Reminder: the journal Noesis has issued a CFP for its Spring 2020 issue, The Philosophy of Customary Law. The deadline is June 1st, 2019. You may submit papers in English, French, or Italian. The editors are Luke Mason, Eduardo Frezet, and Marc Goetzmann.
Call
for Papers: The Philosophy of Customary Law
Special
edition of the French journal Noesis
Presentation
For more than 20
years, the peer-reviewed journal Noesis has been at the
forefront of French contemporary philosophy. Affiliated to the Center
for Research in the History of Ideas (CRHI) of the University of Nice
Sophia Antipolis, Noesis publishes two special editions a
year, collecting papers around a topic chosen by its scientific
committee. The Philosophy of Customary Law will be the name
of the Spring 2020 double issue. It follows the organization of a conference on
the “Philosophy of Customary Law” in May 2018.
The call
Far from considering
the phrase "customary law" as a self-evident
truth, papers will aim at identifying and trying to solve the many tensions
created by the juxtaposition of two separate but parallel forms of social
regulation: law and
custom. What matters then is to investigate the ambiguity behind the very idea
of customary law. Does it point out one
more sort of law,
or does it designate an autonomous kind of law, with its own features and
not reducible to the law?
Answering these
questions requires without any doubts an inquiry about the peculiar dynamics
of customary law, grounded on both
empiricist and theoretical perspectives. To know whether it is a form among
others of law or
it is specific enough to be called a genus of law, it is crucial to define
its principles. If this law is
called customary it
is because custom is key to it as a source of law. Understanding the
specific features of customary law means therefore
striving to understand what role custom plays to shape the very nature of customary law.
It will be necessary
to investigate the way the main role assigned to customs determines the very
existence of specific institutions and peculiar criteria of the bigger law frame that regulates
the individual. Any legal system
that includes custom as its element must establish spatial, temporal and
logical frame of custom proofs. Nevertheless, Anglo-Saxon Common law and its peculiar
principles mustn't overshadow any attempt to grasp the principles and the
peculiarities of customary law; and we will be
particularly sensitive to the way the customary law settles in pluralist
contexts, where different customary laws can be concurrent.
In these conditions the interaction between law and custom takes the
shape of a normative conflict more than of a coherent customary law.
Exploring the limits
and the fictions of customary procedures
adopted by the Common Law could
be the first step of both a new deployment of the customary law potential and an
inquiry about its foundations. Indeed, it would be of extreme interest to study
the different forms of customary law in eras where the
Common Law model
is spreading at different levels and domains, especially in international law, and where customary law is adopted in
de-colonized regions where the law system is marked by a
strong plurality of contexts.
Peculiar stakes of
these contexts force to investigate both the limits and the flexibility
of customary law. Do evolutions of scales
and domains concern the essence of customary law, if this nature exists? Or
are they only variations of a single nature beyond the peculiarities of each
embodiment? It will also be necessary - among other issues - to
address the specific effectiveness of customarylaw, and to determine
if it lays on the same constraint as the law; and if it is supported by
peculiar institutions and applications. The question of the role of the sanction is
in this respect essential.
In the wake of these
reflections it is necessary to note that custom is reduced to the status of
simple source of the law in
every lawcalled customary, and is therefore
deprived of every autonomous form of normative power. It is not custom that is
not acknowledged as custom according to the processes required and in the name
of the institutions and criteria defined by law. In this case, custom is
not anything more than one of the many possible sources of law, and concurring with them;
it has not a primary juridical existence.
This is the reason
why John Austin could so easily disqualify custom self-sufficiency, arguing -
with Hobbes and against the historical school - that the very nature of law prevents custom to be
effective on its own besides the implicit or explicit, direct or indirect
acknowledgement by the sovereign. One of the main ambitions of this collective
publication would be indeed to question Austin's position. This could in turn
allow to address the issue of the substantial or accessory priority of the
phrase "customary law". Beyond this lies
the very issue of the autonomy of custom as a social regulation tool.
In order to do that,
one could be tempted to consider what disappears of custom and what does not,
in customary law, so as to really
understand its very nature. This brings us to discuss the specific subject of
the codification of custom, the cornerstone of customary law. This codification is
never de facto a neutral act, and it will be more
relevant to point out from every point of view all the implicit tensions of the
codification, which standardize and stabilize power balances or social and
economic struggles. One of the axes of the study, already well known in social
science but overlooked by philosophy, would be that of interaction between
formal lawand
custom in de-colonized countries.
