14 September 2015

NEW in Juris Diversitas Series: The Diffusion of Law

The Diffusion of Law

The Movement of Laws and Norms Around the World

  • Edited by Sue Farran, Northumbria Law School, UK, James Gallen, Dublin City University, Ireland, Jennifer Hendry, University of Leeds, UK and Christa Rautenbach, North-West University, South Africa
  • In considering diffusion from a global perspective, this book provides timely new insights into its application in a variety of fields and at many levels of both legal and non-legal orderings. This collection contributes to the wider theoretical debate concerning the movement of law and legal norms by engaging with concrete examples of legal diffusion, in jurisdictions as diverse as Albania, the Czech Republic, Poland and Kuwait. These examples, taken together, provide a comprehensive illustration of the theoretical debates concerning the diffusion of laws and norms in terms of both process and form.

    This international, multi-disciplinary and multi-methodological volume brings together scholars from law and social science with experience in mixed and hybrid jurisdictions, and advances the conversation about legal and normative diffusion across the academy. It represents a robust challenge to many preconceived ideas about legal movement and, as such, will be of interest to academics and students working in the fields of Law, Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science, Legal Education and comparative method.
  • More information on the book

Call for Papers, Human Rights in Translation, St. Louis, March 31--April 1, 2016





"Human Rights in Translation: Intercultural Pathways" conference at Saint Louis University's Center for Intercultural Studies, St. Louis, March 31--April 1, 2016. 
When defining human rights, we often invoke certain beliefs--deemed to be universal--on which such rights are based: dignity inherent to every person, common humanity, and natural state of liberty. However, the norms and values of many cultures are incommensurable, or even incompatible, with these "universal" principles.
One way out of this quandary, rooted in the concept of organic wholeness of humanity, has been to call for a convergence of world cultures around the universal idea of human rights, presumed to be shared by all people at a "deeper" level. The problem with this view is that homogenizing world cultures implies eradicating their diversity, in itself a denial of the right to uphold one's culture. Another solution has been to acknowledge the cultural differences in interpreting human rights, and to treat them as mere variations of the basic, universal set of standards. This approach necessitates drawing a line beyond which the universal would be invalidated by the local, a problematic undertaking at best. Both methods tend to assume timeless universality, and thus run the risk of ahistoricism.
The goal of this conference is to encourage reflection on the intercultural translation of human rights. Instead of using such rights as yardsticks to measure diverse cultures on compliance with them, we welcome papers that translate the differences between cultures through the prism of human rights, illuminating different cognitive contexts that produce different meanings of rights, identifying spaces of intercultural crossing where differences can coexist, and offering usable narratives and metaphors that could serve as interfaces between distinct cultures. Ideally, these translations should view human rights not as an integral and finite goal but as a dynamic process of trying to achieve them.

Proposals should include: a one-page abstract of the paper, with a title and name of the author; the author's brief curriculum vitae; postal address; email address; and phone number.  Complete proposals should be emailed as attachments in MS Word to: Mary Bokern at bokernmp@slu.edu with a subject line "Human Rights in Translation"." The deadline for submissions is December 1, 2015.