, are part of a ritual—the judicial ritual—which internationally symbolizes the act of judging whatever the national legal system has implemented in a given country. As rituals, trials have their temples, temporality, performers, and costumes: justice is therefore akin to a staging, which follows specific rules. The legal process, regulated by the law, concludes in the delivering of a sentence, which is then discussed and analyzed by a variety of experts who express their opinions, approvals or disapprovals of the decision and consequently question the doctrine. In addition to the community of jurists, other people are interested in the legal proceeding and the sentencing of criminal cases from front-page affairs to petty crimes. The trial engenders various types of discourses, narratives and representations from journalistic coverage, to novels, plays, or films. This conference will give centre stage to these “other” types of discourses, narratives and representations by turning the floor over to scholars specialized in diverse disciplines—law, literature, history, sociology, cinema, journalism, etc…. Pluridisciplinary, this event will also be pluricultural since we will focus on the writing and re-writing of judicial procedure from the coverage of trials to their fictionalization from the perspective of both the French-speaking and English-speaking worlds. This geographical opening will lead us to not only consider the discursive characteristics specific to each culture but also to compare their different modes of discourse. 

More information available here at the ESCLH blog.