Welcome to the webpage of the Edinburgh Spring Programme in Legal Theory!

The School of Law at the University of Edinburgh and the Edinburgh Legal Theory Reading Group host a programme of special events in legal theory in spring 2009. For further details please see below.

'The Public in Law' is a Doctoral Colloquium to be held at the University of Glasgow Law School on 29-30 April 2009. The Colloquium is organised by the School of Law of the University of Glasgow with the support of the Edinburgh Legal Theory Reading Group.

To find out more, please visit 'The Public in Law' Doctoral Colloquium Website.

Due to unexpected circumstances Professor Nancy Fraser will not be able to deliver the CLS Annual Lecture on 7 May.

On 7 May Professor Nancy Fraser (New School of Social Research, New York) will deliver a lecture entitled 'Disputing the Subject of Justice: National Citizenry, Global Humanity or Transnational Community of Risk'.

A series of workshops in legal theory will be held at the School of Law, Old College, South Bridge, Edinburgh on 8 and 9 May 2009.

The program is as follows:

Friday 8 May 2009

09:30am-1:30pm: Distributive Claims and the Law, Room L05

1:30pm-2:30pm: Lunch, Room L05

2:30pm-6:00pm: Legal Theory and the Third World, Room L05

Saturday 9 May 2009

10:00am-1:30pm: Law and Morality: The Perplexities of Normative Truth, Lorimer Room

1:30pm-2:30pm: Lunch, Lorimer Room

2:30pm-6:00pm: Political Constitutionalism and Judicial Review, Lorimer Room

More information on each of the above workshops is included below. To register your participation in any of the above workshops, please email the specific Organiser.

Organisers: Francisco Saffie Gatica and Claudio Michelon

Objectives
The first aim of this workshop is to explore the relation between distributive claims and the law. For this purpose the structure of the workshops attempts to deal with this relation at two levels. The first is the general level of distributive justice and the law, and the second is the more particular level of the relation between distributive claims and private law. This structure intends to cover questions such as the ways in which distributive claims might endanger or foster the ideals of the rule of law and human rights, as well as the development of private law institutions such as private property, obligations and contracts.
A more general aim of this workshop is to discuss fresh perspectives on the persistent tension within the law between individual interests and collective claims which are both embedded (though with different political foundations), in the idea of rights.
This tension is a central feature of the different (often rival) theories in vogue in the anglo-american philosophical debate on the concept of law. According to the liberal tradition, law is supposed to ensure individual freedom through the recognition of negative rights. The other tradition tries to foster equality through the language of rights.

Structure
The workshop will be structured in two successive panels. In the first one, we will discuss Prof. Nancy Fraser paper 'Reframing Justice in a Globalizing World’. This will have consequences for the relation between distributive claims and law in general. The questions will range between the nature of distributive claims and claims for recognition to the suitability of law to convey such claims.
In the second, we will discuss the relation between private law and distributive claims. If we are to believe Jules Coleman, Ernst Weinrib and others, private law norms and institutions cannot be appropriately understood as instruments of distributive justice. Yet, it is undeniable that private law relations through contract and delict (torts) have a strong general distributive effect. That distribution might (and normally is) distributively unjust and the question then becomes whether those injustices can be tackled from within private law.

First panel: 09:30 - 11:30

Participants:

Prof. Fernando Atria (Universidad Adolfo Ibanez, Universidad de Chile)

Prof. Neil Walker (University of Edinburgh)

Mr. Francisco Saffie Gatica (University of Edinburgh)

Second panel: 11:40 - 13:30

Participants:

Prof. Peter Jaffey (Brunel University)

Prof. William Lucy (University of Manchester)

Dr. Claudio Michelon (University of Edinburgh)

Description: The workshop aims to instigate an enquiry into ‘Legal Theory’ from the perspectives of the ‘Third World’. The underlying concern which motivates this interrogation is the extent to which legal theory speaks to the historical and contemporary experiences of the peoples of the Third World.

Third World perspectives challenge legal theory in several ways. It contests both the premises of legal theory and its impact through various manifestations of substantive legal concepts and frameworks. It contests the long and dominant legal theoretical tradition that is presented not only as a neutral view of the world, but of the world of law. Third World approaches contest the dominant mindset that attempts to define, shape or structure the legal and jurisprudential experiences of most the world.

Any enquiry of this kind must begin from questioning the tales of production and legal transformation that lie at the origins of legal theory. This workshop begins with the assertion that other experiences, and imaginations of law persist. There is, and continues to be different ways of imagining legal theory, especially from the perspectives of communities in struggle and resistance. These communities remain real subjects of imagination, and therefore, real theorists of subaltern encounters with law. The workshop intends to celebrate the existence and authorship of the Third World so conceived. As such, both the colonial history of legal theory, and decolonial struggles of the Third World seek to be addressed.

