11 January 2014

ARTICLE: Watts on Taxonomy in Private Law

ARTICLE:  Watts on Taxonomy in Private Law

"Taxonomy in Private Law- Furor in Text and Subtext" by Peter G. Watts has been published in the  Philosophy of Law eJournal (2014) and is available on SSRN
 
This article starts with an overview of the debates over classification in private law that took place in the latter period of Peter Birks’s career. It does so by setting out the Birksian taxonomy and by collecting various extracts from Birks’s voluminous output, then contrasts those extracts with the views of a selection of his most prominent critics. The article next turns to a defence of Birks’s project and its aims of promoting rationality, the confinement of discretion, and modesty of function in the common law. The greater part of the article is devoted to showing how, in tort law particularly, New Zealand common law has lost its modesty and is intruding on personal freedoms. Instead of requiring an undertaking before a party becomes liable for nothing more than causing damage to another’s wealth, liability is being imposed from without by fudging the boundaries between contract and tort, and by using as tools nothing much sharper than “justice and fairness”. The final section of the article then turns to criticise, on similar grounds, the concept of unjust enrichment as promoted by Birks himself.

10 January 2014

BLOG: Rugby, Apartheid, and the Law


LAW AND RELIGION: Coptic Xmas, SCOTUS and Gay Marriage, and Islam in Germany


ARTICLE: Babie's The Spatial: A Forgotten Dimension of Property

San Diego Law Review (Vol. 50, No. 323, 2013) just published interesting paper of Paul T. Babie 'The Spatial: A Forgotten Dimension of Property'.

Abstract
This article employs urban sociologist and planning theorist Edward W Soja’s spatial scaffolding found in the ontological "trialectic" to look at property anew, with its obvious, but oft-forgotten spatial dimension brought to the foreground. The article uses Soja’s ontological trialectic to reassemble what we already know about property, demonstrating that theorizing about property implicitly recognizes the importance of spatiality. Recognizing the interwoven complexity to and inseparability and interdependence of historicality, sociality and spatiality — Soja’s three ontological elements — of property allows space an explicit role in defining what property is, when it exists, and how it is central to and affected by human life. But more importantly, it reveals how property is the cause of spatial injustice, which opens the possibility of using property as a vehicle both to seek and to achieve spatial justice. The article concludes by reflecting upon the emerging definition of spatial injustice, how property is one source of such injustice, and how recognizing the spatial dimension may allow us to see and to remedy instances of it.

Full text of the article is available here.


CHAPTER: Corradetti's What Does Cultural Difference Require of Human Rights?

Cambridge University Press has published a book 'Human Rights. The Hard Questions', C.Holder and D.Reidy, eds. (2013) with interesting chapter of Claudio Corradetti 'What Does Cultura Difference Requir of Human Rights?'

Abstract:      
With this essay I analyse the notion of cultural difference with a reference to moral and epistemic relativism. I then explain how the contradictory nature of relativism leads to the notion of cultural difference and then to the idea of cultural pluralism. Cultural pluralism does not only acquire significance in view of moral arguments but is the result of the fulfillment of socio-political standards for mutual cooperation. The latter can be achieved only if the potential conflict among different comprehensive views is defused. According to my views, in order to overcome the potential conflict among comprehensive views of the good, one has to recognize the normative force of one fundamental principle of human rights - the principle of equal liberty of communication. The formulation of such a principle is sensitive to the critical-genealogical reconstruction of the primary meaning of human rights as a concept originating from the end of the Wars of Religion (1598). What I will claim is that the principle of equal liberty of communication is required by the same “fact of pluralism” (Rawls 1993). Contrary to its original meaning as equality of conscience, the principle of equal liberty of communication is to be interpreted today in accordance to its most extensive public participatory form, that is, as equality of participation. One crucial aspect of the proposed argument is showing how there is a strict interconnection between the principle of equal liberty of communication and the role of reflective judgment in constructing pluralism along exemplar lines. It is believed that the model of public reason suggested here will prove to be both more inclusive and stable than those grounded on forms of presumed neutrality.

Full text of the chapter is avaliable here.

09 January 2014

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS: Resident Grants - International Institute for the Sociology of Law, Oñati'




CALL FOR APPLICATIONS: Workshops - International Institute for the Sociology of Law, Oñati




SYMPOSIUM REMINDER: The Unbounded Level of the Mind: Rod Macdonald's Legal Imagination – 7-8 February 2014


JOURNAL: (2013) 3:6 Oñati Socio-Legal Series




CONFERENCE: III congreso internacional sobre Justicia restaurativa y mediación penal


CONFERENCE: Asian Criminological Society



CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: Global Journal of Comparative Law




08 January 2014

WEBSITE: Anglo-Saxon Canon Law


NOTICE: First Female Law Firm in Saudi Arabia




CONFERENCE: Global-Regional-Local Institutions, Relations, Networks


ARTICLE: Bugs and Beasts Before the Law


FELLOWSHIPS: Funded Fellowships in Interdisciplinary Studies (The Baldy Center for Law & Social Policy at SUNY Buffalo)




LAW AND LITERATURE: Law in A Christmas Carol


NOTICE: What is Anthropology?


SUMMER SCHOOL: Transitional Justice


07 January 2014

ARTICLE: What is corroboration?


BOOK: Feldman et al on Law in Politics, Politics in Law


CONFERENCE REPORT: Roman Law - Connections and Perspectives


JOURNAL: Journal of Law and Religion


JOURNAL: Fundamina

Cover of the FundaminaI just received the latest copy of Fundamina: A Journal of Legal Historypublished by the University of South Africa Press. 



The journal is biennial, 'published as the mouthpiece of the Southern African Society of Legal Historians and is distributed free of charge to members of the Society.' 

Check it out. It'll be worth it.

-SPD

BLOG: Tattoo Law


MAP: Prison Populations Around the World


06 January 2014

RIP: David Maxwell Walker (1920-2014)


ARTICLE: Jones on Maori Legal History


JOURNAL: German Law Journal




LAW AND RELIGION: The Top Five New Law & Religion Papers on SSRN




MAP: Where People Live


GAME: You Don't Know Africa




NEWS: British Barristers Strike in Protest to Cuts in Legal Aid


NOTE: Allegra - Inspirational Holiday Readings




05 January 2014

BLOG: Calcutta Chronicles - Life and Times at Old Post Office Street...


CALL FOR PAPERS: Legal Bodies: Corpus / Persona / Communitas


LAW AND RELIGION: Irish President Creates Controversy


LAW AND LITERATURE: Shakespeare in Court: How would Shylock's case from The Merchant of Venice have played out under the Canadian Charter?


ARTICLE: First Female Law Firm Opens in Saudi Arabia