We are honored to announce that this year’s keynote speakers will be three distinguished scholars:
- Professor Jeanne Gaakeer, Erasmus Law School, Erasmus University Rotterdam
- Professor Thomas Giddens, Dundee Law School, University of Dundee
- Professor Peter Goodrich, Cardozo Law School, Yeshiva University
KEYNOTE LECTURES
Jeanne Gaakeer: Playing (with) the double bind of judicial decision-making: the contribution of philosophical hermeneutics and legal narratology
Playing (with) the double bind challenges the persistent formalist view that judging is the unmediated application of objective legal norms to easily stated facts. This idea of a iudex deductor who, as U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts had it at his 2005 confirmation hearing, as an umpire simply calls balls and strikes is incorrect. Playful though Roberts’ metaphor may be, contrariwise the hermeneutic movement between norm and fact is always dialectic, shifting from the specific to the general and back, which is a play but differently. This is so because legal rules are not self-explanatory and/or self-applying, i.e. no rule is a priori available for the application of a specific rule in the case at hand. The practicing jurist’s methodology is always the combined effort of the perception and assessment of the facts against the background of what legal norm can mean. This includes the awareness that the whole process is governed by the dynamics of the interpretive frame that is itself subject to constant developments and challenges. Therefore, jurists should also bear in mind the influence of their own interpretive frameworks on both fact and norm, because as humans we cannot escape our hermeneutic situation of being culturally determined, professionally as well as personally. I will explore the hermeneutic and narratological aspects of the double bind of legal, more specifically judicial, decision-making, i.e., the freedom to decide and the obligation to obey the law, on the view astutely voiced by Paul Ricoeur, that ‘The reader is absent from the act of writing; the writer is absent from the act of reading.’ This exploration will include, among others, the topics of practical wisdom as a form of cognition, the creative and productive imagination necessary in an imaginary decision space, and Paul Ricoeur’s narrative model of mimesis.
Thomas Giddens: The Law Teacher’s Duty to Play
Incumbent on the office of law teacher is a duty to be complicit in the (re)production of social, legal, and institutional form through the care of pedagogic space, community, and practice. There is no neutral pedagogy, and the inhabitant of the law teacher’s office always exerts power in their administration of what they make present for their students and how they guide engagement with materials, knowledge, and understanding. The way law teachers administer their educational materials and conduct unavoidably shapes the law that students are trained into and their subsequent conduct of postgraduate and legal office, within and beyond the legal profession. The law teacher’s obligation to be complicit also comes with an implied duty to play, as the practical means by which knowledge and understanding are encountered and the (re)production of legal form takes place. Engagement with learning requires creativity and inhabiting imaginary structures, features that are characteristic of play and that require play to take place. Broadly understood, play is the means by which knowledge and understanding is staged for and encountered by learning subjects. Recognising this play enables the unavoidable complicity of those administering the law teacher’s office to be recognised and reflected upon. This in turn opens legal education to critical potential, beyond the unthinking repetition of existing forms or harmful practices in the resolution of social conflict that underpins law’s institutional function. The law teacher has a duty to play, can do nothing but play, and recognising this duty and necessary conduct opens legal pedagogy to reflection on its own critical conduct.
Peter Goodrich: In ludo lex
As new technologies and social media remove the art of play from the experience of childhood, legality also seems to be increasingly divested of the sensibility of the game of law. In ludo lex will explore the history of the legal artem ludicram, of the bans, infamia, and institutional controls of body and expression that were deemed necessary to maintain both the distinctiveness and the visibility of the game of law. In the first section of Justinian’s Codex, it is stipulated that those who do not move like us are mad (dementes vesanoques), a portenteous restraint and instruction that endeavours to mark body and gesture as visible signs of following – of walking in the path – of the law (sequentes legem), and imposing infamia or civil death upon the heretical and outlaw bodies that move and dance differently. Taking up this theme in Roman civil law, I will trace the jealous relation of law to body, gesture, movement, dance, games and play, a sexpartite division, as it impacts the common law and its theatres of legal action.