Hyo Yoon Kang | University of Warwick (original) (raw)
Papers by Hyo Yoon Kang
The Modern Law Review, 2012
Law Text Culture, 2019
Over the last decade there has been an increased interest in materiality within legal scholarship... more Over the last decade there has been an increased interest in materiality within legal scholarship, as well as in related disciplines that study law and its practices. Much of it has accounted for the concrete and complex manifestations of law through various materials: from formats of inscription to other mediated devices, such as files and images, to bodies and spaces upon and through which law acts. Yet the terms ‘matter’, ‘materials’ and ‘materiality’ are employed in divergent ways across different works, and often without clear distinctions or theoretical delineations. This special issue begins from proposing a differentiated understanding of these terms in relation to law and legal scholarship, and embeds them in a broader conception of legality, unpacking their premises and implications.
Law Text Culture, 2019
This essay discusses the meaning of 'climate justice' and the ways in which it is or is not mater... more This essay discusses the meaning of 'climate justice' and the ways in which it is or is not materialised currently in climate change litigation. First I present the immateriality of the abstract concepts that make up this composite term: 'climate' and 'justice'. Yet the placing the words adjacent to one another seems to mobilise them into a novel composite vehicle of legal action. I trace how the idea of 'climate justice' hovers as an elusive idea around the concrete particularities of what can be known about 'climate' specifically in relation to 'justice'. These questions are probed in the setting and context of the Philippine Human Rights Commission's 2018 Inquiry into the Carbon Majors' (Chevron, Exxon, Shell, BP etc.) violation of human rights. The aim here is mainly diagnostic: rather than taking legal doctrines of environmental or international human rights law as analytical materials, I use a legal materialist approach in order to try to make sense of what is concretely happening when an issue of a planetary scale of complexity is addressed and represented in a medium-sized moot court room. It helps to bring into vision the specific modes by which formats, places and media are enlisted as constitutive elements in the becoming and stabilisation of the emerging legal matter of climate justice. My analysis depicts law acting as the medium for upscaling (an idea of human justice) and downscaling (of climate science) different knowledges into other frameworks of reality than their original ones: to that of the human narrative scale.
Law, Culture and Humanities, 2020
This commentary considers the question of whether there is, or should be, a law and humanities ca... more This commentary considers the question of whether there is, or should be, a law and humanities canon by exploring the identity and value of the field and querying the concept of canon itself as an authoritative cultural technique of intellectual and social reproduction. I argue that the common trait which binds works in the field of law and humanities together is the connective 'and', which is inimical to the concept of a canon. Thinking with Barbara Hernstein Smith's work on value and evaluation, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht's criticism of canons and classics, and Frantz Fanon's understanding of personal universality, I show that the notion of an inclusive or 'global' canon is an oxymoron and argue that it ought to be resisted.
(accepted version for Law, Culture and Humanities, vol. 16)
Oxford Handbook of Law and Humanities, forthcoming, 2019
(Final copyedited version) This chapter presents legal materiality as a distinct approach within ... more (Final copyedited version) This chapter presents legal materiality as a distinct approach within law and humanities scholarship. Legal materiality is concerned with the conditions of possibility in and through which law arises, rather than taking law’s materiality to be self-evident, as when it is regarded as a form of material culture or when objects are taken as symbols of law. It distinguishes between matters and materials: if matters are problematizations or ‘matters of concern’ to law, materials are the attributes or properties that are enlisted in acts of interpretation. Rather than addressing materials as inert physical elements that are acted upon by law, legal materiality is concerned with how materials come to matter by being engaged in the production of legal meaning through interpretive and representational practices. Section 2.2 situates this approach in relation to a broader inheritance of materialism and materiality in the Western tradition. It considers different understandings of “materialism,” such as “new materialisms” and historical materialism, that inform but also diverge from legal materiality. Section 2.3 engages with different uses of “materiality” in recent legal scholarship, followed by a detailed discussion of its meaning in two works of legal theory that have sought to articulate a conception of legal materiality. The concluding section discusses the potentials of this approach for law and humanities scholarship to understand how materials are directly implicated in the making of legal difference rather than serving solely as law’s objects.
Keywords:
materiality, materialism, new materialism, textuality, media studies, Foucault, Latour, Luhmann, Vismann
Turning Things into Assets: New Lineaments in the Study of Technoscientific Capitalism. K. Birch & F. Muniesa (eds.) MIT Press, forthcoming. , 2019
This chapter describes and problematizes the specific turn to assetization that patents have take... more This chapter describes and problematizes the specific turn to assetization that patents have taken, more specifically, the transfiguration of patents into speculative financial assets. Whereas intellectual property rights are commonly presumed to be key assets in the so-called knowledge economy, the mechanisms by which they are transformed and performed as assets are less examined. This chapter takes a closer look into the ways in which patents are turned into assets by practices and specific knowledge techniques both in and outside of law. With an emphasis on the processes of legal and financial abstractions, it identifies and discusses the modes and practices in which patents act and are transacted as assets that go beyond practices of commodification and monopoly rent-seeking: in patent portfolios, as real options and as instruments of financial hedging. Whereas law has enabled the creation of a market in patents as assets, the argument is that it has now become a financialized market object itself.
