IGLP Pro Seminars

At the 2011 Workshop,The IGLP Inaugurated a Series of Pro-Seminars designed for small groups of Scholars engaged in collaboration aimed towards publication. The Seminars typically bring together between ten and fifteen active scholars, half selected by invitation, and half by application, who are all working on a common topic. Pro-Seminars typically meet in four two-hour private sessions during the broader Workshop to brainstorm their evolving scholarly writing and advance their work towards publication. Pro-Seminar participants may also attend the Streams and lectures which form the larger Workshop when their Seminar is not in session. Pro-Seminar Participants do not participate in the Writing Workshops or afternoon discussion sessions which are designed for participants of the larger Workshop. Alumni of Past Workshops are particularly encouraged to apply to Pro-Seminars.

At the 2012 Workshop we plan to host 3 new Pro-Seminars with an additional 6-8 planned for the 2013 Workshop.

The 2012 IGLP Pro-Seminars will Include:

Pro Seminar 7: Global Poverty and Heterodox Development Pathways: Mapping, Method and Critique

Pro Seminar 8: Globalization of Law and Legal Thought (1970-Present)

Pro Seminar 9: Law, Economic (In)equality, and Global Social Movements.

PRO SEMINAR 7: Global Poverty and Heterodox Development Pathways: Mapping, Method and Critique
Conveners: Lucie White and Jeremy Perelman

This Pro-Seminar will bring together prominent critical law and development scholars to present, map and critique alternative development pathways that are emerging in the confused phase of the post-Washington Consensus. The invited scholars will present short papers that tease out the methodological features of their respective approaches, as well as the distributional effects of the developmental pathways that they identify. Students participating in the pro-seminar will respond to the scholars’ presentations, relating it to their own projects. The pro-seminar participants will meet subsequent to the IGLP workshop to continue their work, which may result in a book or a law review symposium.

PRO SEMINAR 8: Globalization of Law and Legal Thought (1970-Present) To be held at the 2013 Workshop
Converners: Duncan Kennedy, David Trubek, Kerry Rittich, and Justin Desautels-Stein

This pro-seminar sets out to explore and develop what has arguably become a critical orthodoxy about the mapping of American Legal Thought—a map that encourages us to see the development of three phases of legal consciousness operating in a core-periphery dynamic. From the European core in the Nineteenth Century a classical mode of legal reasoning travelled to a political periphery that at the time included the United States. As “classical legal thought” matured in the US, legal critiques were developing both at home and abroad, helping give rise to a second, globalized form of legal consciousness. The basic vocabulary of legal concepts that emerged in the wake of the critique of this socially-oriented globalization of law and legal thought constituted a third form—what might now be termed “contemporary legal consciousness.”

The discussion will focus on the following issues:

1) defining legal consciousness and showing how it can be studied

2) mapping contemporary legal consciousness in the US

3) assessing the extent to which US consciousness has diffused to other countries, including (a) other advanced nations and (b) ‘the Global South.

4) exploring other sources for the diffusion of legal ideas in the global south and the relative importance of various sources including (a) US legal consciousness; (b) other advanced country sources such as Europe and Japan; (c) international institutions and sources (UN, IBRD, IMF, etc)

5) making a case for the emancipatory value of the critique of the globalization of legal consciousness.

PRO SEMINAR 9: Law, Economic (in)equality, and Global Social Movements To be held at the 2013 Workshop
Conveners: Chantal Thomas and Brishen Rogers

In recent decades, global economic inequality has become a central concern for political theorists, legal activists, and legal scholars. Yet over that same period global inequality has increased dramatically. This proseminar will explore the relationship between law, emergent social movements that oppose neoliberal economic and social policies, and global justice. Examples of such movements might include — but by no means be limited to — mobilizations against the international financial institutions and more recent global mobilizations surrounding the “Occupy Wall St.” movement; movements to obtain equal access to prescription drugs; and various new labor movements emerging outside of “official” unions in both developed and developing nations.

Questions to be explored include: What would a critical legal theory of global justice and equality look like? Within such a theory, how much importance would we attach to resource and opportunity distribution, grassroots democratic mobilization, and anti-subordination norms? What is the role of law — national and international, hard and soft, formal and informal, substantive and procedural — in promoting or hindering the development of democratic egalitarian social movements? What — if anything — is distinctive about modern global social movements, and do they force reconsideration of traditional understandings of the relationship between law, class, nationalism, race, gender, and equality? What do those movements tell us about the strengths and failings of predominant liberal theories of global justice? How might 20th century strategies and concepts such as civil rights, the welfare state and the regulatory state limit or continue to advance visions of equality in the contemporary context?

In 2011 we sponsored 6 Pro-Seminars. Three of these groups will continue their collaboration through 2012, but are not accepting new participants. IGLP Pro-Seminars Launched in 2011 include:

 

PRO SEMINAR 1: TRANSNATIONAL SOCIAL POLICY AND LABOR REGULATION: CRISIS AND CHANGE

Convener: Kerry Rittich
Labor market governance in an integrating economy has become a transnational, multilevel, and asymmetric affair involving a wide range of public and private actors. The effective ‘law of work’ now includes a wide range of rules and practices that range from private law and domestic/national regulation to formal international law and traverses fields as diverse as employment standards, social policy, and trade and financial regulation.

In the last 15 or 20 years, debates and regulatory interventions concerning labor markets have been dominated one the one hand by norms of labor market flexibility and ‘deregulation’ and on the other by expanded attention to worker’s basic rights, corporate codes, and other soft regulatory instruments. Yet as the still unfolding economic crisis reveals more and more linkages between labor markets, precarious work and both distributive justice and financial stability, it is clear that both as templates for thinking and as strategies of intervention, these approaches are inadequate. Both to analyze the workings of markets and the production of new forms of work and to respond to the predicaments of workers and firms, the field is ripe for reinvention and new angles of vision.

