Jurisprudence events

JSI Seminar: Politics all the way down? A qualified defence of critical legal theoryIn-person event   In this talk, Dr Ntina Tzouvala sets out to defend the potential for legal theory of what Edward Said called ‘contrapuntal reading’, Louis Althusser (drawing from Jacques Lacan) described as ‘symptomatic read-ing’, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick denounced as ‘paranoid […]

JSI Seminar: The life of international law is not logic but experienceIn-person event   U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously maintained that “the life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.” Holmes statement suggests an antecedent question: what is the life of the law? This essay construes this […]

JSI Seminar: Crowdsourcing and artificial intelligence in constitutional courtsIn-person event In Judgment SU-151/2020 the Constitutional Court of Colombia rendered its decision on a constitutional complaint of a group of journalists. They claim that in certain criminal cases concerning possible corruption by government officials, prosecutors and judges were unsatisfyingly prohibiting the press to attend public criminal […]

JSI Seminar: Legalizing Assisted Dying: Are We On A Slippery Slope To Involuntary Euthanasia?In-person event   On 28 November 2023, the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act will come into effect in NSW. The Act allows ill persons having decision-making capacity, acting voluntary, and with less than six months to live (12 months in the case of a neurogenerative […]

JSI Workshop | Towards a Moralisation of Jurisprudence? Reflections on the Future of Legal PhilosophyIn-person event There is a trend in current Anglo-American legal philosophy that is drawing the attention of legal scholars. We could label this trend “The moralisation of jurisprudence”. Its animating idea is as follows: The questions still left open in contemporary […]

JSI Seminar: The stability of bad thingsIn-person event   Political philosophers have long been concerned with how best to ensure the stability of social orders. Stability is assumed to be a good, whether because whatever is good is better for being stably so, or because stability enables cooperation in the pursuit of whatever other goods […]

JSI Workshop: Description and evaluation in contemporary jurisprudenceIn-person event Modern jurisprudence has been tormented by a divide between description and evaluation in legal theory. Proponents argue that the distinction is essential to any clearheaded discussion of law itself and its relation to adjacent normative systems, especially morality. Opponents insist that being the necessarily normative practice […]

JSI Seminar: Epistemic privilege and duties of mutual assistanceIn-person event Victims of oppression are sometimes said to have epistemic privilege in virtue of their marginalised social position into the operation and impact of oppressive social structures. Epistemic privilege sometimes is cited as a basis for deference in social relations between victims and non-victims—for example, the […]

The Life and Death of States: Author Meets ReadersIn-person event Natasha Wheatley’s bold new book The Life and Death of States: Central Europe and the Transformation of Modern Sovereignty (Princeton University Press 2023) rediscovers the multinational Habsburg polity as a hothouse for ideas that still shape our understanding of the sovereign state. The radical mismatch between theories […]