History of Science, 2019
This paper identifies and analyzes the effects of digital mediation into the relationship between... more This paper identifies and analyzes the effects of digital mediation into the relationship between form of expression and knowledge in patent law. It starts from the premise that the diversity of and shifts in legal inscriptive practices and media, which often appear as legalistic and minute bureaucratic technicalities, frame and inform the ways in which inventions are understood as epistemic, legal, and cultural artefacts. Taking patent law’s representational techniques as the objects of inquiry requires attention to the specificities of its language and form, which have been predominantly based on textual semiotic logic and formats. The writings in patent documents are not only technical but utmost legal. They underlie specific word choices, style and syntax. Moreover, patent writing is bound and modulated by the relationship of categories within the particular form of the patent document itself.
How, if at all, does the meaning of invention - that is, the interpretation of both the inscribed legal concept and its original knowledge practice in science and technology – change with the latest shift in law’s media which dissociates words into digital codes, documents into electronic signs? The figures in this essay illustrate the material change in the way patents are handled: they are electronic pictures or data.
I outline practices of patent document’s digitization and explore their implication on the recognition of the inventive object by drawing on studies conducted at the intersection of intellectual property law and history of sciences. The insights are read together with studies of digital material cultures in the humanities and mathematics. In the latter body of scholarship, I have been informed particularly by Matthew Kirschenbaum’s work on textuality and forensic materiality, Johanna Drucker’s work on material semiotics and her concept of diagrammatic writing, as well as Brian Rotman’s analysis of digital computing in relation to semiotics of alphabetic and numeral inscriptions. The insertion of the word ‘ghost’ in the article title is inspired and borrowed from Rotman’s account of distributed human subject formation. The difference here is that the subject who is constituted by digital signs is law. Taken together, these readings identify and raise questions about the ontological changes brought about by the digitization of patents as a legal form in terms of their visibility (relating to search, retrieval and storage), legibility (relating to sensorial perception and experience, as well as reader’s interpretation), and instrumentality (relating to questions about ease of navigation, manoeuvrability, comparison, and translation). These questions are not only relevant not only from the viewpoint of science-law translation and knowledge transmission, but for the overall justification and legitimacy of patent system as whole in its self-understanding as an archive and evolving account of past inventions.
Routledge Handbook for Law and Theory, Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos(ed.), 2018
![Research paper thumbnail of In search of a trade mark. Search practices and bureaucratic poetics [co-authored with Jose Bellido]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/46851160/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Trade marks have been understood as quintessential ‘bureaucratic properties’. This article sugges... more Trade marks have been understood as quintessential ‘bureaucratic properties’. This article suggests that the making of trade marks has been historically influenced by bureaucratic practices of search and classification, which in turn were affected by the possibilities and limits of spatial organisation and technological means of access and storage. It shows how the organisation of access and retrieval did not only condition the possibility of conceiving new trade marks, but also served to delineate their intangible proprietary boundaries. Thereby they framed the very meaning of a trade mark. By advancing a historical analysis that is sensitive to shifts, both in actual materiality and in the administrative routines of trade mark law, the article highlights the legal form of trade mark as inherently social and materially shaped. We propose a historical understanding of trade mark law that regards legal practice and bureaucratic routines as being co-constitutive of the very legal object itself.
Recent studies of patents have argued that the very materiality and techniques of legal media, su... more Recent studies of patents have argued that the very materiality and techniques of legal media, such as the written patent document, are vital for the legal construction of a patentable invention. Developing the centrality placed on patent documents further, it becomes important to understand how they are ordered and mobilised. The patent classification is the answer to the necessity to make the virtual nature of textual claims practicable, by linking written inscription to bureaucracy. Here, the epistemological organisation of documents overlaps with the grid of patent administration. How are scientific inventions represented in such a process? Examining the process of creating a new patent category within the International Patent Classification (IPC), it becomes clear that disagreements about the substance of the novel inventive subject matter were resolved through computer simulations of patent documents in draft classifications. The practical needs of patent examiners were the most important concerns in the making of a new category. Such a lack of epistemological mediation between the scientific and legal identities of an invention depicts a legal understanding that science is already inside patent law. From an internal legal perspective, the self-referential making of the new patent class may make practical sense, however starts to become problematic from a technological and scientific standpoint as the remit of the patent classification also affects other social contexts and practices.
