Interdisciplinary Legal Studies Research Cluster Launch Event, University of Dundee

Interdisciplinary Legal Studies Research Cluster Launch Event

http://interlawdundee.eventbrite.com/

Law is a subject and a practice that is at all points open to its surroundings. Law regulates the world in numerous ways and in a wide variety of contexts. The constitutive effects of law are widespread throughout society and culture, mediating the structures and possibilities of social life and communal relations—locally, nationally, internationally.

The study of law in recent decades has accordingly and prominently focused on the law’s relations with other areas of understanding and knowledge, with leading examples including socio-legal studies, law and humanities, and critical legal studies. Significant arms of the global legal academy are now concerned not only with doctrine and principle, but with the interrelationships between law in terms of doctrinal or institutional phenomena and its wider constitutions and appearances throughout society, culture, and the material world.

Building upon this expansive energy, the Interdisciplinary Legal Studies research cluster adopts a similarly open-ended view of legality, bringing together scholars and other stakeholders working at the multiple intersections between or across legal and other disciplinary settings. Through this connectivity—both interpersonal and interdisciplinary—the cluster seeks to examine and gain rich and varied insights into complex contemporary questions of law, authority, and justice.

This event marks the launch of this cluster, showcasing a range of current research work related to law that is taking place at the intersection of a range of disciplines, including cultural studies, English, philosophy, geography, and art.

Speakers confirmed so far:

Anne Wagner, Université du Littoral Côte d'Opale

Chloë Kennedy, University of Edinburgh

Kimberley Bryson, University of Sussex

Dominic Smith, University of Dundee

Megan O’Neil, University of Dundee

Golnar Nabizadeh, University of Dundee

ICYMI: Gary T. Marx, Windows Into the Soul: Surveillance and Society in an Age of High Technology (University of Chicago Press, 2016)

ICYMI:



Gary T. Marx, Windows Into the Soul: Surveillance and Society in an Age of High Technology (University of Chicago Press, 2016).

Leon Petrazycki's Scholarship

Roger Cotterrell, Queen Mary University of London, School of Law, has published Leon Petrazycki and Contemporary Socio-Legal Studies at 11 International Journal of Law in Context 1 (2015). Here is the abstract.

The work of the Polish-Russian scholar Leon Petrażycki from the early decades of the twentieth century holds a strikingly paradoxical position in the literature of juristic and socio-legal scholarship: on the one hand, lauded as a supremely valuable contribution to knowledge about the nature of law and, on the other, widely neglected and little known. This article asks how far Petrażycki’s theories, expressed in writings by and about him available to an international readership, can provide insight for contemporary socio-legal studies – not as historical background but as living ideas. How far can his work speak to current issues and inform current debates? What obstacles stand in the way of this? Why have few international scholars engaged with his theories despite their rigour and originality? The article starts from this last issue before addressing the others. It argues that Petrażycki’s radical legal theory offers strikingly distinctive resources for rethinking issues about the role of law in multicultural societies, the nature of developing transnational law, and the significance of law as an aspect or expression of culture.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.