Call for Papers: ESIL IGILTP Roundtable – Theories and Methodologies in the Contemporary Study of International Lawmaking (9 September 2020)

The way scholars study international lawmaking has changed significantly over time. The scholarship witnesses a flourishing variety of theoretical approaches and empirical investigations aimed at uncovering new facets of international lawmaking. The IGILTP invites applications for a roundtable to discuss various theories and methodological approaches utilized today to study international lawmaking understood broadly. If recently you investigated any aspect of international lawmaking and would like to share your experience with regard to theoretical and methodological challenges, we would be delighted to receive your proposal. The roundtable will be dedicated not to substantive issues related to lawmaking but on theories and methodologies utilized by scholars in the study of various facets of international lawmaking focusing on the following questions:

• What is the particular theory or methodology you used?
• How this theory or methodology was utilized?
• What particular utility it had for the study of international lawmaking?
• In what circumstances would you recommend this theory or methodology for the study of other aspects of international lawmaking?
• What is this theory or methodology unable to achieve?
• Why is this theory or methodology better than others?

Submission procedure

Please submit an abstract no longer than 500 words together with a short author(s) bio (no longer than 100 words) to the panel organizer Ekaterina Yahyaoui Krivenko (ekaterina.yahyaoui@nuigalway.ie). Please provide the following information with each abstract:

• Author’s name, affiliation, email and phone contact details;
• Whether the author is a current ESIL member;

The deadline for the submission of abstracts is 25 April 2020.

Successful applicants will be informed no later than 30 April 2020.

The Interest Group is unable to provide funding for travel and accommodation. Selected speakers will be expected to bear the costs of their own travel and accommodation. Some ESIL travel grants and ESIL carers grants will be available to offer partial financial support to speakers who have exhausted other potential sources of funding. Please see the ESIL website for all relevant information about the conference.

All participants at ESIL Interest Group workshops are required to register for the Annual Conference. There will be an option to register just for one day to attend the workshop; however, all participants are warmly invited to attend the entire event.

Speakers selected for this workshop can indicate their interest in being considered for the ESIL Young Scholar Prize, if they meet the eligibility conditions as stated on the ESIL website. The ESIL Secretariat must be informed of all selected speakers who wish to be considered for the Prize before 15 May.

Call for Papers: Second ECTPIL & iCourts Conference – The Reality of International Legal Theory – Reality in International Legal Theory (22-23 October 2020)

Second ECTPIL and iCourts Conference, to be held  22–23 October 2020 at the University of Copenhagen

Reality and realism are two important topics in 21st century theoretical thought about international  law. Theory must, one argument goes, remain connected to the reality of the law – the real law – in order to be relevant to the practices and arguments of lawyers. Various shades of (international) legal realist argument vie with approaches foregrounding empirical aspects and methods to find out about the law and how it is ‘lived’. Both acceptance by peers as well as research funding is dependent on  fulfilling the requirement of ‘interdisciplinarity’, which often focuses heavily on the socio‐empirical over normative aspects of law. The philosophy of legal science or theory of legal scholarship (Rechtswissenschaftstheorie) has a lot to say about such arguments and requirements, both in its de‐constructive and in its constructive modes. Another way of thinking about ‘reality’ is the way in which international legal theoretical arguments, approaches, schools or theorems are actually used – both by scholars and practitioners. How is theory used and abused, how is it practised?
Both sets of issues concern the way in which ‘theory’ deals with ‘reality’ in one way or another. This conference is an open forum to analyse this relationship, to expose fault‐lines and to explore trajectories. The Second ECTPIL and iCourts Conference will draw on these and other under‐researched questions.
The Conference is organised by iCourts, the Danish National Research Foundation’s Centre of Excellence for International Courts at the University of Copenhagen in conjunction with the European Society of International Law’s Interest Group on International Legal Theory and Philosophy and hosted by iCourts. It is convened by Jakob v.H. Holtermann (iCourts), jvhh@jur.ku.dk, and Jörg Kammerhofer (University of Freiburg, IGILTP), joerg.kammerhofer@jura.uni‐freiburg.de.

The full call for papers for this conference can be viewed here. 

The deadline for the submission of abstracts to jvhh@jur.ku.dk is Sunday, 17 May 2020.

