Deadline Extended: Abstract Submission, Conference on Qualitative Research in Law, October 26, 2018

Conference on Qualitative Research in Law - to be held on 26 Oct 2018 in Brno, Czech Republic

We invite all who are interested in qualitative and interpretive methods in legal research. Contributions should focus on the methodological aspect of qualitative research: methods of data collection, interpretation of various types of data, and experience with this type of research in law in general. We are interested in research of anthropological, linguistic, ethnographic, narratological, sociological and other related fields dealing with law, its position and influence on society, the content of legal texts or texts about the law.

- The deadline for abstract submission (maximum length of 300 words) has been postponed until 15 July 2018, on qrlconference@law.muni.cz.

- Notification will be sent to authors until August 13, 2018.

More info: http://qrlconference.wordpress.com/

Via @thomgiddens

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.

Atuahene @ProfAtuahene on Takings as a Sociolegal Concept: An Interdisciplinary Examination of Involuntary Property Loss

Bernadette Atuahene, Chicago-Kent Coolege of Law, Illinois Institute of Technology, has published Takings as a Sociolegal Concept: An Interdisciplinary Examination of Involuntary Property Loss at 12 Annual Review of Law and Social Science 171 (2016). Here is the abstract.

This review seeks to establish takings as a respected field of sociolegal inquiry. In the legal academy, the term takings has become synonymous with constitutional takings. When defined more broadly, however, a taking is when a person, entity, or state confiscates, destroys, or diminishes rights to property without the informed consent of rights holders. Adopting a more expansive conception of takings lays the groundwork for a robust interdisciplinary conversation about the diverse manifestations and impacts of involuntary property loss, where some of the most valuable contributions are made by people who do not consider themselves property scholars. This review starts the conversation by bringing together the empirical literature on takings published between 2000 and 2015 and scattered in the fields of law, economics, political science, sociology, psychology, geography, and anthropology. Most importantly, a robust understanding of property's multiple values is required to fully comprehend the magnitude of the loss associated with takings, and this creates a space in which scholars can rescue property's political, cultural, emotional, and social value from the sizeable shadow cast by the overly dominant focus on its economic value.

The full text is not available from download from SSRN.

LSU Digital Scholarship Lab Hosts Talk and Workshop on Social Justice and Social Justice and Digital Humanities October 24 and 25

LSU’s Digital Scholarship Lab invites you to attend the upcoming digital humanities events by guest speaker Angel Nieves, who will offer a talk and a workshop about his work on race, social justice, and digital humanities.

Talk 

“Intersectional Cartographies: Social Justice,
Digital Humanities Practices, and 3D Visual Heritage in Soweto, Johannesburg” 
When: Monday, 10/24, 11am-12:15pm
Where: Hill Memorial Library 

Nieves’s talk will address the question: Can digital reconstructions of difficult histories be used to harness the tools of restorative social justice in a preservation-based practice that combines both tangible and intangible heritage? Technologies now at our disposal allow us to layer victim testimony in hypertexts using multiple tools for mapping, text mining, and 3D visualizations. Digital humanities may also help analyze documentation so as to reconstruct and recover an alternative historical narrative in the face of conventional wisdom or officializing histories. The layering of the many narratives also helps lay bare the messiness of archive making, the methodologies of digital ethnography, and, the endangered nature of those archives across South Africa – in particular, those related to the Soweto Uprisings of June 1976.   

 Digital Pedagogy Workshop 

“Race, Social Justice, and DH: Applied Theories and Methods” 
When: Tuesday, 10/25, 10am-12pm
Where: Middleton Library, Room 295 (Dean’s Conference Room) 

Nieves’s workshop will show how – through an interdisciplinary, intersectional, and CRT (Critical Race Theory) framework – both race and social justice can be central to digital humanities teaching, pedagogy, and practice. The workshop will pay special attention to queer theory, critical ethnic studies, postcolonial theory, WOC/Black feminism, Indigenous studies, and disability studies as they currently help to reshape digital humanities teaching and methods across our university/college classrooms. 

Angel David Nieves is an Associate Professor at Hamilton College, Clinton, N.Y. and is Director of the American Studies and Cinema & Media Studies Programs there. He is also Co-Director of Hamilton’s Digital Humanities Initiative (DHi) which is recognized as a DH leader among small-liberal arts colleges in the Northeast. He is also a Research Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.  

Patrick on Insights from the Behaviorial Sciences on Law and Emotions

Carlton Patrick, University of Miami Department of Psychology, has published A New Synthesis for Law and Emotions: Insights from the Behavioral Sciences at 47 Arizona State Law Journal 1239 (2015). Here is the abstract.

The business of the law is to influence human behavior. To do this effectively, lawmakers must make assumptions about human psychology and how people think. While the behavioral sciences dedicate their entire enterprises to investigating these questions, the law, even at its best, incorporates knowledge from those disciplines in a fragmentary and unsystematic fashion. At its worst, the legal system overlooks or ignores advances in other fields and instead relies on inherited intuitions of behavior that can be both naive and difficult to enumerate with precision. Nowhere is this phenomenon more evident than in the law’s longstanding struggle with emotions, where attempts to codify, incorporate, explain, and otherwise reckon with our feelings have produced many of the law’s most nebulous and imprecise concepts. Using insights from the modern behavioral sciences, especially those informed by an evolutionary approach to human behavior, this article attempts to inform a legal analysis of emotions and address many of the unsettled questions of the Law and Emotions movement.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Social Scientific Evidence and Its Place In the Contemporary U. S. Trial

Robert P. Burns, Northwestern University, School of Law, has published Social Scientific Evidence as Northwestern Public Law Research Paper No. 15-43. Here is the abstract.

This paper considers two distinct and internally complex language regions, those of the contemporary American trial and of the social sciences. Its concern is how the trial treats the social sciences, not how the social sciences treat the trial. It first surveys the controversies that surround each region and argues that those controversies counsel against any "craving for generality" in defining their relationship with one another. It then describes the canonical account of the trial implicit in the rationalist tradition of evidence scholarship and explains how that account understands the place of social scientific evidence within it. The paper contrasts that received view of the trial with a more concrete and, to my mind, adequate interpretation of the trial. It then provides an account of the various functions of the social sciences within that more adequate understanding of the trial.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Sociology, Ethics, and Law

Steven Lubet, Northwestern University School of Law, has published Ethics On The Run in The New Rambler Review, May 2015. Here is the abstract.

Alice Goffman’s widely acclaimed On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City has drawn more positive attention than almost any sociology book in recent years. The success of the book led to a lecture tour of at least twenty sociology departments and conferences. Her TED talk, which was often interrupted by applause, has had nearly 700,000 views. A careful reading of On the Run, however, leaves me with vexing questions about the author’s accuracy and reliability. There are just too many incidents that strike me as unlikely to have occurred as she describes them. One must try to keep an open mind about such things – especially regarding someone as obviously brilliant and dedicated as Goffman – so readers may disagree with me about the extent of her embellishments. In any event, there is a bigger problem. As I will explain below, Goffman appears to have participated in a serious felony in the course of her field work – a circumstance that seems to have escaped the notice of her teachers, her mentors, her publishers, her admirers, and even her critics.

Download the article from SSRN at the link. Here is a link to the article in the New Rambler Review.