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. 

Nielsen and Hartz on The Problem of Motivation in Hegel and Rawls

Carsten Fogh Nielsen, University of Aarhus, Department of Education, and Emily Hartz, Copenhagen Business School, Department of Organization, have published Why Be Just? The Problem of Motivation in Hegel and Rawls at 31 Ratio Juris 326 (2018). Here is the abstract.

At the heart of any theoretical problem of justice lies the problem of motivation: Even if we could conceive of a way to develop a comprehensive system of just laws, and even if we could rationally believe in the justice of these laws, how could we ever ensure that we—or anyone else—would be motivated to abide by them? By unearthing how the problem of motivation sways canonical discussions of justice, the article brings forth intrinsic similarities and differences in these discussions that are often overlooked in the literature. In particular, the article highlights intrinsic similarities in the analysis of the concept of justice in two central works that belong to the continental and the analytic tradition respectively and are otherwise rarely discussed together: Hegel’s Outlines of the Philosophy of Right and Rawls’s Theory of Justice.

The full text is not available from SSRN.

Gearey on Maitland's Jurisprudence of the Trust

Adam Gearey, University of London Birkbeck College School of Law, has published ‘We Want to Live’: Metaphor and Ethical Life in F.W. Maitland's Jurisprudence of the Trust at 43 Journal of Law and Society 105 (2016). Here is the abstract.

This article argues that reading F.W. Maitland's jurisprudence of the trust alongside Hegel's philosophy of social recognition offers insights into the way in which metaphors ‘structure’ the modes of ethical life that inform legal and social institutions. Conventional ways of reading Maitland (and John Neville Figgis) have obscured the affinities their work shares with Hegel, and limited the impact of a way of thinking about law and society.

The full text is not available from SSRN.

The Turner Rebellion and the Hegelian Dialectic

Christopher Tomlins, University of California, Berkeley, Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, has published The Work of Death: Massacre and Retribution in Southampton County, Virginia, August 1831, as UC Berkeley Public Law Research Paper No. 2639785. Here is the abstract.

What does it mean, particularly to a slave, to describe dealing death as “work?” This essay employs G.W.F. Hegel’s famous lordship/bondage dialectic (from The Phenomenology of Mind) to explore the massacre of 55 members of white slaveholding families that took place on Monday August 22nd 1831 in St. Luke’s Parish, Southampton County, Virginia, now known as “The Turner Rebellion.” I argue that certain specificities of the Hegelian dialectic, notably the centrality of work to the bondsman’s “direct apprehension” of its self as independent, are key components of the massacre. Likewise, I argue that the dialectic helps us understand the specifically juridical form of retributive killing that followed the massacre, in which 18 slaves, variously accused of “feloniously counselling, advising and conspiring with each other and divers other slaves to rebel and make insurrection and making insurrection and taking the lives of divers free white persons of the Commonwealth” were executed. The essay also explores the sociology and social anthropology of the killing that was the focal point of the rebellion. It considers whether this killing was incidental to some other purpose, such as revenge, or revolution, or central and essential to what Nat Turner desired to achieve.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Antigone, the Whistle-Blower

Alessia Contu, University of Warwick, Warwick Business School, has published Whistle-Blowers’ Acts: Recasting Whistle-Blowing Through Readings of Antigone. Here is the abstract.

"Blowing the whistle" in organizational and public life is akin to speaking out and denouncing wrongdoings. Parrhesia, free speech, is a strongly-held value in western societies, but when manifested in organizations as whistle-blowing it is often seen as troublemaking. Most research on whistle-blowers is based on instrumental knowledge. But time has come to develop new perspectives on whistle-blowing (Wolfe Morrison, 2009). We answer the call to re-energize this research arena by developing a critical knowledge, which fosters reflection (Habermas, 2005: 316). Our discussion is based on exploring the analogy between Antigone, the Sophoclean heroine and whistle-blowers. Specifically, we address the readings of the tragedy by authors such as Hegel, Lacan and Heidegger considering what these offer to our understanding of whistle-blowing. These help us explain why whistle-blowers are often seen as ambiguous figures with ambivalent motives. And why whistle-blowing can be recast as an ethico-political act.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link. 

Haldane In Context

David Schneiderman, University of Toronto Faculty of Law, has published Haldane Unrevealed, in volume 57 of the McGill Law Journal (2012). Here is the abstract.