in Mireille Hildebrandt & Antoinette Rouvroy (eds): Autonomic Computing and Transformation of Hum... more in Mireille Hildebrandt & Antoinette Rouvroy (eds): Autonomic Computing and Transformation of Human Agency. Routledge, London (2011)
In: New Genetics, New Social Formation, eds.: Peter Glasner, Paul Atkinson. London: Routledge, 2007
Law and Critique, 2006
This essay explores the possibility of applying narrative analysis as a tool for the socio-cultur... more This essay explores the possibility of applying narrative analysis as a tool for the socio-cultural study of law. Narrative is understood to be both a form of representation of reality, as well as a starting point into the enquiry about the nature of reality itself. Consequently, an analysis of legal narratives could help to assess law’s impact on our understanding of social reality and of ourselves. The narrative context, which is examined for its plot and metaphors, is the intellectual property law of human biotechnology. The legal representation of techno-scientific knowledge in intellectual property law is contrasted against other conceptions of science, especially with the ones that are put forward by scholars in science and technology studies and anthropology. It is argued that the present legal narrative of human biotechnology and intellectual property not only lacks sufficient understanding of the scientific knowledge-making process but also, importantly, that it is in need of a self-reflexive understanding of its own practice. At the end, the possibility of changing the present legal narrative will be probed with the help of different narrative theories of the self and of representation, which have been advanced by White, Taylor and MacIntyre.
Book Reviews by Hyo Yoon Kang
Articles by Hyo Yoon Kang
![Research paper thumbnail of "In Search of a Trade Mark: Search Practices and Bureaucratic Poetics" Griffith Law Review (2016) pp. 1-25 [with Hyo Yoon Kang]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/46932551/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Trade marks have been understood as quintessential 'bureaucratic properties'. This article sugges... more Trade marks have been understood as quintessential 'bureaucratic properties'. This article suggests that the making of trade marks has been historically influenced by bureaucratic practices of search and classification, which in turn were affected by the possibilities and limits of spatial organisation and technological means of access and storage. It shows how the organisation of access and retrieval did not only condition the possibility of conceiving new trade marks, but also served to delineate their intangible proprietary boundaries. Thereby they framed the very meaning of a trade mark. By advancing a historical analysis that is sensitive to shifts, both in actual materiality and in the administrative routines of trade mark law, the article highlights the legal form of trade mark as inherently social and materially shaped. We propose a historical understanding of trade mark law that regards legal practice and bureaucratic routines as being co-constitutive of the very legal object itself. 198. For an initial attempt to 'chart how bureaucratic culture affects the operation of the trade mark system', see Burrell , pp 95-131. 3 On the importance of registry for the functioning of law and law's constitutive relationship to media technology, see Vismann (2008), pp 79-85. GRIFFITH LAW REVIEW, 2016 http://dx.
Conference Workshop Organisations by Hyo Yoon Kang
Date: 9 - 10 January 2020 Place: Warburg Institute, Woburn Place, London, UK Over the last tw... more Date: 9 - 10 January 2020
Place: Warburg Institute, Woburn Place, London, UK
Over the last two years, the AHRC Legal Materiality Research Network has brought together cross-disciplinary scholars who have examined law's relation to its constitutive materials. Network members analysed and discussed the meaning of matters, materials and materiality as they specifically relate to law. What is a legal matter, what is material in and to law, and how do certain materials turn an issue into a legal matter? Such inquiries in turn lead to the question of legal ontology: what is 'legal' rather than a- or non-legal? These theoretical and methodological considerations are relevant to many subfields of legal scholarship, as well as to scholars in other disciplines who study different manifestations of law.
The research network’s concluding conference brings together scholars whose works examine law's diverse materials and who engage with legal materiality from aesthetic, ethnographic, historical, rhetorical and philosophical perspectives. We invite contributions in the form of a paper or other innovative formats, particularly ones that:
- trace the making of a legal matter through legal materials: how do certain materials (things, media, image, sound, data, building, room, oral evidence...) become meaningful to law?
- offer theoretical reflections on law as/in 'objects': seeing and reading law metaphorically as/in a physical object
- interrogate an a- or non-human legal form, language and legal practice
- examine the specific relations between law's physical and intangible materials and its language (textual or otherwise).
This is not an exclusive list of possible topics of contributions. We welcome contributions from outside traditional legal scholarship, such as anthropology, art, history, literature, media studies, music, philosophy, political theory, and science studies, that treat law as their site of inquiry.