Whilst a small number of legal theorists have recently engaged in pioneering critiques of the kind implied, there is still the apparent lack of knowledge and indeed interest, on the nature and transformations of law from Third World perspectives. We are inspired by these recent critiques that invite us to develop strategies for investigating the nature of legal and social transformations by re-imaging law from the perspectives of peoples and communities in struggle. We seek, in this workshop, to take this vision a little further by inviting contributions, reflections, and proposals on how we might move forward to register the impact of the Third World in contemporary legal scholarship in general, and legal theory, in particular. The intention here is to open up conversations that could lead to the formation of collective endeavours. Opportunities for a sustained engagement in research, workshops, conferences etc, as part of a 'Third World and Legal Theory' project, it is hoped, maybe explored. Towards this end, the workshop is guided by (but not limited to) the following substantive questions:

o How might the story of legal theory be told through the voices of the Third World?
o How might specific theoretical constructs, for instance, law, property rights, human rights, security or sovereignty be interrogated and restated from the perspectives of the Third World?
o How might legal theory be taught as if the Third World existed and mattered?

Speakers:
Boaventura de Sousa Santos (Key Speaker), Professor of Sociology, School of Economics, University of Coimbra and Legal Scholar, University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School, Global Legal Scholar, University of Warwick.

Radha D’Sousa, Reader in Law, University of Westminster.

Jayan Nayar, Associate Professor of Law, University of Warwick.

The worksop will be chaired by Anne Griffiths, Professor of Anthropology of Law, Univestiy of Edinburgh

Organiser: Haris Psarras

Description: The question whether and, if so, then in what sense, the concept of normative truth comes into play in legal philosophy has generated engaging discussions and long controversies since the first stages of inquiry into the nature of law. Although it has often been argued that ‘truth’ is irrelevant to the law, it is widely accepted that both legislators and judges cannot successfully fulfil their duties, if their decision-making fails to meet the minimum requirements of normative soundness. The very quest for both the validity of law-making process and the lawfulness of judicial decisions necessarily assumes an intersubjective ground of normative soundness providing the criteria against which the successful exercise of law-making and law-applying authority is to be judged. The question thus arises: What does normative soundness stand for and what should a decision-maker do so that she complies with its requirements? There is no doubt that the very concept of normative soundness epitomises the moral character of law. Yet what is still open to discussion is how strong law’s moral character is or we want it to be. At the dawn of the 21st century the international protection of human rights, the promotion of democracy and the establishment of the Rule of Law are said to be the main criteria for law’s moral appraisal. Yet it is argued that they do not cover an important number of moral ideals that an ethical polity should be keen on putting forward. If this criticism against the Rule of Law doctrine is fair, then law should be opener to moral considerations than current legal systems allow it to be. Yet new concerns arise. How can law deal with the controversies that are endemic to the moral debate without loosing the certainty and broad social acceptance that people expect it to have? And taking into account the multicultural character of modern societies how could the endorsement of a certain morality by the law maintain intact the principled tolerance that lies at the heart of constitutional liberalism? These are just some of the questions that fall under the scope of the workshop Law and Morality: The Perplexities of Normative Truth.

Speakers & papers

Professor Fernando Atria (UAI, Universidad de Chile)  A Theory of Adjudication

Dr Stefano Bertea (University of Leicester)  Grounding the Normativity of Law 

Professor Andrew Halpin ( Swansea University)  Seeking Truth in the Normative/Descriptive Divide

Dr Dan Priel (University of Warwick)  The Law's Two Bodies

The workshop 'Law and Morality: The Perplexities of Normative Truth' is a follow-up to the workshop on Law and Truth that took place in June 2008 with Professor Jaap Hage, Dr Sylvie Delacroix and Maris Kopcke Tinture.

Organisers: Conrado Hubner Mendes and Ross Carrick

British constitutional law has witnessed deep transformations of its core institutions in the last two decades. The Human Rights Act, enacted in 1998, and the UK Supreme Court, which will start to work in October, 2009, are two key symbols of this new institutional state of affairs. They put the principle of parliamentary sovereignty under a more complex conceptual framework, yet to be theorized within a particularly British conception of constitutional democracy. Richard Bellamy’s recent book (Political Constitutionalism: a Republican Defence of the Constitutionality of Democracy) developed an original reading of the republican political tradition and offered an alternative to both mainstream accounts of the British system: the one that defends the introduction of rights-based constitutional judicial review and the one that resists such moves on the basis of popular or parliamentary sovereignty. This workshop will discuss these arguments in the light of the current stage of the British constitution.

Chair: Conrado Hübner Mendes (Edinburgh)

1) The legitimacy and effectiveness of judicial review

Discussants: Fernando Atria (UAI, Universidad de Chile) and Claudio Michelon (Edinburgh)

Respondent: Richard Bellamy (UCL)

2) The nature of the rule of law

Discussants: Paul Yowell (Oxford) and Cormac MacAmlaigh (Edinburgh)

Respondent: Richard Bellamy (UCL)

3) The constitutional qualities of the democratic process

Discussants: Chris Himsworth (Edinburgh) and Daniel Augenstein (Edinburgh)

Respondent: Richard Bellamy (UCL)

On 26 May Professor Frank Michelman (Harvard Law School) will deliver a lecture entitled 'Constitutional Authorship and Constitutional Authority'.

Time: 2:00-5:00pm Lorimer Room, Old College, South Bridge

For further enquiries: neil.walker@ed.ac.uk