[Reader-list] Enculturing Law

[Lawrence Liang]

HI All


Passing on the details of A conference that may be of interest to many.


http://www.cscsban.org/html/EnculLaw.htm

Lawrence
   


     

    Enculturing Law: New Agendas for Legal Pedagogy

    Conference Organised in collaboration with

    Alternative Law Forum
    and
    National Law School of India University, Bangalore

    NLSIU Campus

    11-13 August 2005

    (Supported by IDPAD, New Delhi)

    Programme Schedule

    DAY 1
    9:00 AM-9:30 AM: Inaugural

    9:30 AM-11:00 AM. Keynote Session: Contemporary Challenges for
Scholarship in Law Society and Culture
    Upendra Baxi (University of Warwick) - 'The Dominant, Residual, and the
Emergent Cultures of Law: Some Voices From the Past'
    B.S.Chimni (National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkota) - 'The
Future of the New Law Schools: Some Critical Reflections'
    Eleanor Wong (National University of Singapore) - 'Pedagogical
challenges for en-culturing the law classroom: Reflections on the legal
writing program at NUS'

    11:00 AM-11:30 AM. - Tea Break

    11:30 AM - 12:30 PM- Discussion after comments from session respondent:
Prof. Babu Matthew (Currently Country Director, Action Aid India, New Delhi)

    12:30-1:30 p.m - Lunch Break

    1.30 PM - 2.30 PM Session 2: Critical and Interdisciplinary Traditions
in Anglo-American Legal Scholarship
    Roger Cotterrell (Queen Mary and Westfield College, London) - 'Culture,
Comparison, Community - Social Studies of Law Today'
    W T Murphy (London School of Economics) - 'Cultures of Criticism:
Reflections on contemporary legal education'

    2:30 PM-3:15 PM - Discussion after comments from session respondent:
Sudhir Krishnaswamy (NLS, Bangalore)

    3:15 PM- 3:30 PM - Tea Break

    3.30 PM - 4.30 PM Session 3: Challenges for the Comparative Study of
Legal Cultures
    Partick Glen (McGill University, Montreal) - 'Legal Systems, Legal
Traditions and Legal Education'
    Volkmar Gessner (International Institute for the Sociology of Law,
Onati) - 'Legalization and the Varieties of Capitalism'

    4:30 PM - 5:30 PM - Discussion after comments from session respondent:
Arun Thiruvendagam (Doctoral Candidate, New York University), and special
respondent on the day's proceedings: Prof. Peter Van Der Veer (Co-Chair,
IDPAD, The Netherlands).

    DAY 2
    10 AM - 11.30 AM: Session 1: Reworking Legal Methods I: The Women's
Question in Post-Colonial Societies: Challenges for a Comparative and
Cultural Study of Law
    Hyunah Yang, Seoul National University, Seoul - 'Reading the Recent
Changes in Korean Family Law: Toward a Postcolonial Legal Feminism in Asia'
    Jothi Sauntharajah (National University of Singapore) - 'Toying with
Tradition: Law, CEDAW and Singapore'
    Flavia Agnes (Advocate, High Court of Mumbai) - 'Re-visiting the
Personal Law Conundrum: Reflections on the Resolution of the Womens Question
in Hindu Personal Law'

    11:30 AM -11:45 AM - Tea Break

    11:45 a.m - 12:45 p.m - Discussion after comments from session
respondent: Dr. Rajeshwari Sundar Rajan (University of Oxford, UK)

    12:45-1:30 p.m Lunch Break

    1.30 PM - 2.00 PM Session 2: Reworking Legal Methods II: Social and
Political Histories in the Study of Law
    Tanika Sarkar, Delhi University, Delhi - 'Between Laws and Faith: Hindu
Personal Laws in the 19th Century Public Sphere'
    2:00-2:45 p.m - Discussion after comments from session respondent:
Janaki Nair (Centre for the Study of Social Sciences, Kolkata)