--------------
The Legal Materiality Research Network is a two-year (January 2018 - January 2020) project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and co-convened by Dr Hyo Yoon Kang and Dr Sara Kendall, Kent Law School, University of Kent, UK. The international cross-disciplinary research network has sought to formulate an understanding of materiality that takes into account the specific discursive and practical contexts of different legalities and the making of law. Please see the project webpage for more information and past events: legalmateriality.wordpress.com
The Modern Law Review, 2012
Law Text Culture, 2019
Over the last decade there has been an increased interest in materiality within legal scholarship... more Over the last decade there has been an increased interest in materiality within legal scholarship, as well as in related disciplines that study law and its practices. Much of it has accounted for the concrete and complex manifestations of law through various materials: from formats of inscription to other mediated devices, such as files and images, to bodies and spaces upon and through which law acts. Yet the terms ‘matter’, ‘materials’ and ‘materiality’ are employed in divergent ways across different works, and often without clear distinctions or theoretical delineations. This special issue begins from proposing a differentiated understanding of these terms in relation to law and legal scholarship, and embeds them in a broader conception of legality, unpacking their premises and implications.
Law Text Culture, 2019
This essay discusses the meaning of 'climate justice' and the ways in which it is or is not mater... more This essay discusses the meaning of 'climate justice' and the ways in which it is or is not materialised currently in climate change litigation. First I present the immateriality of the abstract concepts that make up this composite term: 'climate' and 'justice'. Yet the placing the words adjacent to one another seems to mobilise them into a novel composite vehicle of legal action. I trace how the idea of 'climate justice' hovers as an elusive idea around the concrete particularities of what can be known about 'climate' specifically in relation to 'justice'. These questions are probed in the setting and context of the Philippine Human Rights Commission's 2018 Inquiry into the Carbon Majors' (Chevron, Exxon, Shell, BP etc.) violation of human rights. The aim here is mainly diagnostic: rather than taking legal doctrines of environmental or international human rights law as analytical materials, I use a legal materialist approach in order to try to make sense of what is concretely happening when an issue of a planetary scale of complexity is addressed and represented in a medium-sized moot court room. It helps to bring into vision the specific modes by which formats, places and media are enlisted as constitutive elements in the becoming and stabilisation of the emerging legal matter of climate justice. My analysis depicts law acting as the medium for upscaling (an idea of human justice) and downscaling (of climate science) different knowledges into other frameworks of reality than their original ones: to that of the human narrative scale.
Law, Culture and Humanities, 2020
This commentary considers the question of whether there is, or should be, a law and humanities ca... more This commentary considers the question of whether there is, or should be, a law and humanities canon by exploring the identity and value of the field and querying the concept of canon itself as an authoritative cultural technique of intellectual and social reproduction. I argue that the common trait which binds works in the field of law and humanities together is the connective 'and', which is inimical to the concept of a canon. Thinking with Barbara Hernstein Smith's work on value and evaluation, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht's criticism of canons and classics, and Frantz Fanon's understanding of personal universality, I show that the notion of an inclusive or 'global' canon is an oxymoron and argue that it ought to be resisted.
(accepted version for Law, Culture and Humanities, vol. 16)
Oxford Handbook of Law and Humanities, forthcoming, 2019
(Final copyedited version) This chapter presents legal materiality as a distinct approach within ... more (Final copyedited version) This chapter presents legal materiality as a distinct approach within law and humanities scholarship. Legal materiality is concerned with the conditions of possibility in and through which law arises, rather than taking law’s materiality to be self-evident, as when it is regarded as a form of material culture or when objects are taken as symbols of law. It distinguishes between matters and materials: if matters are problematizations or ‘matters of concern’ to law, materials are the attributes or properties that are enlisted in acts of interpretation. Rather than addressing materials as inert physical elements that are acted upon by law, legal materiality is concerned with how materials come to matter by being engaged in the production of legal meaning through interpretive and representational practices. Section 2.2 situates this approach in relation to a broader inheritance of materialism and materiality in the Western tradition. It considers different understandings of “materialism,” such as “new materialisms” and historical materialism, that inform but also diverge from legal materiality. Section 2.3 engages with different uses of “materiality” in recent legal scholarship, followed by a detailed discussion of its meaning in two works of legal theory that have sought to articulate a conception of legal materiality. The concluding section discusses the potentials of this approach for law and humanities scholarship to understand how materials are directly implicated in the making of legal difference rather than serving solely as law’s objects.
