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 jurisprudenceâ€. 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 […]
Julius Stone Address: What is political progress?In-person event Progress is both a necessary and a dangerous idea. It is necessary if one is striving to improve the way things are, and it is dangerous because the pursuit of progress has historically often given rise to episodes of paternalism, colonial domination and narratives of civilizational […]
JSI Seminar | Beyond Indigenous Cultural & Intellectual Property: opportunities in law reform for Aboriginal-led medicines in Australia and the limitations of legal pluralismIn-person event Australian regulators and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples have the opportunity to co-design a cross-jurisdictional framework that ensures structural integrity and cultural ethics, which embodies international law principles and […]
JSI Seminar | Demystifying CLS: A reflection on writing an intellectual history of the Critical Legal Studies MovementIn-person event In his forthcoming book The Rise and Fall of Critical Legal Studies, Stewart uses the tools of CLS to analyse CLS, assessing its dominant narrative against its history and legacy. Literary and philosophical lenses are used to highlight […]
JSI Seminar: Bathroom Bills and Liberal RightsIn-person event On June 30th 2023 Florida’s House Bill 1521 came into effect. The bill requires that all trans people must use Florida public restrooms that align with the sex they were assigned at birth. This includes restrooms in all Florida airports, government buildings, schools and universities, city parks […]