    2:45 PM -3:00 PM - Tea Break

    3.00 PM - 4.30 PM Session 3: Reworking Legal Methods III: Re-Focussing
Rights: Reflections on the Place of 'Rights' in a Legal Classroom
    Jayadeva Uyandgoda (University of Colombo) - Righting the Wrongs in the
Margins: Issues in Constitution Making in a Society in the Transition from
War to Peace: Sri Lanka
    Jonathan Klaaren (University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg) - 'The
Globalisation of Governance: New challenge for conceiving regimes of rights"
Oliver Mendelsohn (La Trobe University, Victoria) - 'What is Distinctive
About Indian Law and How Can that Distinctiveness be Represented in the
Classroom?'
    4:30 pm -5:30 pm - Discussion after comments from session respondent:
Dr. Sitaramam Kakarala, CSCS, Bangalore

    DAY 3
    9.30 AM- 11.00 AM Session 1: New challenges for the cultural scholarship
of law I: Law and the Study of Cinema (Organised by ALF)
    Anne Barron (London School of Economics) - 'The (Legal) Properties of
Film: Copyright Law and Cultural Analysis'
    Ashish Rajadyaksha (CSCS) - 'On the Properties of Cinema: Why Law is
Important for Cultural Analysis'

    11.15 AM - 1.00 PM Session 2: New Challenges for the Cultural
Scholarship of Law II: Law and the Study of Media Practices and Knowledge
Production (Organised by ALF)
    Shuddhabrata Sengupta (The Sarai Programme, Centre for the Study of
Developing Societies, Delhi) - 'Cyber-culture, New Media and the
Proliferation of Knowledge Production: Challenges for the Regulation of
Knowledge Practices.
    Lawrence Liang and Namita Malhotra (ALF, Bangalore) - 'Media Practice as
Legal Practice: Exploring the World of the Cinematograph Act, 1952'

    1:00-2:00 p.m Lunch Break

    2.00 PM - 3.00 PM Session 3: Rounding Up
    Exploratory discussions for future collaborations for research in Law
Society and Culture, etc.

    For Further Details:

    Contact person: Mathew John, Fellow,
    The Law & Culture Programme
    Centre for the Study of Culture & Society
    (mathew at cscsban.org)

    Note on the Conference:

    This note seeks to address some of the critical problems facing
contemporary legal education, especially legal education in large parts of
the global south. While the problems are likely to be numerous and varying
from context to context we try to identify some range of the possibly common
problems that assume salience for a study of law in its social and cultural
context. Not having full access to the range of challenges facing other
social and legal contexts we start with the problems that animate our own
efforts to initiate this conversation on legal education.

    The program for Law, Society and Culture at the Centre for the Study of
Culture & Society (CSCS), Bangalore was set up in 2003 in order to address
what we believe is a crisis in law teaching, research and scholarship in
India. We see the problem at three levels:

    First: it is far from controversial today to assert that contemporary
India has rather modestly developed traditions of legal scholarship. The
legal community as well as other allied humanities disciplines have by and
large failed in building a research project in law with distinctly Indian
problems and possibilities. Model centres of legal teaching and research
like the Indian Law Institute and the National Law School have also largely
failed to definitively determine the paths of Indian legal scholarship. Thus
even at its very best (though of course with a few notable exceptions)
Indian legal scholarship has not managed to travel far beyond the production
commentaries that chart the movement of doctrinal legal trends across
various fields.

    Second: Modest research traditions have meant that the legal classroom
has not been able to grapple with social problems outside the vicelike grip
of doctrinal legal analysis. Though experiments like the National Law School
in Bangalore have met with some success in moving beyond strict doctrinal
approaches, the legal lens continues to blur when it falls upon approaches
outside of its disciplinary frame. Teaching and learning law has therefore
continued to remain a self-referential enterprise in the interpretation of
rules. As a result, legal education in India has not been successful in
going beyond meeting minimal requirement of producing 'legal technicians'
for a range of legal markets.

    Collectively these two aspects of the problem give rise to a third
problem. That is, the inability of legal education in India to respond
holistically and meaningfully to contemporary challenges. This problem is
made especially acute today with the collapse of the developmentalist/wefare
state. Without the institutional and conceptual backing of the
developmentalist state the contemporary Indian university in general and
legal education in particular is unsure of the concerns that it ought to be
contending with and consequently the content that academic programs must now
assume.

