PILAGG will kick off the 2018-2019 ACADEMIC year with Professor Horatia Muir Watt on her latest book, “Encounters with Alterity in Legal Form”
28 Sept/ 12:30 – 14:30
Room 410 T – Meeting Room
Sciences Po Law School, 13 rue de l’université, 75007 Paris
FOR AN ABSTRACT OF THE SEMINAR AND TOPICS OF DISCUSSION:
A core question for global or post-monist jurisprudence is law’s modes of encounters with alterity. Indeed, the “global turn” in law is not limited, as it would sometimes seem, to a tightening of its own structural linkages with the economy, but involves constant exposure or interactions with foreign societies, cultures and ideologies. One response in legal form to ubiquitous otherness, including cultural difference, can be found by joining up with various strands of contemporary interdisciplinary scholarship in exploring the insights to be found in the specific methodologies of private international law. The aesthetic, ethical or political underpinnings of the various modes of reasoning though which, in the Western world, law understands, and reacts to, extraneous norms and values can then be probed and assessed. In other words, the focus here is on the interdisciplinary ecology of those legal forms that embody a certain relationship to foreign laws and other forms of normativity. Post-monist legal approaches to otherness appear here as a “dangerous method” that leads to a decentering of the self, a moment of void at the point of encounter of difference, a suspension of judgment. While such a method leaves behind the comfortable linearity of legal monism, a look towards private international law’s specific intellectual schemes show that the ensuing vertigo is to be embraced as a form of enrichment of law’s horizons and modes of reasoning.
FOR AN INTRODUCTORY EXCERPT TO THE BOOK: