IVR 2017: Special Workshop OBJECTIVITY AND LAW [Call for Papers]

Special Workshop OBJECTIVITY AND LAW

Organizers

Jorge Luis Fabra Zamora | Jorge Emilío Núñez | Gonzalo Villa Rosas

XXVIII World Congress of the International Association for the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy (IVR)

Istanbul, Turkey| 16 – 21 July 2017

IVR 2017 Main Link

Presentation

What is the relation between rule of law and legal reasoning? Which are the necessary conditions required by the rule of law for an adequate legal reasoning? Are judicial decisions fallible? Are there right answers to legal questions? Can legal reasoning be objective when it must answer moral questions? Are there legal facts? What kind of facts are legal facts? Do legal facts suppose moral facts? Are legal facts independent from moral facts? Are there moral facts? What kind of facts are moral facts? Can moral and legal facts be identical to, reducible to, or constituted by natural facts? What are the epistemic conditions which are required for obtaining suitable legal decisions and right moral answers? These and related questions will be addressed by our speakers from metaethical and legal philosophical perspectives. A compilation book of the papers presented at the Worshop will be published in a Journal.
Notes: Open to additional interested participants. The abstracts and brief academic biography should be submitted by no later than Friday 28th October 2016.
Language: The abstracts must be written in English or Spanish, and it should be under 400 words. The sessions will be held in English.
Contact: objectivityandlaw.ws2017@gmail.com

Organizers
Jorge Luis Fabra Zamora (Co-Chair)
Jorge Luis Fabra Zamora, Ph.D Candidate, Philosophy, McMaster University and External Research, FUCTO School of Law. My research legal philosophy, international law and philosophy of private law.
Jorge Emilío Núñez (Co-Chair)
Jorge Emilio Núñez, PhD in Law (Manchester-UK). Senior Lecturer in Law (Manchester-UK). Profesor de Derecho (UNLP-Argentina). Areas of research: jurisprudence, legal theory, political theory, international relations. Various international publications and events worldwide as key speaker.
Gonzalo Villa Rosas (Co-Chair)
Gonzalo Villa Rosas, Ph.D. Candidate in Law and Philosophy, Christian-Albrechts Universität (Germany); LL.M. Summa Cum Laude, Christian-Albrechts Universität (Germany); Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.) with distinction from the Universidad Externado de Colombia (Colombia); M.e.Ph. Universidad Nacional de Colombia (Colombia). Areas of research: legal theory, argumentation theory, and meta-ethics. 

IVR 2017: Special Workshop "THE CONCEPT OF LAW" [Call for Papers]

Special Workshop THE CONCEPT OF LAW: ELEMENTS AND NATURE

[Call for Papers]

Organizers

Jorge Luis Fabra Zamora | Jorge Emilío Núñez | Gonzalo Villa Rosas

XXVIII World Congress of the International Association for the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy (IVR)

Istanbul, Turkey| 16 – 21 July 2017

IVR 2017 Link

Presentation

Law has been defined in many forms and characterised by using essential, non-essential, necessary, sufficient, and even desirable conditions. Following Stammler’s classification of the four themes in law, that is ontology, axiology, formal logic and transcendental logic, the workshop aims to explore the law, its ontology and its nature. What are the essential conditions defining law? Do “essential” and “necessary” refer to the same conditions? Following recent works by Yankah and Schauer there seems to be renewed interest in elements that post-Hartian Anglo-American legal philosophy had long ago discarded: are the Hartian criticisms to Kelsenian and post-Kelsenian hard positivism still valid? Is coercion an essential element of law? Is legitimacy an essential element of law? Which are the relations between coercion and legitimacy of law? Which are the conditions for legitimacy of law? Is objectivity a condition for law and its legitimacy? These and related questions will be addressed by our speakers. A compilation book of the papers presented at the Worshop will be published in a Journal.

