Farahat on Islamic Jurisprudence

Omar Farahat, McGill University has published The Foundation of Norms in Islamic Jurisprudence and Theology with Cambridge University Press. From the publisher:

In this book, Omar Farahat presents a new way of understanding the work of classical Islamic theologians and legal theorists who maintained that divine revelation is necessary for the knowledge of the norms and values of human actions. Through a reconstruction of classical Ashʿarī-Muʿtazilī debates on the nature and implications of divine speech, Farahat argues that the Ashʿarī attachment to revelation was not a purely traditionalist position. Rather, it was a rational philosophical commitment emerging from debates in epistemology and theology. He further argues that the particularity of this model makes its distinctive features helpful for contemporary scholars who defend a form of divine command theory. Farahat's volume thus constitutes a new reading of the issue of reason and revelation in Islam and breaks new ground in Islamic theology, law and ethics.

Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi

Weekend Roundup

• Princeton University has announced the conference Critical Legal Studies: Intellectual History and History of the Present, to be held February 27 to February 28, 2020.  “The conference is free and open to the public; registration is requested and will be available soon via the conference website.”  The organizers are Hendrik Hartog, Princeton University, Emeritus, History; Paul Baumgardner, Princeton University, Ph.D. candidate, Politics; David Linke, Princeton University, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library; and David Trubek, University of Wisconsin-Madison Voss-Bascom Professor of Law and Dean of International Studies, Emeritus, and Senior Research Fellow, Harvard Law School.  We'll post when the website is on line and the program published.

• From the New Books Network (Law), a number of conversations with authors of recent legal-historical monographs: Julilly Kohler-Hausmann (Cornell) on Getting Tough; Cyril Ghosh (Wagner College) on De-Moralizing Gay Rights; Kristin O'Brassill-Kulfan (Rutgers University) on Vagrants and Vagabonds; Kevin M. Baron (University of Florida) on Presidential Privilege and the Freedom of Information Act; Paul Finkelman (Gratz College) on Supreme Injustice; and a few more (covering recent 2019 releases) that we'll note in stand-alone posts this coming week.

• The New Rambler Review proudly announces its relaunch this month under a new board of editors: Cindy Ewing, Connor Ewing, Simon Stern, and Anna Su (all at the University of Toronto). From the editors: "Founded in 2015, New Rambler Review is an online venue for scholarly discussion of the contemporary moment, publishing reviews of select new books in law, literature, history, and politics. In contrast to the formal book review format, NRR features long-form essays that allow experts to bring their insights to bear on recent monographs and extend the conversation across disciplines in a collegial and open scholarly space. We welcome review pitches at pitches.newrambler@gmail.com."

• On August 30, William Nelson, NYU Law, will speak on The Extreme Right in Europe and America: Are they Different or the Same? in the EuroStorie research seminar at the University of Helsinki.  He “will argue that racism is the foundation of right-wing American thought but that protection of traditional Christian values had to be added to that foundation to give the American right political traction. He also poses the question whether something similar to this combination is present in Europe.”

• On September 18, Mathias Schmoeckel, University of Bonn, will be presenting A Legal Perspective on the Scottish Protestant Reformation in the Alan Watson Seminar in Legal History at Edinburgh Law School on September 18.  “The Reformation did not have a uniform effect on the European states, but rather sharpened the individualistic traits of each nation. The protestant city in the Holy Roman Empire obtained more independence, the protestant princes of the empire achieved almost sovereignty, and the Lutheran King of Denmark established a perfectly absolute government, while his subjects in Norway learned to live with more independence. In each case, the Reformation rather enhanced the pre-existing typical elements of each state. Does this scheme also work for Scottish legal history?”

• On November 7, Martha S. Jones, Johns Hopkins University, will deliver the keynote address at the annual meeting of the Society for US Intellectual History from 7:00-9:00 PM at the New School in New York City.  The schedule for the meeting is here.  H/t: JLG. 

• SUNY at Buffalo has posted a nice profile of Samantha Barbas, professor of law, director of its Baldy Center for Law & Social Policy and a former LHB Guest Blogger!

• Congratulations to Christopher Schmidt, Chicago-Kent College of Law, editor of Law and Social Inquiry, and another former LHB Guest Blogger upon his appointment as Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation.

• The Robbins Collection & Research Center at Berkeley Law is convening an event on the "intellectual legacy of John T. Noonan." More information here.

• Matthew Waxman, Columbia Law School, continues his Lawfare posts on the history of war powers with Daniel Webster, War Powers and Bird$h*t.

• Our friends at the Federal Judicial Center note that Supreme Court of the United States has posted a complete set of its Rules from 1803 onward.

• Many of us don’t teach undergraduates, but we like Jonathan W. Wilson’s Favorite First-Day Activity anyway.

• ICYMI: Erin Blakemore, over at the The History Channel, on martial law in Hawaii during World War 2.

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: "Everyone is talking about 1619. But that’s not actually when slavery in America started," by Ciara Torres-Spelliscy (Stetson Law School); and more.

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

Walker on Structural Racism and Structuralist History

Anders Walker, Saint Louis University School of Law, has posted Freedom and Prison: Putting Structuralism Back into Structural Inequality, which appeared in the University of Louisville Law Review 49 (2011): 267 : “Critics of structural racism frequently miss structuralism as a field of historical inquiry. This essay reviews the rise of structuralism as a mode of historical analysis and applies it to the mass incarceration debate in the United States, arguing that it enriches the work of prevailing scholars in the field. “

CFP: Autonomy in Private Law

[We have the following CFP.  Please note: the deadline is January 20, 2019, midnight EST.]

