Syed on Legal Realism and CLS from an LPE Perspective @BerkeleyLaw

Talha Syed, University of California, Berkeley, Law, has published Legal Realism and CLS from an LPE Perspective. Here is the abstract.

What is the role of law in political economy? And what is the role of political economy in law? And in both cases, when we speak of “law” and “political economy,” are we speaking of academic disciplines or social realities? This tangle of questions constitutes, I take it, the orienting research agenda of the emerging “law and political economy” movement in legal academia. Questions concerning not so much the interaction as the interrelation of law and political economy, with each of these understood simultaneously as fields of study and areas of social life. And within that agenda the legacy of two prior efforts at grappling with these questions—Legal Realism and Critical Legal Studies (CLS)—looms large. This Article seeks to take stock of that legacy, and to advance a critique of central aspects of the received traditions of Realism and CLS, for the sake of developing new foundations for the analysis of both law and political economy. The best way to understand Legal Realism and CLS, this Article contends, is along two dimensions: (1) the first concerns the critique of legal reasoning; (2) the second the role of law in society. After setting out the central Realist and CLS claims on both these fronts, I offer critiques on each, ones that seek to push further in the same direction as the Realist/Crit views but in ways that ultimately repudiate the premises underlying these views. The main lines of Realism and CLS are, I contend, hostage to formalist premises in legal theory and liberal ones in social theory. This owes to the posture of internal critique that both adopted as their dominant strategy. Yet a central claim of the present Article is that the method of critique is always already a method of construction, both in the critique of law and the critique of political economy. To think the two may be separated is perhaps the fundamental flaw in the dominant strands of Legal Realism and CLS. And so in that vein, the Article offers a set of contrasting ideas for the development of legal, political, and social theory.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Moyn on Reconstructing Critical Legal Studies @samuelmoyn

Samuel Moyn, Yale University, has published Reconstructing Critical Legal Studies. Here is the abstract.

It is an increasingly propitious moment to build another radical theory of the law, after decades of relative quiescence in the law schools since the last such opportunity. This essay offers a reinterpretation of the legacy of critical theories of the law, arguing that they afford useful starting points for any radical approach, and not merely cautionary tales of how not to proceed. The essay revisits the critical legal studies movement in particular and imagines its reconstruction. Critical legal studies extended the social theory of the law pioneered by legal realism, and framed law as a forceful instrument of domination, though one that is compatible with both functional and interpretative underdetermination. Legal order oppresses, and the way it does so is never accidental or random, while regularly accommodating alternative pathways of control and contestation. Analogously, law is often determinate, which is how it can so routinely serve oppression, even though it does so in and through processes of interpretation of elusive or vague legal meaning by courts and other institutions. The essay concludes by showing that the parameters of a radical social theory of the law—parameters we should reclaim critical legal studies for helping establish—apply to current or future attempts to build any successor, taking account of critical race theory, feminist legal thought, and most especially the emergent “law and political economy” movement. Had critical legal studies never existed, it would have to be invented today.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

The IJLC Special Issue In Celebration of Peter Fitzpatrick and His Scholarship: Volume 17, No. 1 (March 2021) @IJLC_CUP

From David Sugarman, Professor Emeritus, Law School, Lancaster University, Senior Associate Research Fellow, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London, Senior Associate, Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford:

The International Journal of Law in Context has published a special issue in celebration of the late Peter Fitzpatrick and his scholarship. Professors Sugarman and Abdul Paliwala are the guest editors. 

 

 

PETER FITZPATRICK (1941–2020)

 

Peter Fitzpatrick (1941–2020) was a much-loved and inspirational scholar, and a wonderful friend and mentor. He contributed immeasurably to the intellectual, organisational and cultural life of post-colonial legal studies, critical legal studies, and law and the humanities – fields he helped to consolidate. His remarkable influence, however, extends well beyond his scholarship. He taught and supervised an incredible number of people, amounting to two or even three generations of students and colleagues. And they all admire and adore him.

 

In this Special Issue, ten friends, former colleagues and students of Peter’s contribute new insights into his personal and professional development, and celebrate his life and many achievements. We begin with an essay that adds to what we already knew about Peter’s personal and professional biography, and assesses and clarifies his key ideas and their intersection with his ethics and lived experiences (Sugarman, in this issue). It provides a backdrop and context for the subsequent papers that elucidate Peter’s significant contribution to scholarship, engage with his ideas and illuminate specific junctures in his life. The issue ends with an edited transcript of Peter’s final seminar in February 2020 and addresses a variety of themes in his work, including his critique of H.L.A. Hart, his notion of ‘slow reading’, the relationship between theory and grounded engagement with people, the idea of community and relationality, the role of the critic, self-criticism, the impossibility of law, decoloniality, occidentalism, mythologies and governmentality, and the significance of narratives (Paliwala, in this issue).