When historians proffer historical truths they “must not merely tell truths,” they must “demonstrate their truthfulness as well,” observes Hackett Fisher. As against this standard, Frederick Vaughan’s intellectual biography of Richard Burdon Haldane does not fare so well. Vaughan argues that Viscount Haldane’s jurisprudential tilt, which favoured the provinces in Canadian federalism cases before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC), was rooted in Haldane’s philosophizing about Hegel. He does so, however, without much reference to the political and legal currents within which Haldane thought, wrote, and thrived. More remarkably, Vaughan does not derive from his reading of Haldane and Hegel any clear preference for the local over the national. We are left to look elsewhere for an explanation for Haldane’s favouring of the provincial side in division-of-powers cases. Vaughan additionally speculates about why Haldane’s predecessor Lord Watson took a similar judicial path, yet offers only tired and unconvincing rationales. Vaughan, lastly, rips Haldane out of historical context for the purpose of condemning contemporary Supreme Court of Canada decision-making under the Charter. Under the guise of purposive interpretation, Vaughan claims that the justices are guilty of constitutionalizing a “historical relativism” that Vaughan wrongly alleges Hegel to have propounded. While passing judgment on the book’s merits, the purpose of this review essay is to evaluate the book by situating it in the historiographic record, a record that Vaughan ignores at his peril.

Download the essay at the link.

Hegel, the French Revolution, and the Concept of Liberty

Andrew Norris, University of California, Santa Barbara, Department of Political Science, has published The Disappearance of the French Revolution in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as an APSA 2011 Annual Meeting Paper. Here is the abstract.

    

The French Revolution of 1789 is one of the central developments in the history of the concept and practice of political rights. Hegel recognized this, and so valued the Revolution that he claimed always to drink a toast to the storming of the Bastille on July 14th. Nonetheless, in both the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Philosophy of Right Hegel advances an enduring and influential attack upon the Revolution, one that, like that of Edmund Burke, links the Revolution’s accomplishments inextricably with the Reign of Terror of 1793 and 1794. In each Hegelian text, the Revolutionary conception of liberty is presented as being so one-sided and extreme as to be incompatible with a stable polity, and to produce, of necessity, only “a fury of destruction” (P 436/359 and PR §5A). The central line of thought here is relatively clear. The French Revolutionaries enacted a reductive, “abstract” conception of freedom as grasped by the Understanding or Verstand; this “negative freedom” (PR §5A) or “absolute freedom” (P 431/355ff) entails the absence of restriction. When made into a social policy, this can never produce a stable set of institutions, but instead only the destruction of any potential restriction - including, ultimately, those presented by the citizenry themselves. The Revolutionary government was thus destined to descend into the fury of the Terror. In the essay that follows, I do not wish to fundamentally challenge this picture of Hegel’s view. Instead, I will argue that Hegel’s elaboration of it in the Phenomenology in particular is more complicated and nuanced than it initially appears to be, and that attending to the textual details of the Phenomenology’s account allows one to see that Hegel is advancing a particular political diagnosis according which the first “victim” of the Revolution is the apparent agent of the Terror, the volonté générale or general will, a will that only “vanishes” in its own attempt to express itself in action, a vanishing that makes possible the factions, suspicion, guilt, and death of the Jacobins. In connection with this I will also propose that Hegel’s account of the Terror there needs to be read as a response to the immediately preceding account of Utility (die Nützlichkeit), and that when it is so read it shows one of its sides to be a critique of the attempt to “master” a world in which everything is considered as an object of use, a critique that bears comparison with Heidegger’s more famous reflections on the dangers of die Technik.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

Hegel, Law and the Environment

Pravin Jeyaraj has published Philosophy of Love: Hegel, Christianity and Environmental Law. Here is the abstract.

Much Christian opposition to Hegel's philosophy is based on the perception the dialectic supports cultural relativism and the idea that opposing truths can both be valid. This is a narrow interpretation of the dialectic and knowledge and that, more broadly, it reflects the contradictions and interdependence that exists between individual entities. This paper argues that the contradictory interdependence of Hegel's dialectic has its roots in Christian thought and Hegel's earlier theological writings. The paper then goes to suggest how this Christian Hegel could be helpful in developing a model for environmental law research.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.




This paper was presented at a Christian Academic Network workshop on "Knowing in God's World" under the title "Reflections on methods of knowing".