This conference is a follow-up to a series of conversations on the relations between historiography, ideology, and law that took place at the University of Helsinki in March 2018. Among other things, the Boston College conference will take up a set of questions about the recent trajectory of critical legal history, as well as about what scholars familiar with cognate debates (notably, in intellectual history and in general theories of legal change) might add to the discussion.
For more information, please contact Paulo Barrozo (617-792-9475; barrozo@bc.edu).
Click here for discounted reservations at the Crowne Plaza Boston-Newton. For those who wish, a shuttle will take participants to the Law School campus (1.5 miles away) in the morning and back to the hotel at the end of the day.
**Dr. Nahed Samour, SHARIAsource Early Abbasid Iraq and Iran Editor, will be presenting on Islamic international law.**
Agenda:
Friday, Sept. 21
9-9:15
Welcome: Paulo Barrozo
Introductory Remarks: Justin Desautels-Stein & Sam Moyn
9:15-10:45
Panel I: Method Madness I
Bernie Meyler, Stanford University
– Aesthetic Historiography
Simon Stern, University of Toronto
– The Roots of Legal Thought: Notes Toward a Methodology
Paulo Barrozo, Boston College
– History of Law in the Evolution of Law
Justin Desautels-Stein, University of Colorado
– Ideology in Context
10:45-11
Break
11-12:15
Panel II: Method Madness II
Nahed Samour, University of Berlin
– The Dark Entanglement: Islamic International Law and Legal Historiography
Samuli Seppanen, University of Hong Kong
– Ideology and Historiographic License in Chinese Legal Scholarship
Natasha Wheatley, Princeton University
– Law and the Time of Angels: International Law’s Method Wars and the Temporal Properties of Normativity
12:15-1:15
Lunch
1:15-2:30
Panel III: Left Legal History
Anthony Farley, Albany
– A General Theory of Law and Marxism, or, History as Race Consciousness
Ntina Tzouvala, University of Melbourne
– Provincializing Europe-not Capital-in the History of International Law
Rob Hunter, Independent Scholar
– Marxism and Legal Change
Akbar Rasulov, University of Glasgow
– Taking Hohfeld Seriously: Marxist Legal Historiography Post-CLS
2:30-2:45
Break
2:45-4:15
Roundtable Discussion I: What is Left?
Karl Klare, Umut Ozsu, Duncan Kennedy
Saturday, Sept. 22
9-10:30
Panel IV: Constitutional Change in Brazil & India
Breno Baia Magalhaes, Universidade da Amazônia
– Subnational Constitutionalism and Constitutional Change in Brazil: The Impact of Federalism in Constitutional Stability
Ana Beatriz Robalinho, University of Sao Paulo
– Constitutional Mutation and Democratic Legitimacy in Brazil
Leonardo Barbosa, Brazilian Chamber of Deputies
– Legislative Process and Constitutional Change in Brazil: On the Pathologies of the Procedure for Amending the 1988 Constitution
Rohit De, Yale University
– The Jurisprudence of Decolonization: Transregional Legal Geographies and Rebellious Lawyering in Asia and Africa
10:30–10:45
Break
10:45-12:15
Panel V: Histories of Rights
Maeve Glass, Columbia University
– America’s Unwritten Constitutional History
Dan Edelstein, Stanford University
– Revolutionary Rights
Elizabeth Anker, Cornell University
– The Right Paradox
Amy Cohen, Ohio State University
– Critical Historiographies and the Legal Imagination: Reshaping the Human Rights Discourses
12:15-1:15
Lunch
1:15-2:45
Panel VI: History, for Real
Ben Levin, University of Colorado
– Critical Criminal Legal Histories (Or Their Absence)
Dan Priel, Osgoode Hall
– Where Realism Really Was
John Henry Schlegel, Buffalo
– Perhaps the Third Turtle Down
Chuck Colman, University of Hawaii
– The Elephant in the Room
2:45-3
Break
3-4:30
Roundtable Discussion II: Critical Historicism Today
Nathaniel Berman, Laura Weinrib, Judith Surkis, Anna di Robilant