 

We hope these papers convey something of the special person that was Peter: the person whose support as a supervisor and friend regularly exceeded the norm; his tireless innovation; his community building; his empathy towards ‘outsiders’ and ‘others’; and his delightful individuality and sense of humour.

 

 

Editorial introduction

David Sugarman and Abdul Paliwala

 

Becoming Peter Fitzpatrick (1941–2020)

David Sugarman

 

Transformation

William Twining

 

Post-colonial attitudes and the relevance of incommensurability

Eve Darian-Smith

 

Not to save, but to encounter: Fitzpatrick as transnational jurisprudent

Sundhya Pahuja

 

Myth and concealment at colonial law’s foundations

George Pavlich

 

Deconstruction, dissipation and death, and the ‘casting-away of the law’?

Upendra Baxi

 

A concise note on Peter Fitzpatrick’s ‘Racism and the innocence of law’

Patricia Tuitt

 

Improvising with Peter

Sara Ramshaw

 

How to do things with Foucault (legally)

Ben Golder

 

Ultimate conversation: Fitzpatrick at Warwick, February 2020

Abdul Paliwala

Here is a link to the issue and its content.

See also this post at the Cambridge Core Blog.

Call For Papers: 2019 Critical Legal Studies Conference, September 12-14, 2019

From the emailbox:

The University of Perugia invites streams and papers for the 2019 Critical Legal Conference. The event will take place between September 12 and 14, 2019. The deadline for submission of abstracts is July 15th.

The theme of this year's conference is Alienation. More here from the conference website. 

Call For Papers: Vertigo: Fake news/real theory: A Seminar at ANU College of Law

The Australian National University College of Law Centre for Law, Arts, and the Humanities presents a Seminar on Vertigo: Fake news/real theory.

The event takes place on December 12, 2018.

The ANU contemporary critical theory group is hosting a one-day seminar exploring law, art, politics, and society in the 21st century.

This event will feature short papers of no more than 15 minutes that make an intervention or articulate an argument with succinct vigour, leaving plenty of room for lively and even contentious discussion.

We particularly encourage the attendance and participation of HDR students from a wide range of disciplines, as well as from early career and established scholars working on critical theory and critical legal theory.

The call for papers closes November 10.



More here.

Butler and Crawley on Forms of Authority Beyond the Neoliberal State @GriffLawSchool @kscrawling @LawAndCritique

Chris Butler and Karen Crawley, both of Griffith University Law School, have published Forms of Authority Beyond the Neoliberal State: Sovereignty, Politics, and Aeathetics, in Law and Critique (2018). Here is the abstract.

Critical legal scholarship has recently turned to consider the form, mode and role of law in neoliberal governance. A central theme guiding much of this literature is the importance of understanding neoliberalism as not only a political or economic phenomenon, but also an inherently juridical one. This article builds on these con-ceptualisations of neoliberalism in turning to explore the wider historical, cultural and sociological contexts which inform the production of neoliberal authority. The papers in this collection were first presented at the symposium ‘Forms of authority beyond the neoliberal state’, held at the Griffith Law School in December 2017. They consider the role of the corporation, the site of the university, the politics of debt, the genre of prestige television, and the archic sources of state violence, in order to imagine forms of authority which lie beyond neoliberalism as an ideology and a set of practices, and the ensemble of institutions which constitute the neo-liberal state. The contributions draw on social theory, philosophy, cultural studies, legal geography and political theology in exploring new possibilities for cultivating judgement through and beyond the sovereign, political and aesthetic terrains of neo-liberal governance.

Thompson on The Biographical Core of Law: Privacy, Personhood, and the Bounds of Obligation @marcelothompson

Marcelo Thompson, University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law, is publishing The Biographical Core of Law: Privacy, Personhood, and the Bounds of Obligation in Law, Obligation, Community (Daniel Matthews and Scott Veitch, eds., Routledge, 2018). Here is the abstract.