IGILTP Agora – 15th ESIL Annual Conference

On the occasion of the 15th ESIL Annual Conference the IGILTP held a very engaging Agora on spatio-temporal dimensions of sovereignty in international law. The panel chaired by Ekaterina Yahyaoui Krivenko (The Irish Centre for Human Rights, National University of Ireland Galway) brought together three presentations each critically reflecting on the concept of sovereignty using a spatio-temporal lens. So Yeon Kim, a PhD candidate from the University of Cambridge talked about Difference in the Concept of Sovereignty in Spatial Dimension: Reflecting the Legal Approach to the East Asian Territorial Disputes. Professor Christopher R. Rossi from the University of Iowa presented on the following topic: Rethinking International Law and Remoteness: Topophilia, Resource Extraction, and the History of International Law in the Americas (Atacama Desert). The final presentation by Professor Valentina Vadi of Lancaster University addressed Spatio-Temporal Dimensions of Indigenous Sovereignty in International Law. All members of the Co-ordinating Committee of the IGILTP are grateful to speakers for their engagement with this topic and for making this Agora successful.

First ECTPIL & TRICI-Law Conference

The first conference launching the ESIL-IGITLP European Conference Series on the Theory and Philosophy of International Law (ECTPIL) was held 24–25 May 2019 at the University of Groningen

The ESIL Interest Group on International Legal Theory and Philosophy and the ERC-funded TRICI-Law project co-organised a conference on ‘The Theory and Philosophy of Customary International Law (CIL) and its Interpretation’. The conference brought together over one hundred scholars to discuss a plethora of issues including the paradox of CIL, inductive and deductive methodology, the interpretability of CIL, relevance of hermeneutics, fiction, phenomenology and logic in interpretation, Schrödinger’s custom – dead and alive at the same time, and dimensions of temporality, among other relevant topics, with keynote delivered by H.E. Judge Pangalangan of the ICC.

Podcasts and videos of the presentations will be released in the upcoming months.

 

Call for Papers: Spatio-Temporal Dimensions of Sovereignty in International Law: A Critical Appraisal

The call is related to the Interest Group event to be organised on the occasion of the 15th ESIL Annual Conference in Athens, 12-14 September 2019.

The full call is available here.

The deadline for responses to ekaterina.yahyaoui@nuigalway.ie is Monday, 14 January 2019.

Call for Papers: The Theory and Philosophy of Customary International Law and its Interpretation

On 24–25 May 2019 the ESIL Interest Group on International Legal Theory and Philosophy, in co-operation with the TRICI-Law project at the University of Groningen, NL, will hold the first instalment of the European Conference Series on the Theory and Philosophy of International Law. The topic to be discussed is:

 

The Theory and Philosophy of Customary International Law and its Interpretation

 

The full call for papers for this conference can be viewed here. We are, as always, looking for a wide range of voices and takes on this topic from all corners of international legal scholarship and practice – both established and early career scholars, practitioners and ‘stakeholders’ – representing a wide range of views, including critical and main-stream, ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’.

 

The deadline for responses to trici-law@rug.nl is Thursday, 15 November 2018.

 

IGILTP Agora Panel at 2018 ESIL Conference

14th Annual Conference of the European Society of International Law

 

Agora Panel 11: Transcendent Principles and Pluralism in International Law: the Complex, the Simple, and the Universal

 

(Convened by the ESIL Interest Group on International Legal Theory and Philosophy)

We are delighted to inform members that the IGILTP will convene Agora Panel 11 on Transcendent Principles and Pluralism in International Law at the 14th Annual Conference of the European Society of International Law. This Agora will take place on Friday 14 September 2018 from 13:30 to 15:00.

 

The Agora will facilitate dialogue and exploration of counter-positions between theoretical and philosophical approaches on transcendent principles, on their impact on pluralism in international law, and on alternative formulations that recognise but challenge the sway of the universal. With an excellent line up of speakers below, we invite you to join us for what promises to be a stimulating panel.

 

Chair – Ozlem Ulgen

Ozlem is Reader in International Law and Ethics at Birmingham City University. She has written on cosmopolitan ethics in warfare, Kantian ethics and human dignity, and the law and ethics of autonomous weapons. She has a forthcoming publication with Routledge, The Law and Ethics of Autonomous Weapons: A Cosmopolitan Perspective.She is involved in drafting legal and ethical rules governing lethal autonomous weapons at the UN Group of Governmental Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems, and sits on the IEEE Committee for Classical Ethics in Autonomous and Intelligent Systems, and Committee for Reframing Autonomous Weapons Systems.

 

Speakers

 

• Carl Lewis(Tilburg University) – The Concept of the Universal – Negotiating Human RightsCarl’s paper engages with three philosophical approaches to the concept of the universal: François Jullien’s differentiation between the universal, the uniform, and the common; Ernesto Laclau’s alternative operability of the universal; and Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative. Insights gained from these approaches may assist a re-reading of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in order to address the question of the universality of human rights norms.