Autonomy in Private Law: Past, Present, Future.  Organization: The Private Law Junior Scholars Conference.  June 19-20, 2019, Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law, Safra Center for Ethics.  @PLJS_conference

The Private Law Junior Scholars Conference is a collaboration between the law faculties of the University of Toronto and Tel Aviv University. It aims to create a forum for junior researchers from around the world to exchange about private law and different aspects of private law scholarship. The conference provides a select number of doctoral candidates, post-doctoral researchers and junior faculty (pre-tenure) with a unique opportunity to present their work and receive meaningful feedback from senior faculty members and peers. Last year’s conference, themed ‘Public Aspects of Private Law’, received 70 submissions. A total of seven presentations were selected by the organizers and leading private law scholars from the universities of Tel Aviv, Toronto and Yale, which included Hanoch Dagan, Avihay Dorfman, Larissa Katz, Daniel Markovits, Ariel Porat, and Arthur Ripstein.

This Year’s Topic: Autonomy in Private Law: Past, Present, Future  .Autonomy has long stood as the central pillar of conventional scholarship in private law. Much of private law, as depicted in these accounts, is built around the ideal-typical vision of autonomous agents as the relevant legal subjects, and frequently, private law is also claimed to realize and enhance autonomy. The assumption of the existence and desirability of autonomous agents and agency appears to be shared by widely diverging approaches to private law.

Private law’s autonomy-paradigm is, however, increasingly challenged by alternative theoretical accounts of the field that identify freedom as private law’s central pillar, and/or stress the relational dimension of private law. Additional challenges emanate from societal and technological developments that create new areas of power imbalances. At the same time, precisely because of its perceived emphasis on autonomy, private law might seem to offer a promising normative framework for addressing some pressing societal problems.

These challenges and promises invite further reflection about the place of autonomy in private law’s past, present and future. The 2019 Private Law Junior Scholars’ Conference aims to explore these issues, shed light on resulting tensions, and develop possible future perspectives. We invite papers that explore the overall conference topic from different theoretical and methodological vantage points, including historical, comparative, empirical, and critical perspectives.

Motha on sovereignty and violence

Stewart Motha (Birkbeck College, University of London) published Archiving Sovereignty: Law, History, Violence with the University of Michigan Press in 2018. From the publisher:

Archiving Sovereignty shows how courts use fiction in their treatment of sovereign violence. Law’s complicity with imperial and neocolonial practices occurs when courts inscribe and repeat the fabulous tales that provide an alibi for archaic sovereign acts that persist in the present. The United Kingdom’s depopulation of islands in the Indian Ocean to serve the United States’ neoimperial interests, Australia’s exile and abandonment of refugees on remote islands, the failure to acknowledge genocidal acts or colonial dispossession, and the memorial work of the South African Constitution after apartheid are all sustained by historical fictions. This history-work of law constitutes an archive where sovereign violence is mediated, dissimulated, and sustained. Stewart Motha extends the concept of the “archive,” as site of origin and source of authority, to signifying what law does in preserving and disavowing the past at the same time. 

Sovereignty is often cast as a limit-concept, constituent force, determining the boundary of law. Archiving Sovereignty reverses this to explain how judicial pronouncements inscribe and sustain extravagant claims to exceptionality and sovereign solitude. This wide-ranging, critical work distinguishes between myths that sustain neocolonial orders and fictions that generate new forms of political and ethical life.

 Praise for the book:

“Set in and around the Indian Ocean, Archiving Sovereignty is a thoughtful meditation on how the law traffics in fictions—the ‘as if’—as it adjudicates state sovereignty in contexts of colonial and postcolonial violence. Elegantly written, it invites an important consideration of the law’s complex work as historical archivist.” - Avery F. Gordon

“Stewart Motha re-envisions the Indian Ocean as a material site of law, violence, and dispossession that he compellingly terms an ‘archive of the present.’ Drawing comparatively from Australia, South Africa, and the Chagos Archipelago, Motha offers a beautifully crafted analysis of law and sovereignty, how they draw from and disavow their entangled colonial histories.” - Renisa Mawani

“Of the many interwoven themes in Archiving Sovereignty, the driving motif for me is Kant’s ‘as if,’ which responds to the disappearance of metaphysical objectivity. If objects are the only knowable facts, the unknowable is suspended in the ‘as if.’ This is true for a lie (such as acting as if law were grounded in nature or acting as if sovereignty were a power in itself) as well as for a fertile fiction. We must then think of the ‘as if’ in its relation to an absence of first law, and think of sovereignty as the ‘as if’ of a postulation of ‘nothing’ at the centre of existence. Stewart Motha explores this double dimension, its commingling and unravelling, its aporias and suggestions that are of course inexhaustible. This research is at the heart of the concerns and expectations of the present time.” - Jean-Luc Nancy

“Through a series of brilliant readings of contemporary cases of exile and exclusion the source of legality, the archive, is exposed as an unstable archipelago and excoriated as the fictive mark of sovereign solitude.” - Peter Goodrich

Further information is available here.