Keywords:
materiality, materialism, new materialism, textuality, media studies, Foucault, Latour, Luhmann, Vismann
Turning Things into Assets: New Lineaments in the Study of Technoscientific Capitalism. K. Birch & F. Muniesa (eds.) MIT Press, forthcoming. , 2019
This chapter describes and problematizes the specific turn to assetization that patents have take... more This chapter describes and problematizes the specific turn to assetization that patents have taken, more specifically, the transfiguration of patents into speculative financial assets. Whereas intellectual property rights are commonly presumed to be key assets in the so-called knowledge economy, the mechanisms by which they are transformed and performed as assets are less examined. This chapter takes a closer look into the ways in which patents are turned into assets by practices and specific knowledge techniques both in and outside of law. With an emphasis on the processes of legal and financial abstractions, it identifies and discusses the modes and practices in which patents act and are transacted as assets that go beyond practices of commodification and monopoly rent-seeking: in patent portfolios, as real options and as instruments of financial hedging. Whereas law has enabled the creation of a market in patents as assets, the argument is that it has now become a financialized market object itself.
History of Science, 2019
This paper identifies and analyzes the effects of digital mediation into the relationship between... more This paper identifies and analyzes the effects of digital mediation into the relationship between form of expression and knowledge in patent law. It starts from the premise that the diversity of and shifts in legal inscriptive practices and media, which often appear as legalistic and minute bureaucratic technicalities, frame and inform the ways in which inventions are understood as epistemic, legal, and cultural artefacts. Taking patent law’s representational techniques as the objects of inquiry requires attention to the specificities of its language and form, which have been predominantly based on textual semiotic logic and formats. The writings in patent documents are not only technical but utmost legal. They underlie specific word choices, style and syntax. Moreover, patent writing is bound and modulated by the relationship of categories within the particular form of the patent document itself.
How, if at all, does the meaning of invention - that is, the interpretation of both the inscribed legal concept and its original knowledge practice in science and technology – change with the latest shift in law’s media which dissociates words into digital codes, documents into electronic signs? The figures in this essay illustrate the material change in the way patents are handled: they are electronic pictures or data.
I outline practices of patent document’s digitization and explore their implication on the recognition of the inventive object by drawing on studies conducted at the intersection of intellectual property law and history of sciences. The insights are read together with studies of digital material cultures in the humanities and mathematics. In the latter body of scholarship, I have been informed particularly by Matthew Kirschenbaum’s work on textuality and forensic materiality, Johanna Drucker’s work on material semiotics and her concept of diagrammatic writing, as well as Brian Rotman’s analysis of digital computing in relation to semiotics of alphabetic and numeral inscriptions. The insertion of the word ‘ghost’ in the article title is inspired and borrowed from Rotman’s account of distributed human subject formation. The difference here is that the subject who is constituted by digital signs is law. Taken together, these readings identify and raise questions about the ontological changes brought about by the digitization of patents as a legal form in terms of their visibility (relating to search, retrieval and storage), legibility (relating to sensorial perception and experience, as well as reader’s interpretation), and instrumentality (relating to questions about ease of navigation, manoeuvrability, comparison, and translation). These questions are not only relevant not only from the viewpoint of science-law translation and knowledge transmission, but for the overall justification and legitimacy of patent system as whole in its self-understanding as an archive and evolving account of past inventions.
Routledge Handbook for Law and Theory, Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos(ed.), 2018
Trade marks have been understood as quintessential ‘bureaucratic properties’. This article sugges... more Trade marks have been understood as quintessential ‘bureaucratic properties’. This article suggests that the making of trade marks has been historically influenced by bureaucratic practices of search and classification, which in turn were affected by the possibilities and limits of spatial organisation and technological means of access and storage. It shows how the organisation of access and retrieval did not only condition the possibility of conceiving new trade marks, but also served to delineate their intangible proprietary boundaries. Thereby they framed the very meaning of a trade mark. By advancing a historical analysis that is sensitive to shifts, both in actual materiality and in the administrative routines of trade mark law, the article highlights the legal form of trade mark as inherently social and materially shaped. We propose a historical understanding of trade mark law that regards legal practice and bureaucratic routines as being co-constitutive of the very legal object itself.
Recent studies of patents have argued that the very materiality and techniques of legal media, su... more Recent studies of patents have argued that the very materiality and techniques of legal media, such as the written patent document, are vital for the legal construction of a patentable invention. Developing the centrality placed on patent documents further, it becomes important to understand how they are ordered and mobilised. The patent classification is the answer to the necessity to make the virtual nature of textual claims practicable, by linking written inscription to bureaucracy. Here, the epistemological organisation of documents overlaps with the grid of patent administration. How are scientific inventions represented in such a process? Examining the process of creating a new patent category within the International Patent Classification (IPC), it becomes clear that disagreements about the substance of the novel inventive subject matter were resolved through computer simulations of patent documents in draft classifications. The practical needs of patent examiners were the most important concerns in the making of a new category. Such a lack of epistemological mediation between the scientific and legal identities of an invention depicts a legal understanding that science is already inside patent law. From an internal legal perspective, the self-referential making of the new patent class may make practical sense, however starts to become problematic from a technological and scientific standpoint as the remit of the patent classification also affects other social contexts and practices.
