ComparativeLawBlog Dormant

This Blog is on hold, and will be so for the foreseeable future. The archive, for what its worth, will remain online, at least for now.

Sean Donlan and colleagues will continue posting on comparative law matters at www.jurisdiversitas.blogspot.com.

Thanks to Sean for his contributions, and to you for your visits.

Jacco

NOTICE: International & Comparative Law Quarterly

International & Comparative Law Quarterly (ICLQ), marks 60 years of publication in 2012. To mark the occasion the editorial board has taken the opportunity to reflect on the contribution the ICLQ has made in the key areas of legal scholarship such as public international law, private international law, comparative law, EU law and human rights law.

Read the full introduction to this issue here.

Selections of articles have been specially chosen by the Editors to show the quality and diversity of the ICLQ. Each selection can be accessed online without charge by following this link.

You can also see the complete table-of-contents from the first 2012 issue here.

NOTICE: HERINGA & AKKERMANS ON EDUCATING EUROPEAN LAWYERS

Intersentia has recently published Aalt Willem Heringa and Bram Akkermans (eds), Educating European Lawyers (2011). The description reads:

The continuing and accelerating process of European integration impacts on European legal education, or ought to have its impact on our ideas about legal education in Europe. Although legal education in Europe is mainly national and usually conducted in the national language, there are initiatives that seek to break through the national barriers and move towards a truly European legal education. The Maastricht European Law School, which focuses on European Union law, international law and comparative law, fully taught in English, is one of these initiatives. In this edited volume we have endeavoured to reflect upon European Legal education in the light of that program, which has been on offer for a couple of years now and which attracts a great deal of students from all over Europe and the world as well, and to offer to interested readers ways forward as well as obstacles and points to ponder.

This books pays attention to the developments in European law and the effects these have on legal education in general as well as in other fields. Drawing from their own experiences, the authors describe the current state of law, offer perspectives on future developments and explain how they translate these developments in the law school curriculum. All the contributions in this book have in common that each author seeks to better prepare students for a future in a more integrated Europe.

It is our purpose to generate a European debate about the subject and to move the European discussion forward to concrete steps to effectively establish European legal education for new generations of lawyers that will work in an increasingly Europeanised legal domain.

The contents are here.

NOTICE: British Institute of International and Comparative Law Appointments

British Institute of International

and Comparative Law (BIICL)

The Institute is looking to appoint a Deputy Director to provide clear organisational leadership at a senior level and to support the Institute Director in the management of the Institute. Closing Date: 20/02/2012. For further information see: http://www.biicl.org/deputydirector/

The Institute also wishes to appoint a Publications Editor who primarily acts as the assistant editor of the International and Comparative Law Quarterly, and also undertakes all duties in relation to publications in the Institute. For further information please see our website at: http://www.biicl.org/pubeditor/. The closing date for applications is 13 February 2012.

NOTICE: Faure and Smits, Does Law Matter?

Intersentia has recently published Michael Faure and Jan Smits (eds), Does law matter? on law and economic growth (2011), the 100th volume of the Ius Commune Europaeum Series.

For many years now, there has been a strong economic scholarship pointing to the importance of institutions in general - and, more particularly, legal rules and the rule of law - for economic development. The importance of law for economic growth has also been empirically tested in many well-known and often cited studies. These studies seem to indicate not only that law is relevant in the development of countries and their economic growth in particular, but more specifically, that particular legal systems do better than others. The tenant of this scholarship (especially initiated by Andrej Schleifer and others) is that the common law would be a more efficient system in promoting economic growth than the civil law. However, many scholars doubt the empirical claim of this and criticize these findings, both on methodological grounds as well as on grounds of a misconception of differences between the civil and the common law. The interest in legal origins for the efficiency of the legal system also focuses on particular legal regimes, such as accident law, environmental law, or corporate law. Increasingly, the question is also asked whether legal institutions and the rule of law are also important in the process whereby poor nations develop their economy. For example, Cooter, Schafer, and Ulen have attempted to examine why particular developing countries do relatively better than others and, roughly speaking, also attribute (part of the) success of some developing countries to legal institutions. However, others (more particularly Ulen) point at the fact that legal rules may play some role, but perhaps only a modest role in economic development. A powerful example which is quoted in that respect is the one of China which, at least at first blush, does not seem to rely strongly on legal institutions (at least in the traditional sense) and nevertheless has experienced a spectacular economic growth. The particular case of China hence remains somewhat puzzling in this debate. So far, these various streams of literature paying attention to the question to what extent legal origins matter for economic growth have not been strongly integrated and have, to a large extent, been developed in separate social sciences (institutional economics, development economics, and comparative law). This multi-disciplinary book brings these approaches together in an integrated and structural manner. (Series: Ius Commune Europaeum - Vol. 100)