Working in comparative perspective, using a range of critical and analytic methods, and expanding the fields of inquiry, this pro-seminar will function as a forum in which to explore, integrate, and differentiate among the substantive and methodological questions and conundrums about labor market governance and social policy, both national and transnational. Pro-Seminar 1 will continue is discussions at the 2012 Workshop but is not currently accepting new participants.

PRO SEMINAR 2: GENDER, SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, PEACE AND CONFLICT

Conveners: Karen Engle, Karen Knop
This pro-seminar examines gender and social movements in international and transnational contexts, dating from the women’s suffrage and peace movements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries through contemporary feminist interventions in international criminal law and post-conflict resolution. Through a variety of disciplinary lenses–including law, history, politics, literature and anthropology– we explore critically the priorities, strategies, techniques and shifts in these movements. We hope to visit issues regarding the historical and contemporary uses and resonance of such categories as “women,” “men,” “femininity,” “masculinity,” “children,” and “gender,” particularly as they relate to war, peace and empire. Pro-Seminar 2 completed their work in the summer of 2011

PRO SEMINAR 3: THE CENTER AND PERIPHERY IN GLOBAL LAW AND POLITICAL ECONOMY: COLONIALISM TO DEVELOPMENT

Conveners: Matt Craven, Tony Anghie, Vasuki Nesiah, Arnulf Becker, Sundhya Pahuja
This pro-seminar aims to develop new research and writing about the history, meaning and significance of unequal encounters in global society, particularly as they have influenced the arrangements of the global legal order. How should we (and have we) thought about center-periphery relations in the global legal and political system as international lawyers? How should we understand the history and future of “third world approaches to international law?” How can we deepen our understanding of the history of colonialism for global legal (as well as political and economic) order? Pro-Seminar 3 is continuing discussions though 2011 including co-organizing the TWAIL Conference, “CAPITALISM AND THE COMMON GOOD” at the University of Oregon Law School, October 20-22, 2011. They will convene a series of meetings at the 2012 Workshop to begin work on producing a reader of essays focused on the Center and Periphery and International Law. They will conclude their work in 2013. Pro-Seminar 3 is not currently accepting new participants.

PRO SEMINAR 4: GENDER IN POSTCOLONIAL LEGAL ORDERS

Convener: Janet Halley
Ideas about and gender, sex, sexuality, reproduction and the family have played pivotal roles in the rise of colonialism and of modern capitalism, in the formation and dissemination of classical legal thought, in the onset of “the social,” in decolonization and the formation of nations, and in the continual reconfiguration of liberalism’s global reach through “market oriented” economic policies and human rights advocacy. Formal and informal, conscious and unconscious, public and private policies in these domains have had massive material impacts on the course of social and economic development. While there are many valuable studies of specific questions, neither the influence of ideas about gendered existence nor the impact of gender policies on all aspects of life have been central thus far to the work of scholars interested in global governance. This Pro-seminar is designed to take some tentative first steps toward remedying this situation through the study of canonical texts from legal, psychological, political, social and cultural studies that might form the basis both for particular writing projects and for more general studies in the area.

Our focus this year will be on irrational (though perhaps systematic nevertheless) elements of social, economic, political, and intellectual life as they emerge within postcolonial legal orders. We will ask after the role of eros, affect, gender, psyche, and aesthetics. We will study not (only) economies of trade, war, colonization and development, but economies of desire within and alongside them. The goal will be to open a new research project within the IGLP Workshop, in the hopes of queering what we think we know. Pro-Seminar 4 completed their work in the summer of 2011.

PRO SEMINAR 5: RE-THEORIZING LIQUIDITY

Convener: Christine Desan
The financial crisis of 2008 occurred when the money markets essential to global economic activity froze. According to Nobel laureate Gary Becker, many economic theorists did not see the crisis approaching. Those mainstream analysts routinely neglected “the whole financial sector, seeing money as unimportant.” Becker’s observation confirmed a long-standing orthodoxy. “The best models of the economy,” wrote Frank Hahn in 1982, “cannot find room” for money at all. The events of 2008 and their aftermath compel economists and others to re-examine the way money is theorized in order to understand the dynamics of the modern political economy.

“>The pro-seminar, Re-theorizing Liquidity, will bring together scholars from a variety of disciplines, including economics, law, and history, who are engaged in theorizing the way societies create and manage liquidity, including money and credit-based derivatives. The seminar will offer those scholars, in dialogue and debate with each other, to develop further their models of liquidity. The group will attend, in particular, to global dimensions of modern liquidity, including the spread of monetary forms, the operation of capital markets, and the challenges to state actors in the international arena. Pro-Seminar 5 will continue discussions in 2012 and continue their work on a volume of essays to be published in 2012 or 2013. Pro-Seminar 5 is not currently accepting new participants..

PRO SEMINAR 6: RENEWING LATIN AMERICAN LEGAL STUDIES

Convener: Jorge Esquirol
Comparative law has undergone a series of methodological changes over the last decades which have changed our understanding of the politics, sociology and significance of “area studies” in law. At the same time, law and the legal profession in Latin America have themselves been changed. This pro-seminar aims to bring together scholars thinking in new ways about law in Latin America to develop their own comparative scholarship and sharpen their intervention in the field of Latin American legal studies. Over the course of these discussions, participants may work together on a publication, institutional collaboration, or other projects. Pro-Seminar 6 completed their work in the summer of 2011. The group will be publishing a volume of essays on Renewing Latin American Legal Studies in 2012.