in Mireille Hildebrandt & Antoinette Rouvroy (eds): Autonomic Computing and Transformation of Hum... more in Mireille Hildebrandt & Antoinette Rouvroy (eds): Autonomic Computing and Transformation of Human Agency. Routledge, London (2011)
In: New Genetics, New Social Formation, eds.: Peter Glasner, Paul Atkinson. London: Routledge, 2007
Law and Critique, 2006
This essay explores the possibility of applying narrative analysis as a tool for the socio-cultur... more This essay explores the possibility of applying narrative analysis as a tool for the socio-cultural study of law. Narrative is understood to be both a form of representation of reality, as well as a starting point into the enquiry about the nature of reality itself. Consequently, an analysis of legal narratives could help to assess law’s impact on our understanding of social reality and of ourselves. The narrative context, which is examined for its plot and metaphors, is the intellectual property law of human biotechnology. The legal representation of techno-scientific knowledge in intellectual property law is contrasted against other conceptions of science, especially with the ones that are put forward by scholars in science and technology studies and anthropology. It is argued that the present legal narrative of human biotechnology and intellectual property not only lacks sufficient understanding of the scientific knowledge-making process but also, importantly, that it is in need of a self-reflexive understanding of its own practice. At the end, the possibility of changing the present legal narrative will be probed with the help of different narrative theories of the self and of representation, which have been advanced by White, Taylor and MacIntyre.
Trade marks have been understood as quintessential 'bureaucratic properties'. This article sugges... more Trade marks have been understood as quintessential 'bureaucratic properties'. This article suggests that the making of trade marks has been historically influenced by bureaucratic practices of search and classification, which in turn were affected by the possibilities and limits of spatial organisation and technological means of access and storage. It shows how the organisation of access and retrieval did not only condition the possibility of conceiving new trade marks, but also served to delineate their intangible proprietary boundaries. Thereby they framed the very meaning of a trade mark. By advancing a historical analysis that is sensitive to shifts, both in actual materiality and in the administrative routines of trade mark law, the article highlights the legal form of trade mark as inherently social and materially shaped. We propose a historical understanding of trade mark law that regards legal practice and bureaucratic routines as being co-constitutive of the very legal object itself. 198. For an initial attempt to 'chart how bureaucratic culture affects the operation of the trade mark system', see Burrell , pp 95-131. 3 On the importance of registry for the functioning of law and law's constitutive relationship to media technology, see Vismann (2008), pp 79-85. GRIFFITH LAW REVIEW, 2016 http://dx.
Date: 9 - 10 January 2020 Place: Warburg Institute, Woburn Place, London, UK Over the last tw... more Date: 9 - 10 January 2020
Place: Warburg Institute, Woburn Place, London, UK
Over the last two years, the AHRC Legal Materiality Research Network has brought together cross-disciplinary scholars who have examined law's relation to its constitutive materials. Network members analysed and discussed the meaning of matters, materials and materiality as they specifically relate to law. What is a legal matter, what is material in and to law, and how do certain materials turn an issue into a legal matter? Such inquiries in turn lead to the question of legal ontology: what is 'legal' rather than a- or non-legal? These theoretical and methodological considerations are relevant to many subfields of legal scholarship, as well as to scholars in other disciplines who study different manifestations of law.
The research network’s concluding conference brings together scholars whose works examine law's diverse materials and who engage with legal materiality from aesthetic, ethnographic, historical, rhetorical and philosophical perspectives. We invite contributions in the form of a paper or other innovative formats, particularly ones that:
- trace the making of a legal matter through legal materials: how do certain materials (things, media, image, sound, data, building, room, oral evidence...) become meaningful to law?
- offer theoretical reflections on law as/in 'objects': seeing and reading law metaphorically as/in a physical object
- interrogate an a- or non-human legal form, language and legal practice
- examine the specific relations between law's physical and intangible materials and its language (textual or otherwise).
This is not an exclusive list of possible topics of contributions. We welcome contributions from outside traditional legal scholarship, such as anthropology, art, history, literature, media studies, music, philosophy, political theory, and science studies, that treat law as their site of inquiry.
--------------
The Legal Materiality Research Network is a two-year (January 2018 - January 2020) project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and co-convened by Dr Hyo Yoon Kang and Dr Sara Kendall, Kent Law School, University of Kent, UK. The international cross-disciplinary research network has sought to formulate an understanding of materiality that takes into account the specific discursive and practical contexts of different legalities and the making of law. Please see the project webpage for more information and past events: legalmateriality.wordpress.com
We invite contributions to the workshop “Patents as Capital,” which forms the 2nd workshop of the... more We invite contributions to the workshop “Patents as Capital,” which forms the 2nd workshop of the ERC- funded project PASSIM (Patents as Scientific Information, 1895-2020), in collaboration with The International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property (ISHTIP).