The introduction is available on SSRN.

NOTICE: The Development of the German Constitutional Approach to International Law

The Goettingen Journal of International Law (GoJIL) in cooperation with the Institute of International and European Law, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen and the Minerva Center for Human Rights, Hebrew University of Jerusalem is pleased to announce its

 international symposium on 

Precursors to International Constitutionalism:

The Development of the German Constitutional Approach to International Law 

March 9-10 2012, Paulinerkirche, Göttingen, Germany

International constitutionalism is in the focus of contemporary international legal debate and practice, as evidenced by the recent Kadi-Jurisprudence of the European Courts and the burgeoning literature that employs constitutional as well as fragmentation terms with respect to modern international law – dealing with the pluralistic structure of modern international law, post-national law and constitutional pluralism. This seemingly new discourse is all-pervasive, with implications in international politics, law, trade and human rights.

However, this project maintains that this is not an entirely new discourse. Its precursors can be found in what could be considered to be a "German" constitutional approach towards International Public Law (Völkerrecht) that has been characterized by a strong constitutional understanding for centuries. While the roots of the discussion can be traced back to the Eighteenth Century, this has especially been the case in the Twentieth Century, as discernable in German and Austrian teachings, from the scholarship of Albert Verdross (with his 1926 'Verfassung der Völkerrechtsgemeinschaft') to Bardo Fassbender's contemporary analysis of the UN Charter as an international constitution. 

REMINDER: JURIS DIVERSITAS COLLOQUIUM - Doing Justice: Official and Unofficial ‘Legalities’ in Practice

Doing Justice:

Official and Unofficial ‘Legalities’ in Practice

Juris Diversitas is organising, with the Centre Jacques-Berque, a colloquium on Mediterranean laws and norms. It will be held in Rabat, Morocco from 15-16 June 2012.

Participants, both jurists and others, are asked to speak on the complexity of

• state laws (both Western and non-Western), including the gap between legal theory and practice
• other non-state normative orders (religious, customary, etc)

Speakers may discuss, in English or French, either of these aspects (including case studies) or the relationship between the two.

CALL FOR PAPERS AND SESSION PROPOSALS: Stateless Law? The Future of the Discipline

Faculty of Law and Quebec ResearchCentreof Private and Comparative Law

McGill University, Montreal

CALL FOR PAPERS AND SESSION PROPOSALS

STATELESS LAW? THE FUTURE OF THE DISCIPLINE

Faculty of Law, McGill University

28‐29 September 2012

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the first graduating class of the McGill Program, the Faculty of Law and the Quebec Research Centre of Private and Comparative Law will host an international conference on the future of the discipline of law. This event will aim to foster a debate that critically assesses the latest developments in legal thought and innovative approaches to law, in the light of the challenge of globalization and the move away from a national paradigm for understanding law. It will also ask the question of how to integrate the insights so gained into the teaching of law. The concern is with law in all its dimensions: public and private, local and transnational, formal and informal. By being forced to abandon, at least in part, the posited law of the nation state as their lode star, legal education and legal scholarship have been presented with an opportunity to break the mould of centuries of legal nationalism: an opportunity that encourages new, transdisciplinary and transnational ways of thinking about law. In short, the goal is to re-assess and to re-imagine the discipline of law, its place in the university, and its role in society. The working languages of the conference will be English and French.

NOTICE: BACL Postgraduate Workshop and Conference on Comparative Law.

