Global Law Futures Seminar Series
Edinburgh Law School’s ‘Global Law Futures’ seminar series explores questions relating to global law, broadly construed, from transdisciplinary and diverse methodological perspectives. Law in a plural global context requires a radical re-imagining of the practice, study, and theory of legal orthodoxies. This seminar series questions and attempts to push the boundaries of thinking about law. The series will touch on issues such as the space-time of legal imaginaries, the place of law in times of anthropocentric ecological crisis, the relationalities and materialities of law, what it means to decolonise legal thinking in a global context, the meaning of ‘global legal order(s)’, the relationship between law and algorithmic governance, the exploration of decentralised and deformalised legal practices, and many more besides.
Beginning in January 2024, the seminar series is convened by Amalia Amaya Navarro, Gail Lythgoe, and Veronica Ruiz Abou-Nigm, collaborating with Nehal Bhuta, Deval Desai, Simone Lamont-Black. The series is supported by the Edinburgh Centre for International Global Law and the Edinburgh Centre for Legal Theory.
About the Seminar
Foreign affairs questions are often thought to lie at the very edge of private international law, perhaps in the leftover corners of the historical alignment between private and public international law. Similarly, in part on the assumption that private international law settles conflicts of laws between already established states, there wouldn’t appear to be any intuitive connection between nationalist or self-determination movements and the field of private international law.
This lecture shows that these assumptions are mistaken. By engaging with the historical development of the field from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, in this lecture I show that private international law has been deeply enmeshed in major geopolitical events generally, and in nationalist and self-determination movements, in particular. This enmeshment is neither accidental, nor exclusively modern. It is the inevitable result of some of private international law’s main analytical and conceptual building blocks.
About the Speaker
Roxana Banu is an Associate Professor and Tutorial Fellow at the Faculty of Law and Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the history and theory of private international law.
She has written on the intellectual history of private international law in the nineteenth century, the relevance of private international law for the geopolitical events of the interwar period, and on the role of social workers in the history of the field. Roxana has recently co-edited the first volume on “Philosophical Foundations of Private International Law” in OUP’s “Philosophical Foundations of Law Series” and is currently working on a book on the history of private international law in the British Empire, funded by the Leverhulme Trust.
About the Seminar
The imperative for social and legal innovative to be future-proof or to reflect long-term thinking is a characteristic of the 21st century. Looking back, such an imperative is not novel, and is situated in political (military) and economic agendas of the post-WW2 world order. Beyond glossy titles, there is something both to question and to analyse in why the future is expected to matter. Futures studies is an interdisciplinary field that focuses on the analysis of why and how humans think about the future. As part of this session, we will focus on the methodological and thematic implications of focusing on the future in our legal practice, namely matters of ethics and interdisciplinarity.
About the Speaker
Kwamou Eva Feukeu co-runs the Decolonial Comparative Law project initiated by Professor Dr Ralf Michaels and Professor Dr Lena Salaymeh at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law (Hamburg). She previously worked for four years as the Africa coordinator for Futures Literacy at UNESCO. She has also organized her own practice as a head futurist for UN Global Pulse Finland, the OECD, the International Development Research Centre, and the French Development Agency. She is an experienced facilitator and lab designer involved in labs run since 2014, mainly in Africa and Europe, for governments, NGOs and CEOs but also in family settings. Feukeu is also a member of the editorial board of two scientific journals, Futures and Prospective et stratégie. She has spoken for a variety of constituencies including Stanford University, the World Bank, the UN Office for Africa, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands and the African Technology Policy Centre.
A legal scholar by training, she has focused her recent work on the role that norms play in the production and evolution of anticipatory systems, using lessons learned from decolonial studies and pluralist legal contexts as evidence of complexity. She is also keen to work on African representations and uses of the future. She is currently a PhD candidate in Complexity Studies and Law at the University of Hamburg. She holds a master’s degree in business litigation and arbitration and a bachelor’s in African Studies from Sciences Po Paris.
Horatia Muir Watt, tenured Professor at Sciences Po, delivered a seminar titled "The Law's Ultimate Frontier: Towards an Ecological Jurisprudence" on Wednesday, 8 May at 3pm.