 

• Mark Retter(Lauterpacht Centre for International Law) – Human Rights After Virtue: Mediating Universal Rights and Moral PluralismMark’s paper considers Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of the common good and natural justice to develop an alternative understanding of human rights within the Thomist-Aristotelian tradition. This alternative understanding takes seriously the development of moral knowledge of universal human rights from within the particular conditions of diverse communities and traditions, and the responsiveness of that knowledge to those social conditions.

 

• Evan Criddle(William and Mary Law School) – Mandatory MultilateralismEvan’s paperchallenges the conventional wisdom that multilateral cooperation is solely a matter of state discretion. States have obligations to settle disputes through multilateral processes, and to accord equitable consideration to the interests of other states in certain types of disputes. He argues that these requirements of “mandatory multilateralism” emanate from a constitutional norm of international law: the principle of sovereign equality. Mandatory multilateralism has important application to some of the most pressing international disputes.

 

• Hirofumi Oguri(Kyushu University)– Pacta Sunt Servanda as the Intersubjective but Universal Principle: Oppenheim’s Common Consent within the Family of NationsHirofumi’s paper explores Lassa Oppenheim’s theory of common consent as the basis of international law and emphasises how it does not assume international law is universal or that common consent is a universalising concept. He argues that the common consent theory was devised to ensure the “intersubjectivity” of international law: neither objective (totally independent from state consent), nor subjective (subject to the arbitrary will of states). Instead, international law has its basis in mutually regulated consent; common consent.

 

We look forward to seeing you in Manchester.

 

Call for Papers

 

2018 ESIL Annual Conference, Manchester, 13-15 September 2018

Interest Group on International Legal Theory and Philosophy

 

Transcendent principles and pluralism in international law: the complex, the simple, and the universal

 

Deadline: 31 December 2017

Please see attachment for further details: ESIL IGILTP

Call for Expressions of Interest

 

 

First European Conference on the Theory
and Philosophy of International Law

The ESIL Interest Group on International Legal Theory and Philosophy (IGITLP) cordially invites European scholarly institutions to express their interest in hosting and co-organising, together with IGILTP, the First European Conference on the Theory and Philosophy of International Law.

At this stage, IGILTP is only looking for an expression of interest in organising the conference. All details of the proposed conference, including date, format, selection of speakers and topic are subject of discussions between IGILTP’s Co-ordinating Committee and those expressing an interest in hosting the event. We nonetheless wish to propose a potential topic as basis for negotiations:

Unseen Fission? The Drifting-Apart of Theories
and Philosophies of International Law

Has the proliferation of theoretical (including philosophical) approaches to international law, the increasing specialisation of (legal-)theoretical research, together with a radicalisation of their argumentative foundations, silently killed any hope for a common theoretical discourse about international law? Have legal theorists become too legalistic to hear and be heard by philosophers? Have theoretical discourses become too theoretical – and black-letter lawyers too practice-oriented – for each to be able to speak to the other? These questions (and more like it) are the unseen heart and unsung story of theoretical research into international law in Europe and beyond; the conference will explore it. The event is designed to foster maximum inclusivity, both regarding the approaches studied as well as regarding the method(ologie)s used to study these phenomena.

Please submit expressions of interest to IGILTP’s chair, Jörg Kammerhofer (joerg.kammerhofer@jura-uni.freiburg.de), until Wednesday, 31 January 2018. Informal queries can be directed to the same address.

The ESIL IGILTP Co-ordinating Committee

Noora Johanna Arajärvi, Gleider I Hernández, Jörg Kammerhofer, John Morss, Ozlem Ulgen, Ekaterina Yahyaoui

 

The Call document can be dowloaded here IGILTP FECTPIL Call for Expressions of Interest (Final) 2017-10-12

Call for Papers

IVR German Section Conference 2018

27–29 September 2018, Freiburg, Germany
Hans Kelsen’s Pure Theory of Law: Conceptions and Misconceptions

The German Section of the International Association for the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy, in collaboration with the Faculty of Law of the University of Freiburg, will hold its 2018 biennial conference in Freiburg. Up to 24 contributions to six panels will be selected by means of a call for papers.

