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- Crisis, austerity and socio-spatial justice: reflections from Athens, Greece
- Paul and Spatial Justice : Critical Legal Readings of an (Non)Ecclesial Figure
- Panel 2
- Offshore Processing, Spatial Imaginaries and the Sovereign Crisis: An Australian Case Study
- 7. CRITICAL LEGAL STUDIES AND POLITICAL ECONOMY STREAM
- Panel 1: Financialization, speculation, short-termism
- The Post-Crisis Reproduction of Financialization in the E.U. The Reconstitution of the European Capital Market as a Medium of Governance. “A Constructive Effort Towards Spontaneous Development”
- Law, scale, anti-zooming, and corporate short-termism
- The Company as Subject
- Instituting the capitalist State: the trials against German industrialists in post-war Germany
- The Language of Law and Trade
- Panel 3: Legal intersections and comparative law
- Recovery of pure economic losses under a comparative analysis
The Walker Olivia Barr, Melbourne Law School, Australia - olivia.barr@unimelb.edu.au Walking is a legal practice. The habitual and often unthought step-by-step of walking is not only a physical, pleasurable, healthy and an increasingly well-funded government activity, but also an activity that is political, subversive, and always already juridical. Put simply, my central argument is that walking matters legally. What, then, is the relation between law and walking; law and the walker? Consider the legal figures of the pilgrim or the refugee. Yet the relationship between law and the walker is not limited to these iconic figures. Walking, in all its forms, is a material movement that carries legal meaning in the sense that each step is a spatial production, as well as a place-making activity of law. In other words, walking is a legal practice that grounds law in place. However, this is not a universal grounding, nor a universal lawful place. Rather, the placing of law through walking is a dynamic non-linear activity that varies in time and space. By way of illustration, I engage with Francis Alÿs’ artwork, The Green Line, where, nearly 60 years after the Green line was drawn on a 1:20,000 scale, Belgium artist Francis Alÿs redrew the Green Line on a 1:1 scale. Linking walking to law, a jurisprudential attention to lawful walking in Alÿs’ Green Line starkly illustrates both the mundanity as well as the material and topographical awkwardness of assigning legal distinction through the drawing of lines. The strict linearity of lines is actually quite difficult to maintain. Yet this is precisely what many try to do; this is precisely the conceit of modern law; and this is precisely what a jurisprudential attention to the materiality of walking reveals: the wobbliness and instability of lines; the wobbliness and instability of the place of law. Crisis, austerity and socio-spatial justice: reflections from Athens, Greece Penny Koutrolikou, National Technical University of Athens, Greece - pennykk@gmail.com After decades of political, economic and moral domination of neoliberal orthodoxies and –crisis or not– induced austerity, an increasing number of theorists as well as activists and movements are challenging its tenet. While OECD data shows that inequality grows, numerous studies argue about the adverse consequences of rising inequalities, of the dismantling of the welfare state (if any) and of austerity. At the same time, a growing literature on spatial justice is developing, reflecting on the significance of space in the quest for justice. The global financial crisis, the debt crisis of some European countries, the enforced austerity and its repercussions for people and places as well as the recent refugee question in Europe turns the issue of social justice in the city into a vital one. Drawing from Athens (Greece), a city experiencing a multifaceted crisis, this presentation examines the ramifications of austerity and debt-repayment policies on socio-spatial justice and rights (human as well as economic, social and cultural). UN reports have warned about the repercussion of such policies upon rights. In a context of imminent threat, (false) dilemmas of safety versus rights were often expressed. The reduced welfare state and the high unemployment, questions the relations of poverty and social exclusion with potential violation of rights, while ‘newer’ rights (such as housing and water) are challenged by increased taxation and privatizations. In such a context, can the numerous solidarity initiatives that emerged in the city can be perceived as a network of redistributive local socio-spatial justice? Paul and Spatial Justice: Critical Legal Readings of an (Non)Ecclesial Figure Taylor Weaver, University of Kent - T.M.Weaver@kent.ac.uk Space and law have been mixing in critically for several decades. Most recently, Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos has written on the lawscape, atmosphere, and bodies in relation to spatial justice (Spatial Justice, 2015). In attempting to counter disciplinary boundaries that often cordon off ecclesially centred figurations of the apostle Paul, this presentation attempts to follow