CALL FOR PAPERS

British Association of Comparative Law (BACL)

Postgraduate Workshop on Comparative Law

Kent Centre for European and Comparative Law

Kent Law School

Canterbury, UK

19–20 June 2012

The Kent Centre forEuropean and Comparative Law (KCECL) will host the British Association of ComparativeLaw (BACL) “Postgraduate Workshop on Comparative Law” on 19-20 June 2012. The workshop will precede an international conference on “Comparative Law: Engaging Translation” on 21-22 June 2012. Both events are scheduled to take place at Kent Law School, Canterbury, Kent, UK.

The BACL Postgraduate Workshop on Comparative Law is designed for doctoral students working on dissertations in the field of comparative legal studies and related subjects. In a round-table setting, the 2-day workshop will address both the benefits and methodological problems of postgraduate research in comparative law.

Comparative Law Call for Papers for SLS Conference, from David Marrani

SLS Conference 2012 Bristol - Call for Papers: Comparative Law Section

Dear all,

The 2012 SLS Annual Conference will take place at Bristol University from 11-14 September. The theme of the conference this year is “Pressing Problems in the Law and Legal Education” and papers on that topic are particularly welcome.

CALL FOR PAPERS: International Conference on Judicial Independence and Globalization

International Conference on Judicial Independence and Globalization

Sponsored by City University of Hong Kong

In collaboration with The Faculty of Law, Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Centre for Public Law, University of Cambridge

21-23 March 2012

CALL FOR PAPERS

We invite authors to submit an abstract of about 200 words of your proposed paper presentation. Please submit your paper proposals as soon as possible.

REGISTRATION DETAILS

Registration fee for speakers / participants is HK $2,500 (which includes all meals and conference materials, but excludes accommodation charges) Please refer to the registration form for details.

Please make your cheque / bank draft payable to the City University of Hong Kong. An official acknowledgement receipt will be sent to you.

The Civil Law and its Codes: A Journey Through the Americas

Les Editions Thémis, Montreal, published Le droit civil et ses codes: parcours à travers les Amériques, a collection of papers presented at a workshop series conducted at the Quebec Research Center of Private and Comparative Law at McGill University, edited by Jimena Andino Dorato, Jean-Frédérick Ménard and Lionel Smith. View the Table of Contents.

Les neufs juristes conviés par le centre de recherche en droit privé et comparé du Québec de l'Université McGill à parcourir le droit civil à travers les Amériques et leurs codes en dressent un portrait pluriel. Cela dit, comme le relève Benoît Moore dans le rapport de synthèse qui clôt cet ouvrage collectif dans lequel il se penche sur l'unicité, la centralité et la pérennité des "codes d'Amérique", des thèmes récurrents traversent les textes des auteurs, indépendamment de leur origine nationale. Ainsi, on observe l'évolution du rôle normatif du Code civil en Argentine avec Julio César Rivera qui s'attarde notamment à ses interactions avec le common law et la lex mercatoria. On constate aussi, tant avec Olivier Moréteau, qui réfléchit à la place du Code civil en Louisiane qu'avec Jimena Andino Dorate, Graciela Jasa-Silveira et Nelcy Lopez Cuellar qui abordent le dialogue des codes civils avec les normes constitutionnelles et internationales en Argentine , au Mexique et en Colombie, que la place du code civil dans l'univers juridique a beaucoup changé depuis la première vague de codification au 19ème siècle. De même, l'exposé de de José Antônio Peres Gediel sur la modernisation du droit des personnes physiques en réponse aux innovations médicales et scientifiques et dans la foulée de l'adoption par le Brésil d'un nouveau code civil rejoint à la fois le propos sur les défis associés à la réforme et à la recodification du droit privé que livre Luis Muniz-Argüelles à partir de Puerto Rico et le point de vue québécois de Sophie Morin sur l'avenir du Code civil du Québec. Tel que l'évoquent en ouverte Jimena Andino Dorato, Jean-Frédérick Ménard et Lionel Smith, cet ouvrage pose un regard renouvelé sur le droit civil tel qu'il s'est développé sur le continent américain et constitue une excellente introduction à son étude comparée.

