Call for Papers: Using Legal Culture: JCL Workshop, 20th and 21st May 2010
14 November 2009
In Comparative Law, the concept of legal culture has come to play an increasingly significant role in contemporary theorising, empirical analysis and methodological innovation. The 2010 Journal of Comparative Law Workshop will address a number of the key issues regarding the use of this concept
The closed workshop, to be held at the University of Venice in May 2010, is intended to examine the value of the concept of legal culture for comparative law and related disciplines. The workshop will be chaired by Professor David Nelken (Macerata/Cardiff) and organised by Professor Renzo Cavalieri (Venice) and Professor Michael Palmer (for the JCL).
A selection of the Papers will be published as a special issue of The Journal of Comparative Law (Vol. 5, No. 2), guest edited by Professor Nelken, and subsequently as an edited book.
The questions we should like to address in the workshop include:
- How is the concept of legal culture currently being used – or abused – in comparative law?
- How does its meaning change when used within different disciplines? When used to explain attitudes and behaviour towards law in one society, or in several societies?
- Which of the goals of Comparative Law – for example, classification, description, explanation, interpretation, evaluation – can the concept best help with?
- What are the current alternatives to this concept and why are they less (or more) useful?
- How does the concept of legal culture help in examining specific issues – and what light does such examination throw on the concept?
- What units can the concept best be used to understand – for example, national legal cultures , court cultures, professional cultures , NGO cultures, transnational cultures, branches of law, and so on?
- How, if at all, can the concept be used without falling foul of the criticisms made of it, and of the term culture in general? (see, for example, Nelken's chapter on legal culture in Orucu and Nelken [eds.] Comparative Law: A Handbook, Hart 2008)
The above list is not intended to be exhaustive and contributors should feel free to examine other aspects of the concept and its use.
Keynote address:
The keynote address will be given by Professor Sally Engle Merry (NYU).
