(Source: Melbourne Law School)
The Melbourne
Doctoral Forum on Legal Theory has a call for papers for its 11th
forum. The theme of the conference is “Facts, Law and Critique” and some of the
possible ways to address the topic also refer to legal-historical analysis. Here the call:
The 11th
Melbourne Doctoral Forum on Legal Theory will take place on 4 and 5 December
2018. The Forum brings together graduate researchers and early career scholars
from a range of disciplines and backgrounds to think methodologically,
theoretically and critically about law and legal theory. The theme for this
year’s Forum is ‘Facts, Law and Critique’.
Facts sustain
law and legal institutions. Contesting, debating, and then, ‘finding’ or
establishing facts is seen as essential to the process of law-making that
follows. But, far from acting on or applying to a set of pre-existing facts,
law produces, writes and determines its own facts, knowledges and truths. And
the politics, procedures and histories of legal facts, unlike the law itself,
are often taken as given, establishing a dichotomy between contesting the legal
and accepting what remains outside of, or prior to, law. The recent unsettling
of our contemporary faith in facts, objectivity, and transparency as a form of
public knowledge and a precondition for politics provides us with an
opportunity to revisit the relationship between law and facts.
In this Forum,
we invite papers critically examining the relationship between facts and law as
it relates to your own research. How can understanding the way in which facts —
as well as institutions, procedures and methods for finding facts — have been
established and contested over time and throughout history shed new light on
the present moment? How does law develop and reach out for technologies which
establish facts through particular means? How does selecting and assembling
facts in particular ways use law to establish and embed particular narratives?
What is the place of critique in a time in which facts are ‘alternative’, or in
struggles over who is authorised to produce truth? How does examining processes
of fact-finding highlight the politics of legal facts and the exercise of power
they represent? What is seen, and what lives become unseen, as law and law’s
facts come to constitute a way of experiencing the world?
Possible ways of
addressing the topic might include, but are not limited to:
Facts and
institutions, including legal procedures of establishing facts such as
international fact-finding missions, commissions of inquiry and truth
commissions
Facts and
representation, including the role of media, art and the image in law and legal
analysis
Facts and
empirics, such as work critiquing the role of data, technology, and the turn to
economic and quantitative analysis in law
Facts and
courts, agreed and disputed facts, evidential processes and the judgment as
public record
Facts and
governance, including the place of, and challenges to, objectivity, publicity,
and transparency in contemporary forms of legal governance and law
Facts and
epistemologies, including indigenous forms of knowledge, fact and law, as well
as epistemologies of the South
Custom as law
and the translation of fact and practice into law
Facts and
imperialism, and the role of history in critiquing or recreating imperialist
narratives and knowledges
Queer theory,
ontology and the selectivity of law’s facts
Feminist
critiques of the divide between law and fact
The craft of the
lawyer: lawyers’ agency in and responsibility for the making of law and fact.
Please submit
abstracts of up to 500 words and biographies of up to 200 words to Melbourne
Doctoral Forum on Legal Theory by 5 September 2018. Applicants will receive a
response by late September.
We particularly
invite applications from those interested in exploring methodological questions
within the collegial and supportive environment of the Forum. Depending on
interest, we may organise sessions specifically focusing on questions of
method. If you are interested in participating in one of these sessions, please
indicate this and address these questions in your abstract.
A limited number
of travel bursaries are available for interstate and international presenting
participants who are unable to claim sufficient funding from their home
institution. Please indicate in your application whether you wish to be
considered for a bursary.
More information here
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