NOTICE: Pargendler on the Rise and Decline of Legal Families

Mariana Pargendler (Fundação Getulio Vargas School of Law at São Paulo)'s 'The Rise and Decline of Legal Families' (2012) 60 American Journal of Comparative Law is now available on SSRN.

The abstract reads:

The effort to group jurisdictions around the world into a handful of legal families based on common characteristics of their laws has traditionally occupied a central role in the comparative law literature. This Article revisits the intellectual history of comparative law and surveys the evolution of legal family taxonomies from the first efforts at classification in the late-nineteenth century to the influential categorizations advanced by René David and Zweigert and Kötz in the 1960s. The early taxonomies differed from their modern counterparts in important ways. Although the nineteenth century is usually viewed as the apex of the common-civil law dichotomy, this distinction was conspicuously absent from legal family classifications until the twentieth century. A number of economic and political factors – ranging from economic liberalism to anti-colonialist sentiment – likely played a role in minimizing the salience of legal traditions in nineteenth-century legal thought.

NOTICE: New German Law Journal

The editors of the German Law Journal has recently circulated a message about the latest issue:

Dear Readers:

We are pleased to announce that the new issue of the German Law Journal, Review of Developments in German, European and International Jurisprudence, is now available at www.germanlawjournal.com.

This issue marks the beginning of a new year and of volume 13 of the Journal. It features excellent scholarship in a variety of fields, including Public International Law's engagement with the unruly discourse on Global Constitutionalism, contested issues of territoriality in the Balkans, the newly revised OECD Guidelines for Multinational Corporations, a case review of recent jurisprudence in EU law, an essay on copyright licensing as well as an interview with German constitutional law professor Christoph Moellers about the Federal Constitutional Court.

What are we missing? Yes, another true gem in this month's issue: A Book Review Symposium on new publications in the area of Human Rights! It was conceived by GLJ student editor, Tiffany Wong, of Osgoode Hall Law School, around the time of her graduation in 2011, with contributions authored by law students at Osgoode Hall and at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Law, and edited by the excellent editorial team at Osgoode. Bravo to all!

As always: Happy reading and, this time still, a very happy new year!

Russell Miller
Peer Zumbansen
Editors in Chief, German Law Journal
The Editors
www.germanlawjournal.com

FINAL REMINDER: IRISH SOCIETY OF COMPARATIVE LAW Conference

The CALL FOR PAPERS for the IRISH SOCIETY OF COMPARATIVE LAW (ISCL) Conference is closing.

The 4th Annual ISCL Conference will take place on 2-3 March 2012 at the Faculty of Law, University College Cork, Ireland.

See the original Call for Papers or contact b.sage@ucc.ie for additional information.

CALL FOR PAPERS: The Irish Constitution: Past, Present and Future

The Constitutional Studies Group at University College Dublin invites submissions for a conference on “The Irish Constitution: Past, Present and Future”. The conference is being organised to mark the 75th anniversary of the enactment of the current Irish Constitution and will take place in Dublin between June 28th and 30th, 2012.

The conference line-up will feature a range of distinguished speakers from Ireland and other jurisdictions. Confirmed participants so far include:

• The Chief Justice of Ireland, the Hon. Mrs. Justice Susan Denham

• The Hon. Mr. Justice Donal O'Donnell of the Supreme Court

• Prof. Philip Pettit (Princeton)
• Prof. Mark Tushnet (Harvard)
• Prof. Cheryl Saunders (Melbourne)
• Prof. Deirdre Curtin (Amsterdam)
• Prof Gerry Whyte (TCD)
• Prof. Martin Loughlin (LSE)
• Dr. Aileen Kavanagh (Oxford)
• Dr. Colm O’Cinneide (UCL)

The conference organisers welcome proposals from all disciplines on any topic relevant to Irish constitutionalism. Proposed papers are not required to focus on Irish law alone. The organisers particularly welcome submissions from a comparative, conceptual or inter-disciplinary perspective.