the recent trend of ‘philosophising’ Paul, specifically through applying Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos’ particular readings of the concepts of lawscape and spatial justice to a radical, materialist Pauline figuration. Law already has strong connections to streams of Christianity, and the Pauline corpus, because of its obsession with law, materiality, and justice is ripe for a re-reading through a critical legal lens. While the variety of concepts that come together in Spatial Justice deserve equal attention, the focus here will be narrowed to those readings of the concepts of law and justice that deal with spatiality as described within the text (space as: interrelated and embedded practices, a sphere of multiple possibilities, a ground of chance and undecidability, as always becoming). In addition, paying attention to the rearticulation of spatial justice that Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos has provided in Spatial Justice, such that atmosphere and lawscape come to the fore through retaining certain interpretations of withdrawal. Panel 2 Chair: Hillary J. Shaw CLOCK: Transforming Cultural, Material and Spatial Spheres of Justice Jane Krishnadas, Keele University Law School - j.h.krishnadas@keele.ac.uk The ‘Age of Austerity’ is presented as the structural ground for the Legal Aid, Sentencing, and Punishment of Offenders Act, 2012; an external, irredeemable and unrelated factor that of itself justifies the limits of access to justice, within a finite domain. Drawing upon my earlier work ‘Relocating the Master’s Domain’ (2008), I map the reconstruction of sites of justice, in which the finite budget of the World Bank limited access to the constitutional rights of equality and life, and ultimately the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. Simultaneously ground level rights interventions, challenged and broke down the manmade, structural and governmental barriers, to challenge the ‘finite’ resources, within a universal concept of human rights. It is at this point, whereby the limits of justice may be understood as a false construction, which was drawn within the blue print of the Bretton Woods Agreement and Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which prioritises the dominant, capitalist and global North framework. CLOCK (the Community Legal Outreach Collaboration, Keele) maps the rights claims to reconstruct the lines of engagement between the identity, needs and location of legal actors as they interact at different scales of justice. From the manual and physical navigation of legal pathways, legal actor rights are identified, valued and located to claim access to justice. Clock.uk.net, translates the mapping of fixed determinates of identity, needs and location, within a transformative three dimensional web of legal relations which reconfigures the Cartesian coordinates, to a transformative axis of rights, from recognition to reflection, redistribution to revaluation, and relocation to revolution. Being Illegal Anette Sikke, University of Illinois, Springfield, USA - asikk2@uis.edu This paper seeks to answer the question: What are the stated and unstated purposes of attaching criminal sanctions to the occupation of particular spaces in the U.S. and Canada, and how has this criminalizing legislation particularly affected racialized persons, namely black, indigenous and foreign-born. This question is situated within the broader literature of critical race theory, highlighting not only the disproportionate impact of such criminal legislation on racialized persons but equally the racially-biased historical roots of those laws. I argue that a key method employed by dominant racial groups in both the United States and Canada to ensure that racial groups are “kept in their place” is to literally keep them in their place. Through the criminalization of being in a space in which certain groups of individuals are deemed “unwanted”, racial groups’ mere existence acts as a catalyst for criminal sanction. Once this “criminal” label is attached, they are excluded from society’s view, both literally and figuratively. Building on recent works on race and incarceration I analyse the creation and implementation of laws regulating racial occupation of space, and their relationship to societal fears around racial incursions into white spaces. These laws include “Black Codes” in the Post-Reconstruction U.S. South criminalizing vagrancy, Canadian and U.S. laws preventing individuals of Aboriginal descent from leaving reservations without prior approval, and the various immigration reform laws criminalizing the unauthorized presence by foreign nationals on U.S. soil. These laws are analyzed with reference to the disproportionate numbers of racialized (Black, Latino, Indigenous) persons incarcerated in the U.S., the disproportionate numbers of Latino persons deported from the U.S., and Aboriginal people’s massive overincarceration in Canada. I argue that through the criminalization of racialized spaces the hyperincarceration of these groups becomes normalized. Offshore Processing, Spatial Imaginaries