Institute for Advanced Legal Studies, London 26-27 June 2024
We invite abstracts (of 300-500 words) for the 2024 Hart Conference on ‘Historicising Jurisprudence: Person, Community, Form’. Abstracts should be emailed to [email protected] by Monday 4 December 2023. Further details on the theme are included below. Please note that bursaries are available for PhD and Early Career Scholars as well as scholars from the Global South. There will also be a prize for the best paper from a PhD / Early Career Scholar.
PhD and Early Career Paper Prize
A prize will be offered to the best paper submitted by a PhD or Early Career Scholar. To be eligible for the prize, please first submit your abstract in the usual way. When you submit the abstract, please indicate clearly that you are a PhD or Early Career Scholar (within 5 years of your PhD). Once your abstract has been accepted, a further date will be set for the submission of a paper (approx. 6,000-8,000 words, all inclusive). Please note that the requirement to submit a written draft of the paper is only a requirement for those entering the prize (not for presenting at the conference).
The prize will be judged by the Academic Directors.
General Summary of the Theme
Jurisprudence, or the philosophy of law, often appears as an abstract and impersonal domain of intellectual practice, and one divorced from the politics and culture of its time. Jurisprudential questions are often treated as timeless, with each jurisprudential text approached as articulating its own autonomous vision of a universal theory of law. The substance of jurisprudential ideas is also typically seen to be independent of the means via which these ideas are expressed, and thus separate from the history of aesthetics and the humanities, including literature and the arts. While recognizing the universal and impersonal aspirations of jurisprudence, this conference seeks to explore its historicization in particular times and places. The conference thus invites participants to take an alternative view of jurisprudence: as a human, all too human, practice, which is deeply personal while also being deeply social, and one that is shot through with historically-situated politics and culture. By digging deeply into its situated ethics, politics, and aesthetics, this conference will explore different ways of historicising jurisprudence. The conference will foreground and pursue the following kinds of questions:
● How is the production of jurisprudential thought related to the personal, felt, experience of individuals who produce it, as well as to the role those individuals play in the power struggles of their time and place?
● In what ways is jurisprudential thought a communal enterprise, and thus the result of many hands working together in irreducibly social contexts?
● What are the forms and genres of jurisprudence, and how are those forms and genres related to the very substance of jurisprudential views?
Further Sub-Themes
The following are examples of possible sub-themes under our three main themes:
⮚ Person:
● The passions / emotions of philosophy
● The performance and self-fashioning of a jurisprudential persona
● The available personas – or ways of being a jurisprude – in particular cultures
● Race, class, gender and the history of jurisprudence
● Jurisprudence and character / temperament / sensibility
● Jurisprudence and the history of tone / style
● The philosophical life / the political life
● Dispositions to particular harms or values as an integral part of jurisprudence
● Jurisprudence and psychoanalysis / jurisprudence and the self
● Queer histories of jurisprudence
● The body of the jurisprude
● The jurisprude as public intellectual / counsellor / critic / servant of power
● Jurisprudence and the history of masculinities
⮚ Community:
● Social histories of jurisprudence
● Political geography and jurisprudence
● Interactional and communal production of jurisprudence
● Jurisprudence and friendship
● Jurisprudence and the family / marriage
● Jurisprudence from below / folk jurisprudence / indigenous jurisprudence4
● Pedagogies of jurisprudence (the classroom as a jurisprudential laboratory)
● Spaces and places where jurisprudence is produced and consumed
● Schools / movements of jurisprudence
● Elitism and jurisprudence
⮚ Form:
● Genres, styles, media of jurisprudential expression
● The drama of jurisprudence / jurisprudence in dramatic works
● The relationship of content and form in jurisprudential writing
● Visual jurisprudence
● Epistolary jurisprudence
● Jurisprudence in dialogue form
● Jurisprudence in songs or alleged low- or minor-forms
● Jurisprudence as literature / as poetry
● The forms of indigenous jurisprudence
● Jurisprudence and the history of rhetoric
● Forms of classical / late antique / medieval / early modern / modern jurisprudence