About the seminar
Horatia Muir Watt will speak about her book The Law's Ultimate Frontier: Towards an Ecological Jurisprudence (Hart, 2023). This important book offers an ambitious and interdisciplinary vision of how private international law (or the conflict of laws) might serve as a heuristic for re-working our general understandings of legality in directions that respond to ever-deepening global ecological crises. Unusual in legal scholarship, the author borrows (in bricolage mode) from the work of Bruno Latour, alongside indigenous cosmologies, extinction theories and Levinassian phenomenology, to demonstrate why this field's specific frontier location at the outpost of the law – where it is viewed from the outside as obscure and from the inside as a self-contained normative world – generates its potential power to transform law generally and globally.
Combining pragmatic and pluralist theory with an excavation of 'shadow' ecological dimensions of law, the author, a recognised authority within the field as conventionally understood, offers a truly global view. Put simply, it is a generational magnum opus. All international and transnational lawyers, be they in the private or public field, should read this book.
About the speaker
Horatia Muir Watt is a tenured Professor at Sciences Po, where she is Co-Director of the program Global Governance Studies (which covers private, public and economic international law, arbitration and litigation, human rights and development) within the Master’s Degree in Economic Law. Horatia Muir Watt received a PhD in private international law from the University of Panthéon-Assas Paris 2 in 1985 and passed the agrégation examination in private law in 1986 (ranked second). She is a tenured Professor in private international law and in comparative law. She taught at the University of Tours, at the University of Paris XI, and at the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne between 1996 and 2009 and was appointed to Sciences Po in 2009, when she participated actively in the creation of the law school. She is a Member of the Institute of International Law (since 2013) and of the Institut Universitaire de France (since 2018).
She is Director of the Revue critique de droit international privé (the leading French-language journal on private international law) and a member of the publication committees of numerous other legal journals, among which the Journal of Private International Law, European Review of Contract Law and Transnational Legal Theory. She is part of the core faculty of IGLP (Institute of Global Law and Policy).
She runs the PILAGG (private international law and global governance) research group of which the launching article is « Private International Law beyond the Schism », (2011) 2(3) Transnational Legal Theory 347–427. The research group’s collective work has given rise to several books, published with OUP, Edward Elgar and Pédone.
Dr Alejandro Rodiles, Chair of International Law at Friedrich Schiller University Jena, delivered a seminar titled "On Adaptive (Anti-Law-)Law" on Friday, 22 March at 5pm.
About the seminar
From climate change over counterterrorism to development, resilience discourses and strategies increasingly permeate global law. Beyond affecting several legal fields, this resilience turn has far-reaching consequences for global law’s normativity. Inasmuch as normative solutions evolve experimentally through the acceleration of existing and evolving practices, a mode of legal rationality emerges according to which recompositioning becomes the new normal. While this may be seen as a new type of ‘adaptive law’ that can cope with our Anthropocene condition (in other words, as law’s own resilience), Dr Rodiles argues that it rather reveals a ‘whatever works’ rationality that fails to articulate (new or alternative) reasons for action.
About the speaker
Alejandro Rodiles holds the Chair of International Law at Friedrich Schiller University Jena. He has been an associate professor of International Law and Global Governance at ITAM School of Law, in Mexico City, a visiting professor at El Colegio de México, a lecturer at UNAM, and a research fellow at Humboldt University Berlin. Previously, he worked at Mexico´s Ministry of Foreign Relations, including in the Mexican Mission to the United Nations, in New York. His book Coalitions of the Willing and International Law (CUP 2018) was awarded the 2019 ESIL Book Prize. His research focuses on global security law, the interplay between formality and informality in international law, comparative international law, foreign relations law, and the regulatory potentials of infrastructures.
Prof Dr Ralf Michaels, Director of the Max Planck Institute for International and Comparative Law, Hamburg, delivered a seminar titled "Can Modern Law be Sustainable?" on Friday, 26 January at 4pm.
About the seminar
Our everyday way of life is governed by private law. This way of life – a life based on extraction, trade, consumption, waste – is unsustainable. This must have implications for private law, but these implications are, however, rarely scrutinized – at least in this generality, at least fundamentally. Prof Dr Michaels argues that modern private law is paradigmatically incapable of sustainability, and public law is not, as it is in other cases, a solution. Our hope, if any, lies in a radical rethinking of private law.
About Prof Dr Michaels
Prof Dr Ralf Michaels is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg, Germany, Chair in Global Law at Queen Mary University in London, and Professor of Law at Hamburg University. He is a widely published scholar of private international law, comparative law, and legal theory; his current research focuses on decolonial comparative law, regulatory conflicts, and theoretical foundations of private international law and global legal plurality, and, more recently, sustainability and law.