Contemporary critical legal studies scholarship pays heed to a perspective of materiality in law that jurisprudence more generally has tended to overlook. In keeping with a broader “nonhuman turn” in the humanities and the social sciences, this growing body of scholarship has been observing the passage of law through nonhuman realms. But how wide – and how indiscriminately – can the legal bond cast the net of its dignity? Is not the dignity of law rather connected with human subjectivity in deep and indissociable ways? This paper seeks to contribute to the debate above by querying the quintessential realm where law and human subjectivity intertwine – i.e. privacy. Questioning into the origin of the force of privacy obligations enables us to see its inherent connection with the origin of the force of law itself, and to draw important conclusions from this connection.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Schlegel on Critical Legal History Without a Privileged Position

John Henry Schlegel, University at Buffalo Law School, is publishing Sez Who? Critical Legal History Without a Privileged Position in the Oxford Handbook of Historical Legal Rseearch (Markus D. Dubber and Christopher Tomlins, eds., Oxford University Press, --). Here is the abstract.

Scholars active in the Critical Legal Studies movement of the 1980s regularly attacked the scholarship of liberal legalist scholars by using a variety of then contemporary epistemological theories that argued for the impossibility of any observer attaining a neutral position from which to observe social activities. Somewhat surprisingly, liberal legalist scholars seldom turned this criticism back at the work of CLS scholars who themselves never criticized their own work as they did that of other scholars. The examination of several pieces of CLS inspired history of labor law shows how engaging in such self-criticism might have further strengthened this very strong body of scholarship.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Critical Legal Conference, 2016: Call For Stream Proposals Now Open

Via James Martel:

CRITICAL LEGAL CONFERENCE 2016
Kent Law School
1st – 3rd September

Turning Points

The Call for Stream Proposals is OPEN NOW – please send proposals of no more than 500 words along with short bios of the stream organisers to klsclc2016@kent.ac.uk. The Call for Stream Proposals closes 7 March 2016.

“…there are no witnesses to changes of epoch. The epochal turning is an imperceptible frontier,
bound to no crucial date or event.” 

The present is notoriously difficult to diagnose. Are we living at a decisive turning point for global and European history, politics and law? Are we witnesses to a new epoch? Or perhaps we just have a bad case of “presentism”? The Critical Legal Conference 2016 will open a forum for critical reflection on precarious political situations, particularly that of Europe in a global context - an apposite theme for a critical conference at the University of Kent, ‘the UK’s European University’ and a point of origin for the CLC.

Taking a global and historicised view of contemporary Europe and its intellectual and political traditions (as well as an interrogative stance on their centrality), we anticipate that this year’s CLC will enable a creative response to some of the many problems of our collective present. The difficulty in thinking the present lies partly in its immediacy, and partly in the way in which spaces for that thinking are themselves precarious, colonised, dis-placed, degraded, recast or simply made untenable. From individuals’ housing, employment and migration experiences to the broader question about the intensification or disintegration of the European political project, are life’s very objects and experiences now peculiarly shaped by precarity?

Law forms part of the architecture of precarity, shaping both its production and governance, whether through specific rules and regulations relating to welfare provision, housing law or the structuring and regulation of financial markets; or through changing images and enactments of justice, (fragmented) genealogies, and shifting understandings of modernity. One approach within the critical legal tradition has been to expose these architectures: to show how it produces inequity, to demonstrate its contingencies, to trace its genealogies, to question law’s production of a normative order of life. In this sense it might be said that the role of critique is to render law itself precarious. What is the contemporary nature, role and position of academic work generally, in relation to political life and cultural and intellectual history? Are we post-human? Post-Europe? Post-law? Post-critique? And what about the core critical legal concerns: law, justice and ethics?

True to the tradition of the CLC, we hope participants will approach these general provocations through a rich plurality of critical and radical thematics and interdisciplinary approaches.

Confirmed Plenary Speakers:

·         Donatella Alessandrini, Kent Law School

·         Kathleen Davis, University of Rhode Island

·         Isabell Lorey, European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies

·         Davide Tarizzo, University of Salerno

The Call for Stream Proposals is OPEN NOW – please send proposals of no more than 500 words along with short bios of the stream organisers to klsclc2016@kent.ac.uk. The Call for Stream Proposals closes 7 March 2016. The Call for Papers and Panels will be opened in March when streams are announced – and as ever there will be a general stream. *Conference registation will open via the webpage shortly*: http://www.kent.ac.uk/law/research/clc-2016/index.html

We also invite participants to curate screenings, performances, happenings and other creative formats at the conference. Please contact us at klsclc2016@kent.ac.uk with your plans – we will do our best to facilitate them.

Connal Parsley, Nick Piška and the KLS CLC Committee

Jean D'Aspremont On Methodological Choice in International Law

Jean D'Aspremont, University of Manchester School of Law and University of Amsterdam, has published Methodology as a chapter in his book Epistemic Forces in International Law: Foundational Doctrines and Techniques of International Legal Argumentation 177(Edward Elgar, 2015). Here is the abstract.