Dates: 8-10 September 2020
Venue: Nobel Museum, Stockholm, SWEDEN Call closes: 14 February 2020
Proposal format: 500 Word proposal/200 Word bio
Submit to: 2020workshop@passim.se
Patents are regarded as central techniques and indicators of value in the 'knowledge economy' by linking immaterial knowledge to capital. In intellectual property scholarship, particularly that approaches law as economics or as a regulatory tool, patents are commonly studied as means of commercial and economic strategies. But this focus leaves out the other ways in which patents act as both instruments and representations of diverse kinds of capital: intellectual, cultural, scientific and financial capital(s). The concrete processes by which patents are implicated in and give rise to various practices of capitalisation and valuation remain relatively underexplored. Rather than equating patent with value, or presuming that patents generate intellectual capital, this workshop aims to examine and delineate the workings of patents as capital in their multiple manifestations: as personal privilege, scientific credit, cultural symbol, instrument of credibility and as financial proxies. These are only examples of the queries that we would like to discuss.We welcome cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary contributions that problematise and analyse the promises and failings of patents as capital and that study the role of patents in such capitalisation processes.
We will give preference to unpublished papers that seek substantive feedback from participants of the workshop. PASSIM will cover the travel and accommodation cost of the selected participants.
Any questions can be directed to the organizers of the workshop:
Björn Hammarfelt (bjorn.hammarfelt@hb.se)
Gustav Källstrand (gustav.kallstrand@nobelcenter.se)
Hyo Yoon Kang (h.y.kang@kent.ac.uk) ___________________________________________________________________________
PASSIM is a five-year (2017-2022) project funded by an ERC Advanced Investigator Grant (741095) to Professor Eva Hemmungs Wirtén, Linköping University, Sweden, PASSIM focuses on the “openness” aspect of patents, considering their role as technoscientific documents in the history of information and intellectual property. For more information on the project and the team, send us an e-mail: contact@passim.se, follow us on twitter @passimproject or visit our website www.passim.se.
Institute for Advanced Legal Studies, London 22 June 2018 The one-day exploratory workshop aims ... more Institute for Advanced Legal Studies, London
22 June 2018
The one-day exploratory workshop aims to identify and problematise the complex and multiple meanings and figurations of scale and probability in law, politics, philosophy and history of sciences. Both notions, scale and probability, are not commonly found or employed in legal deliberations and discourse. This is because a question about the legality or illegality of an act has traditionally invited a binary answer 'legal/illegal' rather than calculating degrees of legality. The workshop aims to examine how notions of calculability and probability may contest the normative framework and foundations of law.
Scale can denote both an apparatus of weighing - the scale of iustitia is a well-known legal image - but is also premised on the concept of proportion in relation to a whole. It stipulates both a sense of a whole and its parts: it refers to a figure of overall magnitude as well as to relative degrees within it. It conveys an objectivist logic of calculability and measurability, however without a clear indication of what a whole would consist of. The very notion of scale in the sense of magnitude makes only sense relatively and in retrospect in relation to a known whole. From the legal perspective the notion of relative scale is difficult to reconcile with determinations of legality: why and how does proportion become a legal normative prescription, and what is its correlative on which it is premised - what is assumed to be the 'whole'? What are the calculations which determine the question of il/legality?
Such a relative notion of scale raises further questions about the relationship between probabilistic calculations and law's practices and ways of knowing: what roles do probabilities play in the making of laws, the choice of their inscription media as texts, numbers or images, and in the interpretation of laws at the stage of adjudication? How are deliberations of what is lawful or unlawful, legal or illegal, not necessarily based only normative thought processes but shaped to varying degrees by considerations of probability?
The workshop will explore the notion and relevance of scale and probability in their conceptual meanings, as well as legal transpositions that have been developed in response or misconstrued. They include ideas of proportionality in international and environmental laws, contested usage of the notion of scale in relation to historical atrocities (e.g. the Holocaust, Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings, aerial bombings in Europe during WWII, Iraq body count, colonial camps) and the question of relative magnitude and the problem of probabilistic measure and their normative implications (e.g. what counts as a relevant data and how to count when, for how long and where in military strategy, epidemiology and population statistics). Concrete sites of such fractional calculations include automated warfare based on probabilistic algorithms, climate change litigations in which computer models based on hundreds years of meteorological data and future projections need to be scaled down to the level of individual claim here and now.
