ASLCH PROGRAM, March 10-11 2014, UVA LAW SCHOOL (original) (raw)

Law and Humanities: A Field Without a Canon

Law, Culture and Humanities, 2019

This short Commentary imagines law and humanities not as a “canon” per se, but as a “field without a canon”; or a canon that resists canonization. Arts-based practices utilized in legal research and teaching expose the law and humanities “canon” to its dual (and somewhat contradictory) nature: ever straining towards a pre-established archive, it must also leap ahead fearlessly to properly defy disciplinary boundaries and move the field beyond siloed thinking, which is one of the preliminary aims of law and humanities scholarship and pedagogy. Arts-based practices consist not of a stable collection of set texts, but instead signify a process of experimentation that is ever in flux and alive to possibility. It is this process of discovering new arts-based practices that ensures law and humanities remains a vibrant, yet ever-changing, field for years to come. To that end, this Commentary surveys a sampling of outsider approaches to law and humanities scholarship and pedagogy, those more concerned with process than product, and which are coming from outside of or beyond the more traditionally conceived canon of law and humanities. These approaches fall into two broad categories: (1) arts-based scholarly legal practices; and (2) arts-based legal pedagogical practices. A uniting feature of both these approaches is that they are being undertaken and explored by Canadian legal scholars at a small law school on Vancouver Island on the West Coast of Canada, namely the University of Victoria Faculty of Law, where there is an impressive number of faculty members using arts-based practices in their research and teaching.

Socio-legal studies and the humanities – law, interdisciplinarity and integrity

International Journal of Law in Context, 2009

This paper was delivered as a plenary lecture, designed to respond to the one-day special conference focus upon links between socio-legal studies and the humanities.1 The paper focuses in particular upon the relationship between law and the humanities. It may be argued that the role of empirically sourced socio-legal research is well accepted, given its tangible utility in terms of producing hard data which can inform and transform policy perspectives. However, scholarly speculation about the relationship between law and the humanities ranges from the indulgent to the hostile. In particular, legal scholars aligning themselves as ‘black letter’ commentators express strong opinions about such links, suggesting that scholarship purporting to establish links between the two fields is essentially spurious, bearing in mind the purposive role of law as a problem-solving mechanism. The paper sets out to challenge such assertions, indicating the natural connections between the two fields and...

A Humanities of Resistance: Fragments for a Legal History of Humanity

Law and the Humanities

I first realized that there was something strange about the term "Humanities" when, as the director of my university's Humanities Institute, I participated in a meeting to set up a European Consortium of Humanities Centers. Except for the host center in Utrecht and mine, no other participating European university had a Humanities Institute. The aspiring founding fathers and mothers came from single disciplines: Archeology, English, Dutch, Media, and Philosophy. Then it struck me: No proper or widely used term translates the term Humanities in Greek or Italian, their supposed mother tongues. The Humanities, despite their desperate look eastward and backward, are a consummately modern and decidedly American invention. No faculties, courses, or centers for the Humanities existed in European universities until recently. The few British exceptions-of which my own institution is a shining example-do not follow a long tradition of Humanities education. They are, rather, the result of our "special relationship" with our transatlantic cousins and of the managerial culture that has replaced the older genteel governance of universities, and is perennially trying-and on the whole failing-to create economies of scale, grant-producing interdisciplinary initiatives, and a teaching, scholarship, and evaluation culture that rather pathetically imitates the marketplace. What are the Humanities? According to the flourishing American debate, the Humanities have been defined in two related ways. They are either a set of academic subjects that typically consists of Classics, Philosophy, History, and Literature (the disciplinary approach) or an attitude toward teaching and learning that could be extended to all types of subjects (the humanistic approach). Humanities subjects are linked through a common origin, through their shared object of concern, or through the use of common strategies. The Classics had initially pride of place in the enumeration of Humanities disciplines. "As late as 1918. .. the word humanities and the phrase Greek and Latin [were

Legal Scholarship as Spectacular Failure

Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, 2018

Most authors of legal scholarship would probably hesitate to describe their writings as heroic tales of (intellectual) conquest and adventure; They would also most likely deny that they are unreliable storytellers. Equally, conventional accounts of legal scholarship tend to view legal scholarship as lacking common structure. This challenges these assumptions by offering a novel aesthetic perspective on legal writing. We argue that most legal essays are modeled on a narrative device known as “the hero’s journey,” in which a protagonist (the scholar) overcomes a particularly frightening menace (the legal problem), and returns home with the bounty (the legal solution). However, there’s a twist: legal theorists are institutionally conditioned to treat this story suspiciously, looking for false and misleading features, thus (perhaps unconsciously) treating the narrator as unreliable. By exposing these common literary patterns this essay also reveals a unique and as-of-yet unexplored trade-off between two different qualities of legal scholarship: the more unreliable the reader finds the legal article, the greater aesthetic pleasure she derives therefrom. Consequently, many legal articles are, in a way, beautiful failures. That is, unsuccessful attempts to convince their reader in the truth of their thesis that nevertheless resonate with their readers aesthetically. This essay explores these ideas and explains their implications both from a law & literature and a philosophical perspective.

