On Wednesday, March 30, Professor Nils Jansen will give the Wilson Memorial Lecture at the Edinburgh Law School. His topic will be "Hermann Kantorowicz' Concept of Legal Science and the Social Role of Legal Scholarship, Today":
Hermann Kantorowicz was a scholar who bridged the intellectual divide between Common and Civil Law both through his biography and his highly extensive work, which connected legal history, legal theory, and criminal law. This lecture will focus on Kantorowicz's idea of legal science. It will endeavour to show that Kantorowicz's problems still face us today and that there is a lot to learn from the questions he raised. One reason is that he discussed these questions in a manner which engaged deeply with contemporary philosophical scholarship (i.e. Heinrich Rickert, Wilhelm Windelband, and Max Weber). The other reason is that Kantorowicz developed his ideas of legal science wholly independently of 19th century (or contemporary) programmes aimed at re-constructing the law in the form of a fully rational and internally coherent system. In this respect, Kantorowicz's ideas fit in well with modern, more fluid, and complex notions of law and multi-layered legal systems.You may attend in person or online. Details here.
--Dan Ernst