Organisers: Hyo Yoon Kang and Sara Kendall (Kent Law School) This informal workshop will entail ... more Organisers: Hyo Yoon Kang and Sara Kendall (Kent Law School)
This informal workshop will entail three sessions exploring the relevance and possible benefits of theoretical developments for legal scholarship. These sessions will take the format of conversations between legal scholars and colleagues outside the legal discipline. The morning conversation will explore actor-network theory and its uptake of Tarde's sociology and transformation into a normative agenda in recent years. After lunch, we will be in conversation about the role of media, objects and aesthetics through the lens of German media/cultural studies. We will conclude the day with learning about Tristan Garcia's take on object-oriented ontologies.
Sponsored and supported by Kent Law School's Research Group Social Critiques of Law (SoCril)
Although the elusive character of intellectual property's subject matter might have been a produc... more Although the elusive character of intellectual property's subject matter might have been a productive dilemma for the development of legal doctrine, the specific mutability of this form of property has also made it into a particularly contested and sensitive area where different arguments about its legitimations collide. It is in this sense that intellectual property has been a canvas on which identities have been contested; economic and intellectual capital created and accumulated; as well as knowledges and identities wilfully delineated, transformed and managed as 'assets.' Intellectual property regimes do not only commoditise knowledge but also transform the very processes by which it is generated, understood and valued. The workshop brings together scholars from law, science studies, anthropology, philosophy and sociology to explore many questions concerning the role of intellectual property as a specific mode of governance of intangible knowledge at this present moment of time. Beyond understanding intellectual property as legal techniques of appropriation, the workshop will explore intellectual property and its broader contemporary political, social and cultural meanings: its relation to economic rationality; as a specific mode of governance of different epistemes; and as concrete practices of industrialisation and valorisation. Contact and details: j.a.bellido@kent.ac.uk or h.y.kang@kent.ac.uk
This workshop will explore the past and present state of law and critical theory as a textual epi... more This workshop will explore the past and present state of law and critical theory as a textual epistemic practice, with the aim of developing new approaches that can inform future scholarship within and beyond the field. As “new materialist” approaches such as actor-network theory and object oriented theories have been taken up within legal scholarship, what alternate or composite legal epistemologies might be drawn from critical theory, with its emphases on textuality and hermeneutics? How can we conceptualise the juridical form itself, not as a pre-given vector of power or as an instrument that produces social effects, but rather as a textual technique or orientation? Can we redraw the relationship between law and critical theory in a way which reimagines and refines the meanings of criticality and critique beyond an instrumental understanding?
We will examine the current rift and productive tension which is prevalent in current legal scholarship: “new” materialism versus textuality. The former in legal scholarship seems to be often equated with a sociological reading and methodological application of actor-network theory, whereas the latter is closely associated with scholars concerned with questions of interpretation and legal hermeneutics, broadly identified with law and the humanities. As many theoretically informed contemporary legal scholars have been engaged in issue-driven analyses and arguments, this workshop represents an opportunity to revisit questions of ontology and epistemology of law with a rich interdisciplinary group of legal thinkers and social theorists.
Confirmed participants:
Mark Antaki (Law, McGill)
Mario Biagioli (Law, History & Science Studies, UC Davis)
Marianne Constable (Rhetoric, UC Berkeley)
Maria Drakopoulou (Law, Kent)
Samantha Frost (Political Theory, Illinois)
Markus Krajewski (Media History and Theory, Basel)
James Martel (Political Theory, San Francisco State)
Stuart Murray (English Language and Literature, Carleton)
Chantal Nadeau (Gender and Womens Studies, Illinois)
Yoriko Otomo (Law, SOAS)
Connal Parsley (Law, Kent)
Alain Pottage (Law, LSE)
Kriss Ravetto (Cinema and Digital Media, UC Davis)
https://lawtextmaterial.wordpress.com
London Review of Books Blog, 2018
Blog post about the Philippine Human Rights Commission's London hearing for its inquiry into the ... more Blog post about the Philippine Human Rights Commission's London hearing for its inquiry into the responsibility of carbon major companies for human rights violation in the Philippine: "Richard Heede’s 2014 report Carbon Majors: Accounting for Carbon and Methane Emission 1854-2010 ‘quantifies and traces for the first time the lion’s share of cumulative global CO2 and methane emissions since the industrial revolution began to the largest multinational and state-owned producers of crude oil, natural gas, coal, and cement’. The legal inquiry involves the transformation of scientific attribution principles into legal arguments, scaling down climate-change models into specific claims of human rights infringements. There have been cases dealing with risk in environmental and tort law before, so the transformation of probabilities into legal principles is not entirely new. But the scale and complexity of the matter at hand are unprecedented."
