Edinburgh Law School Legal Studies Research Paper Series - September 2024
Tue 17 September 2024
The latest in the Legal Studies Research Paper Series (Vol. 12, No. 2: September, 2024) from Edinburgh Law School is now available.
View the full Edinburgh Law School Legal Studies Research Paper Series on SSRN
Emotions and Ethics in Teaching Mass Atrocities Using Archives
Andy Aydın-Aitchison - University of Edinburgh - School of Law
Annalisa Battista - University of Edinburgh - School of Law
This chapter explores the interplay between ethics and emotions in teaching and studying atrocity crimes through a mixed-method study on the experiences of students and teaching staff on a senior undergraduate course, Criminologies of Atrocity. Students are presented with the general study of atrocity crimes, perpetrators and victims, and the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s which act as a case study. At the end of the course, students are assessed by a report on their own criminological archival research with court transcripts and exhibits from the ICTY web-archive. The sensitive nature of the material with which the students work demands reflection on the ethical and emotional dimensions of working in the field of atrocity criminology. Supported by literature on research ethics and the scholarship of teaching and learning sensitive of difficult topics, the study combines focus groups with the students enrolled in the course, survey data collected covering 4 instances of delivery (2020-2023), and reflective conversations between teaching staff. Emotions constitute a normal response to the study of atrocity crimes and emotional support and ethical awareness can help students avoid harm while embracing the challenge of researching and writing about atrocity crimes. We argue that it is fundamental to establish emotionally and ethically responsible ways of teaching mass atrocities through archives rather than avoiding the coverage of sensitive, traumatic topics. Courses grounded in ethics and open to emotions play an important role in a criminological or legal curriculum, and the emotional and ethical journeys made by students demonstrate the effectiveness of creating a supportive place for ethical and emotional growth and evaluation of research and legal practice.
Sovereignty and the European Union: An Enduringly Awkward Fit
Neil Walker - University of Edinburgh - School of Law
Sovereignty has always been an awkward fit for the European Union in many respects – conceptual, historical, normative and material - its supranationalism has been constructed against sovereignty. Conceptually, the defining features of modern sovereignty, namely self-determining political agency, unity of title, unqualified supremacy, and comprehensive authority, have been largely absent from the framing logic of supranationalism Historically, supranational Europe emerged in response to the perceived security and economic limitations of the world of states – the political form with which sovereignty has long been closely associated. Normatively, not only has supranationalism not mimicked the attributes of sovereign statehood, it has sought to challenge the prevalence of these attributes. It has done so not just through addressing the immediate mid-century legacy of military and economic nationalism, but as an ongoing and professedly perpetual experiment in reconfiguring continental – and increasingly global - political relations into a less state-centred shape. That normative challenge has had a deep material basis. For today’s European Union, expanded well beyond its initial continental market-making jurisdiction, boasts a scope, density and intensity of legal authority in matters formerly within the prerogative of the state that has no equal or modern precedent. These various factors have left European supranationalism in an ‘awkward’ position relative to the dominant form of sovereign statehood, It has been conditioned neither to ignore nor to emulate states, but instead to engage with states, and through that engagement to discover and develop terms which allowed it to ‘fit’ into a global pattern in which the forms and attitudes of sovereignty remain so pervasive. This paper examines contemporary trends across the two key aspects of that awkward fit - internal and external relations. In both dimensions the EU’s relationship to sovereignty is increasingly double edged. For as well as challenging internal and external state sovereignty, the EU, both internally, and – with somewhat greater freedom and increasing prominence – externally, has in certain respects been minded to claim or accept some version or some features of sovereignty for itself in its efforts to find an optimal ‘fit’ within the global state system.
Ethical Markets and Economic Development: How Fair Trade Produced a Neoliberal "Social
Amy J. Cohen - Temple University Beasley School of Law
Andrew Lang - University of Edinburgh - School of Law
This chapter traces how the modern fair trade movement helps to produce a neoliberalised version of social order. But our understanding of “neoliberal” governance differs from many others’. We do not describe the imposition of a single order of value, e.g, “market value” that cannibalizes all other values. Rather we describe it as an approach to governance that purposefully evades a shared consensus to address questions of value via the subjective evaluative techniques imaginatively associated with the sovereign consumer. As such, the social groups that coalesce around a fair-trade do not take the form of “publics” associated with a democratic polity. Nor do they take the form of unions among producers, laborers, and consumers that once served as the normative foundation of previous political imaginaries. Instead, they are contingent and thin social formations subject to ongoing competition and change that can forge loose and temporary alliances with other collectives—specifically corporations and their associated supply chains.
Foreign Allegiance and Constitutional Citizenship: Postcolonial (Dis)continuities in the Commonwealth Caribbean
Timothy Jacob-Owens - University of Edinburgh - School of Law
The independent states of the Commonwealth Caribbean—all of them former British colonies—share a common constitutional provision, according to which individuals are disqualified from standing for election if they are under a voluntary acknowledgment of allegiance to a foreign state. In this article, I argue that judicial interpretations of this ‘foreign allegiance disqualification’ have been decisively shaped by inherited ideas drawn from the English medieval and British imperial laws of subjecthood. The first of these ideas is the assumption that holding citizenship of a state necessarily gives rise to allegiance to that state. The second is the notion that citizenship and allegiance are singular and uniform across the former territory of the British Empire, now the Commonwealth of Nations. The third is the conception of the relationship between the citizen and the state as hierarchical and quasi-contractual, wherein the citizen’s allegiance is extracted in return for the protection of the state. The region’s post-independence constitutional citizenship jurisprudence thus remains more ‘Commonwealth’ than distinctively ‘Caribbean’ in character, with the consequence that the boundaries of democratic membership continue to be defined by reference to a conceptual framework of the former coloniser’s making.