    Though this discussion has been framed by the Indian example we suspect
that it would roughly hold true for many other countries of the global
south. The problem of the ideological crisis of the welfare/developmentalist
state is however a far more general problem that throws open the question of
the social mandate of legal education in all contexts across the world as
well. There is therefore no denying the usefulness of comparative
discussions through these problems. It is in this context that we propose a
seminar to dialogue some range of the issues that we identified above from
an international and comparative perspective.

    Exploring the promise of interdisciplinary study

    One way in which the CSCS Law and Culture Programme has sought to
respond to the problems outlined above has been by advocating a strongly
interdisciplinary approach to the study of law. Drawing heavily from social,
cultural, economic, historical and anthropological approaches to law, the
program has been committed to exploring an approach to contemporary social
issues that would be distinct from the prevalent model emphasising doctrinal
analysis. While the turn towards interdisciplinary study holds promise for a
holistic response to social problems the usefulness of this approach is not
necessarily self-evident and thereby raises a further range of questions.
Some of them include - What shifts in the contemporary political economy and
mindscapes have made for the generation of contemporary interdisciplinary
study in law, society and culture? What merits does this mode of studying
social phenomena possess? Does this mode of addressing problems make
significant advances in the manner in which these problems have
conventionally been addressed? If so, how? Is the cultural turn an alibi for
the impossibilities and impasses in the study of human societies? If so how
might we move beyond these stumbling blocks?

    Though one might not necessarily be convinced about the usefulness of
the interdisciplinary approach one cannot help but notice its usefulness in
identifying and studying distinct sets of pointed socio-legal conversations
of considerable contemporary significance. Some examples of these exchanges
relevant to India would include the debates on caste, the contests over
rights to the urban metropolis, the challenge of religious and ethnic
violence, issues of rights, the questions raised by women's movement in
India and so on. Underpinning many of these debates are the concerns that
frame legal systems in most parts of the global south through the tensions
of Modernity and Tradition, Coloniality and Post-Coloniality as well as
Orientalism and Post Orientalism. We believe that many of these
conversations tease out interesting aspects of legal problems in
contemporary India especially the difficulties involved in understanding the
working of law in post-colonial contexts. It is against this background that
we propose a three-day seminar to discuss the manner in which these issues
are configured as challenges for legal education. Further we also believe
that all or many of these concerns resonate with experiences in contexts
beyond India. Therefore we expect the seminar to think through some of the
issues outlined above from a range of international perspectives, a task
made especially urgent by the challenges of globalisation and the global
crisis in determining the social mandate of law, legal systems and legal
education.

    Organisational Details and Particulars

    As organizers we believe that an ambitious academic exercise such as the
one outlined above one cannot but be a truly cross-cultural and
cross-disciplinary exercise in order to make it both meaningful as well as
enriching. Accordingly we are hopeful that a wide range of scholars from
across the world will contribute to the dialogue at the seminar.

    The seminar is structured as a set of three panels per day on each of
the three days, with two to three speakers per panel and each panel
moderated by a joint respondent. The audience beyond the participants will
primarily be law students and other interested social science students from
Bangalore and probably a few other parts of the country.

    Intellectually seminar breaks down as follows: The first day is
concerned with socio-legal debates emanating from legal academy and the
concerns that it will explore are: -

    1. The institutional and epistemic challenges facing legal academy in
the global south (through the case of India).
    2. The burdens of the critical traditions in legal study ( i.e. Marxist
tradition, feminist traditions, the Critical Legal Studies movement etc.)
and their impact or usefulness in the study of contemporary social problems.
    3. The challenge of comparative legal study given that liberal legal
models are the templates that determine the contours of legal systems
(jurisdictions) in most parts of the world.

    The second day deals with the way in which social scientist have found
themselves confronted with legal problems, the manner in which they have
addressed these problems and the place that such efforts must or could have
on legal curricula. We hope to explore the following themes.

    1. Law and the resolution of the women's question in post-colonial
societies
    2. The place of social and political histories in the study of law
    3. The Margin of Rights: Post colonial critiques of rights discourses

    The third day will be put together by a collaborating organisation,
Alternative Law Forum and will primarily address new forms of knowledge
production outside the conventional university space and which have
implications for the study of law.

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