Notes: Open to additional interested participants. The abstracts and brief academic biography should be submitted by no later than Friday 28th October 2016.
Language: The abstracts must be written in English or Spanish, and it should be under 400 words. The sessions will be held in English.
Contact: conceptoflaw.ws2017@gmail.com

Organizers
Jorge Luis Fabra Zamora (Co-Chair)
Jorge Luis Fabra Zamora, Ph.D Candidate, Philosophy, McMaster University and External Research, FUCTO School of Law. Areas of research: legal philosophy, international law and philosophy of private law.
Jorge Emilío Núñez (Co-Chair)
Jorge Emilio Núñez, PhD in Law (Manchester-UK). Senior Lecturer in Law (Manchester-UK). Profesor de Derecho (UNLP-Argentina). Areas of research: jurisprudence, legal theory, political theory, international relations. Various international publications and events worldwide as key speaker.
Gonzalo Villa Rosas (Co-Chair)
Gonzalo Villa Rosas, Ph.D. Candidate in Law and Philosophy, Christian-Albrechts Universität (Germany); LL.M. Summa Cum Laude, Christian-Albrechts Universität (Germany); Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.) with distinction from the Universidad Externado de Colombia (Colombia); M.e.Ph. Universidad Nacional de Colombia (Colombia). Areas of research: legal theory, argumentation theory, and meta-ethics. 

Juris North [Jurisprudence Discussion Group] Call for Presenters 2016-17 [Term One]

Call for Presenters 2016-17 [Term One]

If your current research is on a topic that can be broadly characterised as jurisprudence—i.e. legal and political philosophy, and you would be interested in presenting it to a friendly group, which includes academics as well as lawyers, students, and public in gerenal, you are welcome to be a presenter at the Juris North Discussion Group.

The discussions are normally held on Wednesday afternoons. But we can be flexible about the particular days that we meet. Discussions are always informal and very lively since we follow a Rawlsian approach. That means we do not have “Professors” and “Students” but people interested in discussing issues related to legal and political philosophy. So any question is an important question for debate.

If you would like to give a paper as part of our 2016-17 [Term One: September-December] Working Paper Series then please send an abstract, no more than 500 words long and written in English. If you are interested, please contact Dr Jorge Emilio Nunez j.nunez@mmu.ac.uk.

The seminars will have a “pre-read” format: successful applicants will be asked to send a draft paper two weeks in advance of the seminar so that it can be circulated amongst members of the group.

Accommodation and expenses: we will not be able to make any contribution towards accommodation and travel expenses.

Enquiries please contact Dr Jorge Núñez: j.nunez@mmu.ac.uk

First UK-Russian Symposium on Jurisprudence and Sovereignty [Manchester, UK 16th & 17th March 2016]

Eventbrite free ticket booking

First UK-Russian Symposium on Jurisprudence and Sovereignty

Manchester, UK 16^th & 17^th March 2016

Programme

Wednesday 16^th March 2016, 12:00pm-7:00pm

VENUE: MMU, BS3.02, BS3.17, BS3.18 (“BS” stands for Business School, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK).

12:00-12:30pm REGISTRATION (BS3.02)

12:30pm-1:00pm (BS3.17)

Welcome by Dr Mikhail Antonov  (St. Petersburg) and Dr Jorge Núñez (Manchester)

1:00pm-3:30pm (BS3.17)

• HoD Dr Eugenio Potseluev (Ivanovo): “Discussing sovereignty in Russian legal science at the turn of the XXth century”
• Asst. Prof. Antonia Waltermann (Maastricht): “Popular Sovereignty without Democracy”
• Dr. Lisa Rodgers (Leicester): “Sovereignty and rights in the labour context”

3:30pm-4:00pm Coffee Break (BS3.02)

4:00pm-6:00pm (BS3.17)

• Asst. Prof. Dr. Svetlana Chekhovskaya (Moscow): “Soft Law and Sovereign State System”
• Alexander Green (London): “International Law and the Value of Statehood”
• SL Dr. Jorge Núñez (Manchester): “Sovereignty Conflicts and Distributive Justice Principles: the Egalitarian Shared Sovereignty”

6:00pm-7:00pm (BS3.17)

Conclusive remarks and Open floor discussion.

7:30pm Dinner (BS3.18)

Thursday 17^th March 2016, 09:00am-7:00pm

VENUE: UoM, UPB3.204, UPB2.217, UPB1.219 (“UPB” stands for University Place Building, The University of Manchester, Manchester, UK).