Legal Scholarship at the Threshold of a New Millennium

Acta Juridica Hungarica, 2001

Scholarship has already warned us to soundness in relation to modernisationist legal reforms. For it consistently (1) emphasised the framework-creating nature of the otherwise prevailing social normativity, and its primordial role in determining social processes, (2) put the possibility and demand of organicity with every step in the limelight, (3) did not consider the effectiveness of initiating elitist actions to influence overall social movements plannable for the long run and with lasting effects. Therefore, it regarded any regulatory legal intervention as the primarily symbolic confirmation with sanctioning of the direction otherwise ongoing movements were taking, (4) warned to the damages caused by any adventurer policy in as much as they not only fail, but discredit even the thought of change itself. Therefore, it (5) gave voice to the advantage of a systematically planned, consistent, convincing, pragmatic, and all-comprehensive social programme, as opposed to the occasional temptations of worldcuring intentions, exposed to the alternate danger of sudden forwarding and quick tiring, supported solely by intellectual arguments.

The lingering core of legal scholarship

Legal Studies, 2010

The purpose of this paper is to consider how leading scholars are interpreting the role and status of the core tenets of legal scholarship in England and Australia – the tenets that have provided an element of unity in legal scholarship over the past century or so. Instead of focusing on the way that scholarship has diversified and expanded, the paper considers whether elements of the prior orthodoxy have remained: do the tenets persist, what status are they afforded and what impact will their presence have on the future identity of the discipline and its conception of law? The paper captures insights into the way that scholars – as opposed to administrators or managers – are interpreting changes in the discipline. It is based on the premise that scholarly attitudes can shape the discipline and that therefore such attitudes are worthy of study.

Law, the Humanities and Political Incertitude in a Time of Climate Change 1

This article addresses how climate change triggers relevant transformations in the realm of the law and affects our politico-legal paradigms. To this end, it delivers cross-disciplinary research by focusing on a non-fictional literary genre, i.e. climate-change pop-science, which has arisen very recently. The article also explores the concept of 'strategic formalism', i.e. a strategic legal device unable to govern societal concerns. On the one hand, it shapes our approach to climate change and migration; on the other, it adapts ecological issues to the 'traditional' legal framework. Against this background, the article argues that non-fictional texts also reflect the ideas of the most active forces within society, and fuel dynamism when tackling the ecological crisis. In a time of climate change, these forces stir strategic formalism, and make the law act as a bridge linking our troubled reality to an inclusive future.

The Law Review Approach: What the Humanities Can Learn

Academic Questions, Vol. 26, Issue 1, 2013

This essay describes how the law review process generally works and then discusses what the humanities can learn and borrow from the law review process. It ends by advocating for a hybrid law review/peer review approach to publishing. The law review process is not a panacea for our publishing ills. It has several drawbacks and shortcomings. This essay highlights the positives and notes some of the negatives of the law review publishing process, but a lengthy explanation of all that is good or bad about law reviews is not my aim. Every law review has its idiosyncrasies and methodologies, but most share certain overarching procedures and protocols that can be evaluated in terms of their similarity.

The Irrelevance of Contemporary Academic Philosophy for Law: Recovering the Rhetorical Tradition

On Philosophy in American Law, 2009

Can we hope for justice in this world? Plato thought not. In the Republic he suggests that justice can be achieved only if the philosophers rule, but also that philosophers cannot simultaneously rule the many and remain in the sunlight of true knowledge. They must return to the cave. Leo Strauss famously interprets Plato as arguing that the philosopher in the cave must speak esoterically because if he speaks plainly his wisdom will be misunderstood, leading the prisoners to attack the one who opens this dangerous line of thinking. After all, the philosopher returning from divine contemplations to the petty miseries of men cuts a sorry figure and appears most ridiculous, if, while still blinking through the gloom, and before he has become sufficiently accustomed to the environing darkness, he is compelled in courtrooms or elsewhere to contend about the shadows of justice. .. (Plato 1930: 517d-e) What, then, can be said about striving to create a just world? Plato leaves us with the Laws, in which three tradition-bound men discuss politics in light of real-world practical constraints. Law is our resignation in the face of the impossible demands of justice; it is not just unphilosophical, it is antiphilosophical.