Conference Theme
Hans Kelsen’s Pure Theory of Law provides a particular approach to law and normativity. It offers a grammar and a vocabulary that helps us identify some legal concepts and problems as essential and to dismiss others as alien to the main tasks of legal scholarship. Far more fundamentally, it also is and claims a theory of what legal scholarship is, can or should be. This approach to what it means to engage in scholarship is often implicit and seldom discussed in literature – this lack of sustained attention means that it is also one of the more problematic parts of the Pure Theory inviting critique and dissent.
The Pure Theory of Law has not lost its potential to spark interest and controversy in the more than one hundred years since Kelsen first expounded it. However, it also still generates, as it always has, a fair amount of perplexity but also of misinterpretation. The international scholarly community has long discussed and continues to discuss some writings and some notions, yet large tracts of his work and many strands of argument are relatively unknown. In addition, while Kelsen’s own writings are frequently read and discussed, this is not the case for other members of the Vienna School of Jurisprudence. The conference wants to broaden the debate on the Pure Theory between legal cultures by also including some of its lesser discussed aspects.
The conference thus attempts to bridge legal-cultural, linguistic and professional divides and will explore the relevance of the Pure Theory’s arguments today. It will go beyond the exegesis of Kelsen’s oeuvre and aims at open conversations about the merits and flaws of the Pure Theory of Law in confrontation and communication with fundamentally diverging views. Which of its conceptions are still helpful today, which of its misconceptions – or misconceptions about it – are to be avoided?

Topics
The organisers invite the submission of abstracts for six panels. Abstracts applying the Pure Theory’s ideas to particular areas of black-letter law, reflecting on the problems faced by doctrinal scholarship and practitioners, are particularly encouraged, for example:
–  Private law: legal personality, subjects of law; subjective rights and the autonomy of the sub-jects of private law (Privatautonomie); the distinctions and connections between material and procedural law
–    Criminal law: exceptions/defences; causality and attribution
– Public and international law: constitutional avoidance (verfassungskonforme Auslegung); multilevel constitutionalism; private and public law analogies in international law; general principles of law; cosmopolitan constitutionalism: international political theory and international legal theory.
The organisers also encourage submissions of other papers staying broadly within the conference theme. Potential topics for discussion include:
–  Philosophical foundations of the Pure Theory of Law: making the philosophical modus op-erandi plausible for jurists and legal theory inviting for philosophers; confronting the Pure Theory of Law’s implicit theory of legal scholarship (Rechtswissenschaftstheorie) with today’s philosophy of science; anti-essentialism and the Pure Theory’s criticism of legal dualisms
–  The normative access to the world: about the possibility of norms; the Pure Theory of Law’s concept of normativity confronted with alternative candidates; norms as reasons for action?; law and practical reason; the concept of ‘positive law’
– The structure and dynamic operation of the legal order (Stufenbau): theoretical bases and other conceptions of legal ordering; empowerment norms; the unity of the legal system; So-cial Systems Theory as new Pure Theory of Law?; factuality in norm-creation; gaps in the law; conflict of norms; derogation; logic in law; the problem of erroneous decisions; Fehlerkalkül; tacit alternative clause; defeasibility; Rechtskraft
– The Pure Theory of Law’s theory of interpretation and modern approaches: corpus linguistics; linguistic philosophy; hermeneutics
– Judge-made law: conceptualising law creation by legal officials; precedential authority
– The sound of silence? Topics which the Pure Theory does not (or cannot) address
– Kelsen’s Schüler and the next generations of Kelsen scholars

Invited Speakers
– John Gardner (Oxford): Keynote Address
– Robert Alexy (Kiel), Stanley L Paulson (St Louis, MO/Kiel): The Philosophical Foundations of the Pure Theory of Law
– Christoph Kletzer (London), Lena Foljanty (Frankfurt): The Structure of the Legal Order
– Alexander Somek (Vienna), DA Jeremy Telman (Toledo, IN): Entanglements and Trans-Culturality (‘Lost in Translation’)

Selection Procedure
Those interested in participating should submit an abstract, in English or German, of 800 words maximum, summarising the ideas they propose to develop for presentation. Successful appli-cants will be expected to deliver a talk of no more than fifteen minutes. Each of the six panels will include a general discussion of the papers of approximately 45 minutes. Papers that have been accepted for publication elsewhere are in principle eligible for consideration, provided that they will not appear in print before the conference. The organisers have secured funding to cov-er a significant part of the travel and accommodation costs for all speakers. However, partici-pants will have to bear a small portion of costs themselves.
Abstract submissions should be sent to ivrtagung2018@jura.uni-freiburg.de by 20 October 2017, together with the applicant’s contact details, a short curriculum vitae and an indication whether they intend to present the paper in English or German. Questions regarding this call for papers may be directed to the same address.