Author Archives: drliste

International Studies Association Annual Meeting in Toronto, 26-29 March 2014

The ISA 2014 is apporaching quickly. The program is online here. I will participate in three panels.

Wednesday, March 26, 8:15 AM,
WA05: The Politics of Law and Space
Dominion South, Sheraton Centre Toronto
Contributing a paper: Transnational Human Rights Litigation and the Production of Normative Space

Thursday, March 27, 4:00 PM
TD69: Ritual in International Criminal Justice
Suite 2429, Sheraton Centre Toronto
Participating as discussant

Friday, March 28, 1:45 PM
FC35: Performing Normativity
Dufferin, Sheraton Centre Toronto
Participating as chair

Rechtskulturen Reading Circle

Fragmented Normativity and International Relations

Di 11 Mar 2014, 16:00–18:00, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Juristische Fakultät, Room E23, Unter den Linden 9, 10099 Berlin

Convener: Philip Liste

Discussion on:
1) Büthe, Tim and Walter Mattli. 2011. The New Global Rulers: The Privatization of Regulation in the World Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press (ch. 2)
2) A. Claire Cutler. 2013. Legal Pluralism as the “Common Sense” of Transnational Capitalism. Oñati Socio-legal Series 3:4, 719-740. Available from: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2327501

The reading circle is intended as a space of academic exchange outside the usual classroom/conference setting and open to anybody interested. Please write an e-mail to rechtskulturen@rewi.hu-berlin.de if you would like to participate in a session and we will be happy to forward you the text. We will keep you up-dated about our selection of texts and meetings. Of course, we are also very much open for any suggestions you might have and would enjoy the opportunity to discuss texts/topics suggested by you.

R.I.P.: The Idea of Frankfurt’s Ivory Tower

TurmSpectacular or sad day? Last week, Goethe University’s AFE Tower, which was hosting the Social Sciences Faculty, was blown – in order to construct bright and new highrises. With its all grey-in-grey façade and all the graffiti in the elevators and all over the walls, this “Ivory Tower” was also a symbol of critical thought. Last week this symbol collapsed. Welcome to Frankfurt 2.0!

Contested Collisions Conference in Bremen

From Jan 10-12 I will participate in a conference on “Contested Collisions” in Bremen. This three-day conference will controversially discuss the concept of “regime collisions.” The concept is used to describe the fact that fragmentation into an increasing number of international regimes with overlapping areas of competence can lead to contradictory decisions or mutual obstruction. A conference program can be found here.

Forthcoming: Transnational Human Rights Litigation and Territorialized Knowledge: Kiobel and the ‘Politics of Space’

The paper “Transnational Human Rights Litigation and Territorialized Knowledge: Kiobel and the Politics of Space” is forthcoming in Transnational Legal Theory (vol. 5, Issue 1). A pre-version is now online on SSRN under http://ssrn.com/abstract=2370413

Abstract:
In Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Dutch and British private corporations were accused of having aided and abetted in the violation of the human rights of individuals in Nigeria. A lawsuit, however, was brought in the United States, relying on the Alien Tort Statute — part of a Judiciary Act from 1789. In its final decision on the case, the US Supreme Court has strongly focused on ‘territory.’ This usage of a spatial category calls for closer scrutiny of how the making of legal arguments presupposes ‘spatial knowledge,’ especially in the field of transnational human rights litigation. Space is hardly a neutral category. What is at stake is normativity in a global scale with the domestic courtroom turned into a site of spatial contestation. The paper is interested in the construction of ‘the transnational’ as space, which implicates a ‘politics of space’ at work underneath the exposed surface of legal argumentation. The ‘Kiobel situation’ as it unfolded before the Supreme Court is addressed as example of a broader picture including a variety of contested elements of space: a particular spatial condition of modern nation-state territoriality; the production of ‘counter-space,’ eventually undermining the spatial regime of inter-state society; and the state not accepting its withering away. The paper will ask: How are normative boundaries between the involved jurisdictional spaces drawn? How do the ‘politics of space’ work underneath or beyond the plain moments of judicial decision-making? How territorialized is the legal knowledge at work and how does territoriality work in legal arguments?

Read article online under: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2370413

Rechtskulturen Reading Circle

Critical comparisons in legal studies

Di 26 Nov 2013, 16:00–18:00, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Juristische Fakultät, Room E23, Unter den Linden 9, 10099 Berlin

Convener: Philip Liste

The reading circle is intended as a space of academic exchange outside the usual classroom/conference setting and open to anybody interested. Please write an e-mail to rechtskulturen@rewi.hu-berlin.de if you would like to participate in a session and we will be happy to forward you the text. We will keep you up-dated about our selection of texts and meetings. Of course, we are also very much open for any suggestions you might have and would enjoy the opportunity to discuss texts/topics suggested by you.

Rechtskulturen inaugural event, Oct 10

posterRechtskulturen cordially invites you to the inaugural event on Thursday, 10 October where the seven new Rechtskulturen Fellows 2013-14 will introduce themselves and their research projects to the academic public:

• José-Manuel Barreto: Re-contextualisation of Human Rights and Critical Dialogue: Human Rights beyond Eurocentrism
• Shakira Bedoya Sánchez: “Exhuming Truth”, Constructing Evidence. The Production of Forensic Knowledge in Post-conflict Somaliland and Peru
• Anne Clément: The Criminal Courts of Colonial Egypt and India (1862-1919): Legal and Normative Pluralism in Context and in Action
• Philip Liste: Transnational Human Rights Litigation and the Politics of Space
• Larissa Vetters: Fragmented Sovereignty and Census Projects: The Workings of Law in the Production of Population Knowledge, Political Community and Statehood in the European Union and in Bosnia-Herzegovina
• Maaike Voorhoeve: Constitutional Debates in Post-revolutionary Tunisia: Identity Construction and the Position of International Human Rights Law
• Ismail Warscheid: Islamic Jurisprudence and the Making of Social Order in the Central and Southern Sahara between the Seventeenth and Nineteenth Century (far South of Algeria, Mauritania, Northern Parts of Mali)

When: Thursday, 10 October 2013, 18:00–20:00
Where: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Juristische Fakultät, Room E 25, Unter den Linden 9, 10099 Berlin

The program and more information can be found here:
http://www.rechtskulturen.de/fileadmin/pdf/rechtskulturen/Kalender/2013-10/RK-Karte-Knowledge_That_NetWorks-2013-3.pdf