This paper constitutes a chapter of the author's monograph entitled 'Epistemic Forces in International Law' (Edward Elgar 2015). After formulating some general considerations on the relationship between theory and methodology, it builds on the idea that methodological choices are most conducive to the persuasiveness of legal arguments and explores the social constraints on methodological choices in international law (I). The paper then turns more specifically to international law and offers a handful of critical observations on methodological debates in contemporary international legal studies (II). In doing so, it revisits some of the methodological postures revered and venerated by international lawyers today: induction, the idea of system, the so-called turn to empiricism, interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity, the abiding (need for) methodological revolution, pluralism and methodological perspectivism. It ends with a few observations on deconstruction, structuralism and the critical attitude in international legal studies.

Download the chapter from SSRN at the link.




More information here from the publisher's website.

Martti Koskenniemi's Critical Subject

Sahib Singh, University of Cambridge and University of Helsinki, Eric Castren Institute of International Law and Human Rights, is publishing The Critical Subject in Martti Koskenniemi and his Critics (W. Werner et al., eds.; forthcoming). Here is the abstract.

This essay excavates and critiques the image of the critical subject that is presupposed by Koskenniemi in his 'From Apology to Utopia'. Critical international legal thought often invests considerable faith in the potential of the subject; I argue that this may, in some cases, be a misplaced strategy. This argument proceeds in three steps. Part I examines how the various theories and methods of Koskenniemi's text leaves us with no knowledge of the critical subject. Part II demonstrates that his text presupposes into existence a subject rooted in a Sartrean metaphysic, and then explores the characteristics and attitudes of this being. Part III then demonstrates how this critical subject is structured by specific contradictions that may disable it from realizing the emancipatory politics of critical thought. More importantly, it attempts to show how this subject may very well embed the prevailing cultural ideology of our time, rather than challenge it. And yet, despite these antinomies and limits, many young scholars still continue to believe in this image of the critical subject. Because this image is held together through myth.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

The Link Between CLS and Marxism

Akbar Rasulov, University of Glasgow School of Law, is publishing CLS and Marxism: A History of an Affair in volume 5 of Transnational Legal Theory (2014). Here is the abstract.

This essay explores the relationship between the Critical Legal Studies movement and the Marxist tradition. What role did Marxism play in the formation of CLS’s ideological and theoretical horizons? What part was it assigned in the movement’s symbolic economy of discursive projects and practices? What sorts of critical challenges did CLS scholars mount against the Marxist legal-theoretic tradition and what kind of broader lessons can the Marxist tradition extract today from those criticisms? The essay starts by summarising the standard account of the relationship between CLS and Marxism that has historically developed within the CLS’s own internal discourse. It problematises a number of basic assumptions underlying this account before turning its attention to the examination of CLS’s (potential) contribution to the development of a new wave of the Marxist legal-theoretic enterprise.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Call For Papers: Critical Legal Conference 2014 at the University of Sussex

Call For Papers

POWER, CAPITAL, CHAOS

CRITICAL LEGAL CONFERENCE 2014

4-6 September 2014

UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX, BRIGHTON, UK

Call for Papers

Conference Theme:

By ‘Power, Capital, Chaos’, we refer to a context of ongoing global economic crisis, the neo-liberal destruction of social democracy and the ever-widening entrenchment of inequalities of wealth, power and technology within and between a global ‘North’ and global ‘South’. A contemporary political situation marked by austerity and privatisation, by security and responsibility, by racist political reaction, class-war and gender-domination.

Yet, this is also a situation marked by manifold acts of protest, struggle, occupation, riot and revolution. All of which demand the reimaging of social, political, juridical and material life. These are modes of resistance that call-out disparate and conflicting visions of the ‘public good’, ‘human dignity’ and ‘justice’. Equally these involve legal and political claims to knowledge which exist within and contend with a late-modern context of endless critique, scepticism and disagreement. As such, the contemporary theorisation of ‘power’ and ‘capital’ involves critical thought’s confrontation with a certain ‘chaos’ of reason and unreason.

Conference participants are asked to consider how we might attempt to understand, explain and respond to a chaotic contemporary political situation? You are invited to do so on the lovely campus of the University of Sussex set in the chalky South Downs of South-East England. In this respect, one context of the CLC 2014 is the city of Brighton and Hove, which carries on a long tradition of pleasure and distraction. In another, the context is the University of Sussex which holds onto both a radical intellectual tradition and a tradition of radical student protest.

We ask you to make your own interpretation of the theme ‘Power, Capital, Chaos’, and invite scholars from a range of disciplines to propose papers and streams. Traditionally the Critical Legal Conference is a friendly and interdisciplinary conference bringing together scholars from a wide body of disciplines.

