About Jindal Global Law Reviw :
Founded in 2009, Jindal Global Law Review is the faculty-edited flagship journal of the Jindal Global Law School. JGLR is published twice a year, with each issue curated as a themed dossier on a specific area of both historical and contemporary significance to law. We publish peer-reviewed interdisciplinary and critical legal scholarship — with a focus on the Global South — by academics in law and cognate disciplines that take the conventional and the creative seriously. JGLR is especially interested in publishing works that expand and reimagine the boundaries of the
legal discipline through innovations in method and form. We understand ‘law’ expansively as an assemblage of ideas, theories, methods, concepts, norms, traditions, politics, moralities, aesthetics, doctrines, policies, pluralities, and life practices. JGLR is indexed in the SCOPUS database.
About the Special Issue
The phenomenon of expert witnesses advising the courts or the litigants, often in contentious, highprofile disputes has been studied by doctrinal legal scholarship. Expert witnessing in the fields of interpretive social sciences and humanities, however, has mainly been examined by anthropologists, which largely remains the case even today.
This special issue aims at advancing cross-cultural, cross-jurisdictional and cross-disciplinary perspectives on cultural expertise in South Asia and Europe, thus contributing to the disentangling of the relationship between science and law, the understanding of the diversity of existing practices of cultural expertise and the avenues for the development and reform of the legal doctrine and implementation of formal rules. By bringing in contributions from different legal traditions as well as modes of interaction between judges, attorneys and expert witnesses, the project will shed light
on the potential avenues for mutual inspiration as well as the cross-sectoral differences depending on the types of questions the cases with the involvement of expert witnesses in the social sciences and humanities are responding to. At a theoretical level, the special issue addresses problems such as conceptualizing expertise, the legitimacy of experts as partners to judicial decision making or the (im)possibility of identifying ‘objective’ truths via interpretive social science.
The special issue is organized as part of a collaborative project on ‘Cultural Expertise and Litigation in South Asia and Europe‘ funded by the Independent Social Research Foundation. This project builds on contemporary research on cultural expertise, a prime hub of which is the EURO EXPERT project led by Professor Livia Holden. Contributions dealing with single countries in South Asia or Europe as well as comparative intra-regional and cross-regional contributions are
invited, covering primarily (but not exclusively) areas of criminal law, family law, Indigenous rights, historical memory, and migration or asylum.
Theme : Cultural Expertise and Litigation: Practices in South Asia and Europe
Questions to be tackled include (but are not limited to):
• How are different understandings of ‘expertise’ in the social sciences and humanities ingrained into positive law in different jurisdictions, and how are they interpreted by courts and judges? Are some of these understandings excluding or downgrading particular types of expertise or knowledge that could benefit more informed and justified outcomes of
judicial decision making?
• How do local traditions and discourses on expertise in matters of culture and society influence the legal doctrine and practices? In the South Asian context in particular, how has colonialism historically shaped the material and conceptual structures for the production of cultural expertise?
• Is cultural expertise gendered? If so, in what ways does gender intersect with the identities of expert witnesses, their performance and the actors surrounding the use of cultural expertise?
• What factors determine the inclusion of cultural expertise in contentious court cases where social scientific knowledge may have an impact on judicial decision making? In empirical terms, does the involvement of expert witnesses on matters of culture tend to have a conservative effect, or does it contain radically transformative possibilities?
• Are there any indicators of similarities or differences between (selected) jurisdictions in South Asia and Europe in their use of cultural expertise? What (historical, doctrinal or contextual) factors might shed light on these similarities/differences? In particular, how do caste and race condition the production and deployment of cultural expertise?
• How do the perspectives of different participants (attorneys, judges, expert witnesses) on cultural expertise relate to/contrast with each other? Are there particular issues where some appear more open to inclusion of cultural expertise than others?
• How do cultural experts themselves perceive their involvement in court cases? What deficits do they identify in institutional support and the legal regulation in their respective jurisdiction? Is their perspective on the regulation of cultural expertise taken into consideration by lawmakers and adjudicators?
The special issue welcomes the innovative formats the JGLR offers (such as critical case notes, book reviews, review essays, long-form interviews, photo-essays, and field reports) alongside traditional journal articles. The contributions will advance the research agenda on cultural expertise and studies on the understanding and possibly conflicting conceptions of expertise that are discernible in legal discourses.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere.
Timelines:
• Deadline for abstract submissions: on a rolling basis by 1 November 2022
• Peer review and selection of contributions: on a rolling basis by 15 November 2022
• Complete manuscripts for submission due: 15 March 2023
• Planned online publication: December 2023
Submission Guidelines
Abstracts of no more than 500 words can be submitted at the earliest convenience via
this online form [Click here]. Abstracts will be evaluated on a rolling basis.
Moreover, the first three abstracts received and accepted may still be considered for presentation at the international workshop to be held within the scope of the project in hybrid format on 2 – 3 December 2022, with the in-person component hosted at the O.P. Jindal Global
Official Brochure :