09:00am-11:00am (UPB3.204)

• Prof. Bill Bowring (London): “Russia’s Annexation of Crimea: Sovereignty, Legal Justifications, the Constitutional Court, and Pandora’s Box”

11:00am-12:00pm Coffee Break (tbc)

12:00pm-2:00pm (UPB3.204)

• Asst. Prof. Dr Mikhail Antonov (St. Petersburg): “Questioning sovereignty: balancing of human rights by the RF Constitutional Court”
• Dr. Maria Smirnova (Manchester): “Russian Constitutional Court and ECtHR: The ‘Right to Object’ as a Tool for Constructive Dialogue, not a Revolution”
• Dr Christopher Walshaw (Berlin): “The Sovereignty Merry-go-Round”

2:00pm-3:00pm Lunch (UPB2.217)

3:00pm-6:00pm (UPB1.219)

• SL Dr. Evgenii Tonkov (St. Petersburg): “Rethinking legitimacy and sovereignty”
• SL Dr. Jackson Maogoto (Manchester): “Statal Discipline and Indiscipline: Sovereignty as Fealty of the Independent State to International Humanitarian Normativity”
• Prof. Dr Marianna G. Muravyeva (St. Petersburg): “Conservative Jurisprudence and Selective Sovereignty: How Do Judges Interpret the Hierarchy of Laws?”

6:00pm (UPB1.219)

Conclusive remarks by Dr Mikhail Antonov (St. Petersburg) and Dr Jorge Núñez (Manchester)

Value Judgments and different levels of analysis: Meta-ethics

We have previously seen what value judgments are and introduced different levels fir their analysis. For an introduction see:

Value Judgments and different levels of analysis

The first level we will refer to is meta-ethics and whether there are rational procedures to justify the validity of the value judgments, that is, if there is any way to demonstrate that a justice or moral goodness is true or valid so that demonstration is, in principle, accessible to any person who was in the right conditions.

In this theoretical level the kind of meaning that characterises ethical terms such as "right" "wrong", and others and their opposites and the significance of value judgments depends on what kind of judgment they are and what expressions are typically used to formulate them.

There are several theories that have been proposed about the meaning of ethical terms (such as "good," "fair", etc.) and the meaning of statements in the form of value judgments

(e.g. "it is unfair to punish someone because…").

For the sake of simplicity, these theories may be broadly classified as follows:

a)            Descriptivist theories, subdivided into

1. Ethical naturalism, subdivided into

A.                Subjectivists.

B.                Objectivists.

2. Ethical non-naturalism, subdivided into

A.                Subjectivists.

B.                Objectivists.

b)            Non-Descriptivist theories, examples of which are

1.            Ethical emotivism.

2.            Ethical prescriptivism.

c)             Other theories.

Descriptivist Theories

These theories hold that value judgments are descriptive statements of some kind of facts. Consequently, they claim that such judgments, and ethical terms in them, have cognitive meaning. Therein, it may be possible to attribute truth or falsity to moral judgments and, in principle, such judgments can be justified rationally. However, there is no agreement between descriptivists about what facts relate to moral judgments and how it determines its truth or falsity. This disagreement leads to the concepts that we will examine in future posts.

Non-Descriptivist Theories

These theories differ from those previously introduced in that they maintain that value judgments are characterized by not being centrally descriptive of certain facts. This is linked with the idea that ethical terms do not have, or have not exclusively, cognitive meaning: they do not typically refer to factual properties, whether objective or subjective, empirical or supra-empirical. The implication of this conception with regard to moral judgments is that they cannot be true or false. They are not formulated for the purpose of conveying information about how reality is but for other purposes, such as to influence the behavior of people. This generates doubts about the possibility of rationally justifying our value judgments, so the non-descriptivism is usually followed by skepticism, which may be more or less extreme, regarding the role of rationality in ethical matters.

In the posts to come we will be reviewing each of these theories. In the meantime, for more information:

Introduccion Al Analisis del Derecho, by Carlos Santiago Nino (1980) Ed. Astrea.