Proposals should consist of a short abstract (max. 250 words).

Deadline for Stream Proposals:          31 March, 2014

Deadline for Paper Proposals:            30 June, 2014

Plenary Speakers:

Mark Devenney (University of Brighton)       Maria Drakopoulou (University of Kent)

Denise Ferreira da Silva (Queen Mary)         Mark Neocleous (Brunel University)

Louiza Odysseos (University of Sussex)          Nina Power (University of Roehampton)

Organisation:

The CLC 2014 is hosted by the Sussex Law School, and by the School of Law, Politics and Sociology, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK.

For stream proposals, paper proposals and general information please contact:

Kimberley Brayson or Tarik Kochi: clc2014@sussex.ac.uk

Conference Fees, including conference dinner, drinks reception, lunch and refreshments:

Early-Bird Registration (by 31 July 2014):      £180

Late Registration:                                           £200

Reduced Rate (postgraduate):                        £100

For further information see the Conference Website:

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/law/newsandevents/clc

Legal Intellectuals and Their Impact On Society

James R. Hackney, Jr., Northeastern University School of Law, has published Legal Intellectuals in Conversation: Reflections on the Construction of Contemporary American Legal Theory (New York University Press, 2012). Here is the abstract.

In this book the author examines the trajectory of American legal theory in the late 20th century by way of interviewing ten leading theorists. The interviews conducted with Bruce Ackerman, Jules Coleman, Drucilla Cornell, Charles Fried, Morton Horwitz, Duncan Kennedy, Catharine MacKinnon, Richard Posner, Austin Sarat, and Patricia Williams cover a wide breadth of contemporary legal theory — including law and economics, critical legal studies, rights theory, law and philosophy, critical race theory, critical legal history, feminist theory, postmodern theory, and law and society. The topics raised in the conversations include the early lives of interviewees as thinkers and scholars, their contributions to American legal theory, and their thoughts regarding some fundamental questions in legal academe.

Critical Legal Conference 2011

An announcement for the Critical Legal Conference, to be held at Aberyswyth University, September 9-11, 2011.

A Definition of Critical Legal Studies

Pierre Schlag, University of Colorado Law School, has published Critical Legal Studies, in 295 The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Legal History (Stanley N. Katz ed., 2009). Here is the abstract.

This brief encyclopedia entry, written for the Oxford International Encyclopedia of Legal History, discusses the origins and implications of critical legal studies as a political movement and an intellectual tendency. The entry attempts to chart the intellectual forerunners, the intellectual contributions, the politics, and the legacies of critical legal studies. It also describes the attacks on cls and the anti-intellectual consequences of these attacks for the American legal academy.

Download the entry from SSRN at the link.

The Origins Of Critical Race Theory

Richard Delgado, Seattle University School of Law, has published "Liberal McCarthyism and the Origins of Critical Race Theory," at 94 Iowa Law Review 1505 (2009). Here is the abstract.

I wrote this piece exploring some of the intellectual origins of critical race theory for a 20-year anniversary of the movement held at the University of Iowa in April, 2009. In it, I look at the role of certain prominent university officers in purging their ranks of white radicals to prepare the way, in the late sixties and early seventies, for the first large group of post-Brown minority students who were starting to arrive around that time. I show how four promising white professors, two of law, one of history, and one of criminology lost their jobs and what they did afterward. I show that they continued to teach and write about left-wing thought in the hinterlands in ways that contributed to the rise of critical race theory. As they say, it is hard to kill an idea.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Conference Announcement

The Critical Legal Conference

From Bald de Vries and Since 1984, every first weekend in September, the Critical Legal Conference brings together critical and radical legal scholars from all over the world. It has been a phenomenal success despite its modesty. The CLC is also exactly that: a conference. No organisation, presidents and secretaries, members and subscrip­tions.
This conference is a transient community; an inoperative community always to come, lasting for three days every year, without orthodoxies, exclu­sions or stars and gets down to the business of thinking and being together. In doing so, a variety of critical schools, such as postmodernism, phenomenology, decon­struction, feminism, post-colonialism, critical race, queer theory, the ethics of otherness, the ontology of plural singularity, and the critique of bio-politics have been pioneered in these conferences, creating new and stronger links between theory and practice.
Most conferences have taken place in the UK but we have also been to South Africa, India, Ireland and Scandinavia. This is the first time, the CLC is organised in the Netherlands. It hopes to bring together different schools and approaches to critical legal scholarship at a time when collaboration and solidarity across Europe and the world is imperative.