CANCELLED FRIDAY 13th NOVEMBER 2015: Prof. Neil Walker (Edinburgh Law School)
- “Global Law and Global Justice: The Gap” (see previous post).
- Discussant: Prof. David Kinley
FRIDAY 4th DECEMBER 2015: Prof. Gunther Teubner (Frankfurt University)
- The Anonymous Matrix: Human Rights Violations by “Private” Transnational Actors.
- Do fundamental rights obligate not only States, but also private transnational actors? Since violations of fundamental rights stem from the totalising tendencies of partial rationalities, there is no longer any point in seeing the horizontal effect as if rights of private actors have to be weighed up against each other. On one side of the human rights relation is no longer a private actor as the fundamental-rights violator, but the anonymous matrix of an autonomised communicative medium. On the other side, the fundamental rights are divided into three dimensions: Firstly institutional rights protecting the autonomy of social discourses – art, science, religion – against their subjugation by the totalising tendencies of the communicative matrix; secondly personal rights protecting the autonomy of communication, attributed not to institutions, but to the social artefacts called ‘persons’; and thirdly human rights as negative bounds on societal communication, where the integrity of individuals’ body and mind is endangered.
- Paper: http://www.fichier-pdf.fr/2015/11/07/globaljustice-engfrz-2015/ (if you can’t download the paper, please send an email to malik.touanssa@sciencespo.fr / the paper will also be sent soon in the email announcing the seminar)
- Discussant: Prof. Pier-Giuseppe Monateri
FRIDAY 19th FEBRUARY 2016: Prof. Peer Zumbansen (King’s College)
- “Unpacking a ‘Not-yet-case’: FIFA as a transnational legal problem: litigation, advocacy and norm-creation”
- The presentation will, in its first part, explore the promise and challenge of adding “transnational law” to the existing canon of legal doctrinal fields, on the one hand, and legal theories, on the other. In the second part, it will use the current scandal around corruption and labour rights violations by FIFA, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, to discuss practical consequences of understanding law “as transnational”.
- Discussant: Jacco Bornhoff
- In preparation of the discussion: What lies before, behind and beneath a case? Five minutes on transnational lawyering and the consequences for Legal Education, Prof. Zumbansen, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2370428
FRIDAY 26th FEBRUARY 2016: (date subject to change): Prof. Hans van Loon (Former Secretary General of the Hague Conference on Private International Law)
- The international protection of migrants and PIL (TBD)
FRIDAY 11th MARCH: Prof. David Restrepo Amariles (HEC)
- Topic TBD
FRIDAY 22nd APRIL 2016: Antonio Marzal (Sorbonne Law School)
- Conflict of Laws as an Analytical Tool
FRIDAY 13th MAY 2016: Prof. Katja Langenbucher (Frankfurt University / Sciences Po)
- On Law Making for Financial Markets
FRIDAY 20th MAY 2016: Prof. Joel Bakan (University of British Columbia):
- The Invisible Hand of Law: Private Regulation and the Rule of Law
- The early 1980s— when “politics and ideology . . . turned arse-over-tit,” as E.P. Thompson once described it— was, in the less colorful language of David Harvey, a “revolutionary turning point in the world’s social and economic history.” Law was not immune to the sweeping changes taking place. Until the 1980s, and over the previous half century, law had served (albeit unevenly and incompletely) as the main institutional vehicle for policing corporations in aid of public interests, thereby protecting people, communities, and the environment from corporate excess and malfeasance. Over the course of the 1980s and thereafter, however, law’s protective role began to diminish, and privately promulgated voluntary regimes (hereinafter “private regulation”) emerged in its place. Importantly, no such diminishment occurred in relation to law’s parallel and prominent role in protecting corporations and their interests. Here, state legal regimes continued to operate as robustly as ever; incorporate companies; establish their mandates; protect their rights as “persons”; shield their managers, directors, and shareholders from legal liability; compel their officers to prioritize their “best interests” (typically construed as increasing shareholder value); articulate and enforce their contract and property rights; and repress dissidents and protesters who opposed their growing power. Corporations— indeed, corporate capitalism— could not exist without these legal foundations and supports, which taken together represent a massive infusion of state legal power into society. Despite that massive infusion, many private regulation advocates and commentators presume that globalization eviscerates state legal power, and prescribe, on that basis, that private regimes should take law’s place.
- Paper: http://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/research/ILJ/upload/Bakan-final.pdf