CALL FOR PAPERS: Doing Justice - Official and Unofficial ‘Legalities’ in Practice

Doing Justice: Official and Unofficial ‘Legalities’ in Practice

Juris Diversitas is organising, with the Centre Jacques-Berque (Rabat, Morocco), a colloquium to be held in Rabat from 15-16 June 2012. As a follow-up to last year’s launch of the Mediterranean Hybridity Project, its theme will be the relation of the diverse and lived ‘legalities’, both official and unofficial, in the region.

The event will also serve as the 2012 Juris Diversitas Annual General Meeting. Proceedings will be in English and French.

The Mediterranean Hybridity Project

The extraordinary legal and normative hybridity of the Mediterranean region was produced in a complex history of conquest, colonisation, and social and legal diffusion across shifting and porous political boundaries.

The objective of the Mediterranean Hybridity Project is, through a collaborative international and interdisciplinary network of experts, to produce and publish a comparative or cross-cultural collection on these ‘legalities’. On the basis of a questionnaire agreed with the participants, the outcome will be more accurate, useful, and accessible account of Mediterranean hybridity. The presentations made at the colloquium will assist us in this Project.

A draft discussion of the Mediterranean Hybridity Project is available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1874095; a revised version will appear shortly in the Journal for Civil Law Studies.

Proposals and costs

While the primary focus of the colloquium is on the region, especially with respect to the Mediterranean Project, related proposals on ‘legalities’ beyond the Mediterranean are also welcome. Those interested in making a presentation should send a short (250 word) proposal to Baudouin Dupret (baudouin.dupret@cjb.ma) by 7 February 2012.

In general, transportation and accommodation costs are not paid by the organisers. There are, however, no conference fees for Juris Diversitas members and other invited speakers. The conference fee for other attendees will be €100. The Centre will support the costs of several invited speakers coming from Arab countries.

NOTICE: 2012 Thematic Congress of International Academy of Comparative Law

The 2012 Thematic Congress of International Academy of Comparative Law is being hosted by the College of Law at National Taiwan University, on May 24-26, 2012.

The general theme of the congress is codification, with the second day (May 25) dedicated to the sub-theme “Codification and Legal Transplant: the East Asia Experience”, focusing on Taiwan, Japan, Korea and China.

NOTICE: Husa and Smits on Comparative Functionalism

The following 'Dialogue on Comparative Functionalism' between Jaakko Husa and Jan Smits may be of interest:

The use of the functional method when comparing legal systems remains debated, even to such an extent that some authors have discarded functionalism as a fruitful method. The two authors of this paper ask what we can still expect from functionalism. While Husa presents an argument in favor of rule-of-thumb functionalism, Smits claims that functionalism has a bright future if it is reshaped. The authors present their arguments by way of a dialogue that was written for the ‘Legal debates’-section of the Maastricht Journal of European and Comparative Law.

NOTICE: A Decade of the German Law Journal

The newest issue of the German Law Journal is available. In addition, the editors note the publication of Comparative Law as Transnational Law: A Decade of the German Law Journal (OUP).

The announcement of the journal reads:

This issue is packed to the rim with first-rate, exciting scholarship and it is ---- collaborative! Have a look at our call for papers in conjunction with the English translation of Hermann Kantorowicz's 1906 article on "Der Kampf um die Rechtswissenschaft" in the context of a growing discontent with legal formalism and positivism.

Other highlights in this issue are the articles and case reviews concerning one of the most important constitutional law cases out of Germany in recent years, concerning the so-called Hartz IV payments to social welfare recipients. The landmark decision is discussed in the context of a more comprehensive assessment of the trajectories and the prospects of the much-acclaimed German welfare state system.

Furthermore, you find in this issue a comparative study on the abortion rights cases in both

the U.S. and Germany.

We are one issue away from drawing this year, the Journal's twelfth volume, to an end, and we would like to extend our gratitude and appreciation to our readers, authors and students who continue to make the Journal's publication worthwhile - and possible. We do receive a very high number of submissions and, as a result, are sometimes facing longer delays in our peer-review process, for which we ask for your patience and understanding.