Legal codification is one of these moments when powers and
knowledge meet with most intensity. The “historical school” of lawmaintained the necessity of
combining law studies
with humanities, and we can now include social sciences such as economy,
anthropology and sociology. We will therefore investigate which place these
disciplines can or should have within the codification and definition of
custom; we will also inquiry about their legitimacy, methods and
approaches.
The question arises
of which place one should give to specific case studies in this volume. It is
clear that they must be crucial while studying customary law as a theoretical
object; but no discourse should be limited to a series of descriptions of
different customarylaws.
The following, non-exhaustive, list of questions should allow to
prefigure various leads:
Does "customary law" locution show a
specific mode of social regulation between the juridical and the customary? Is custom a source
of law? Or could be
considered as an object beyond or before it? Does a specific form of customary law exist despite its
different expressions? Does a model of customary law exist - such as the
international law?
Which transformations
does custom endure when integrated with the "customary law"? Which philosophical
implications does codification of custom produce within customary law? Which are the stakes of
the very existence of customary law in pluralist and
decolonized contexts? What are the relationships between customary law on one side and moral
or juridical standards such as human rights on the other? What is the place
of customary law within social change
dynamics?
Which interactions
and which concerns exist about humanities, social sciences and law with respect to
custom? Which are the links of customary law with localities,
territories, their history and their social displaying? How different
disciplines of social and human sciences allow to reflect upon these phenomena
and their conflict with law's
peculiar formality?
Submissions
The committee and the editors will make their
selection from a set of complete papers only. Proposals will not be
reviewed.
Papers may be as long as 35.000 signs /
7.500 words. This does not include: the main title, abstracts,
footnotes, the author’s presentation etc. Only the main text counts in
the total of words.
Papers may be written in French, English
and Italian only. They should be sent to the following email
addresses altogether, by June 1st,
2019.
To ensure an unbiased selection, the document
must be anonymous. It must be modifiable, therefore .doc files are
preferable. Please include in your email a separate document that states your
name, affiliation, topics of interests. We should provide an answer by August 1st, 2019.
Then, selected papers might need some
modifications. The final versions of the papers will be due by September 15, 2019.
Guidelines for
submissions to Noesis
The paper must
include:
-a title
-a short abstract (300 words
approx.) with a list of 5 keywords
-images can be inserted in the
file but need to be sent separately as well
Once the paper is published, the
author also accepts the future publication of his/her paper online.
Formatting
standards:
-Times New Roman, 12, with no
extra space between lines, is preferable
-The titles of all the parts and
sub-parts of the paper must be clearly highlighted and numbered
-Each paragraph must be indented
-Notes must be footnotes and not
end notes, numbered from 1 to the end.
-Commas like this « »
are preferable to commas like this “”
-Quotes that are longer than 3
lines approx. must be separated from the main text
-Quotes in foreign languages must
be italicized
-Cuts inside quotes must be
signaled with […]
-To highlight words, please use
commas first, italics if necessary, but do not underline or put the words in
bold
References:
-References must be
included in footnotes. Lists of references at the end of the article are
possible but not encouraged.
-The main text must not include
bibliographical elements (like dates): the full reference must appear in the
footnote and only there. Only the number of the footnote appears in the main
text.
For books:
Author’s first name and last name
(in full), Title, City, Publisher, year, p. x.
For papers:
Author’s first and last name (in
full), « Title », Name of publication, n° X, Year,
p. x.
For book chapters:
Author’s first and last
name, « Title », in first letter of the
editors’ first name and editor’s last name, (ed.), Title, City,
Publisher, Year, p. x.
-Authors’ names should not
written completely with upper-case letters
-They should be written in full
-If there are 2 authors, use
“and” between the two names; for 3 authors, separate the first two with a comma
and use “and” before the last name; for more than 3 authors, use et al.
For recurring
references inside footnotes:
For a book: Author’s first and last
name, Title (shortened if necessary), op. cit.,
p. x.
For a paper: Author’s first and last name,
« Title », art. cit., p. x.
If the reference is repeated
right after a previous mention:
use Ibid., p. x, if the page is different; for the exact same
page, Ibid. only.
Please use:
chap. for chapters
n° for a specific issue
p. for page(s)
sq. pour “and the following pages”
t. (number) to indicate the book
part
trad. for translation/translator
--
Marc Goetzmann
Part-time Lecturer, University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne,
Philosophy Department
PhD-Candidate, University of Nice Sophia Antipolis, UCA
ATER Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne UFR10
Agrégé de philosophie
Doctorant, Université de
Nice Sophia Antipolis, membre de l'Université Côté d'Azur
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