and the Sovereign Crisis: An Australian Case Study Emma Patchett, King’s College, London - emma.patchett@kcl.ac.uk Australia's offshore processing centres create a series of enclosed spaces, where the spatial-temporal topography of crisis is reframed through a narrative of protection and a re-drawing of abyssmal anti-territoriality. This paper will consider the film 'The Journey' (2016), commissioned by Australia's immigration department to deter asylum seekers, as a distortion of the concept of sovereignty and a deconstruction of post-colonial spatial imaginaries. Using an innovative interdisciplinary methodology, this film will be read through and against Australia's immigration and asylum policy, in order to consider new ways in which critical scholarship can take account of spatio-legal counter-topographies in an era of global crisis. 7. CRITICAL LEGAL STUDIES AND POLITICAL ECONOMY STREAM Stream organiser: Iain Frame (University of Kent) This steam has the very broad aim of providing a space for discussion for those who have an interest in (i) critical legal studies (however understood) and (ii) capitalism or the economy or economics or commercial law or finance, or other related areas. The motivation for doing so is a sense that many of us with an interest in the CLC also have an interest in understanding, critically analysing, and perhaps re-imagining the relationship between law (or specific areas of law) and some aspect of our modern day, post financial crisis, capitalist economy. Panel 1: Financialization, speculation, short-termism Chair: Iain Frame A philosophical dialogue on financial risk towards a phenomenology of financial markets Daniele D’Alvia, Birkbeck University - d.dalvia@bbk.ac.uk The paper aims to address the global dimension of financial markets in their objective form of ‘experiencing’ as well as subjective dimension of ‘that which is experienced’. This observation has revealed a new phenomenology. Indeed, the dual relationship between objective and subjective dimensions in the phenomenology of financial markets is translated into the reflection on objective as well as subjective meanings of financial risk. However, the subjectivity of risk is represented by the Speculator who is willing to second guess the choices of other speculators. This figure is responsible of the creation of value of financial assets, and it is at the same time a personal subjectivity identified through the person of the Speculator and its decision making process. On the other hand, the subjectivity of financial markets within the new phenomenology by means of ‘that which is experienced’ is represented by new actors such as Central Banks, Regulators and the Law. They are all impersonal and they are thirdly in respect of the ‘experiencing’ of financial markets, but they can influence and direct that ‘experiencing’. Indeed, it seems that today the Homo economicus is no more in charge of his decisions. In this light, the new ‘experiencing’ of financial markets can make the new Homo economicus to adopt the most reasonable behaviour instead of the most profitable one. Furthermore, it is the same concept of reasonability to constitute also the measure of intervention of a Central Bank in terms of proportionality. Indeed, under this idea a Central Bank as well as Regulators should not follow an unreasonable policy intervention because where the line stops at the reasonability level, there it is also where the new Homo economicus stands and the decisions of a superior level of control should always reflect an assessment of proportionality inspired by reasonable standards in order to preserve financial innovation too. The Post-Crisis Reproduction of Financialization in the E.U. The Reconstitution of the European Capital Market as a Medium of Governance. “A Constructive Effort Towards Spontaneous Development” Jasper van Dooren, Kent - J.van-Dooren@kent.ac.uk A decade since the start of the global financial crisis, the long-standing project of a European capital market has recently been revived by the European Commission through its Action Plan for a Capital Markets Union (CMU). While concern over the stability and viability of the E.U.’s financial markets remains, this Action Plan illustrates the ‘success’ of the E.U.’s response to the crisis over the last decade: the (capital) market has been reinstated as the starting point for any initiative addressing problems in the material reproduction of the Union. In this paper I take a look at the regulatory and supervisory framework that has made this situation possible. I will argue that post-crisis financial regulation and supervision in the E.U. is aimed at reproducing a separation between public state authority and private market activity, thereby shielding questions on the material reproduction of the E.U. (and its social relations) from democratic processes of decision-making. In order to provide some empirical depth, I offer a focus on the European Securities Markets Authority, with its extra-parliamentary delegated executive powers in the Lamfalussy Framework (e.g. cost-benefit analyses of legislation, market- and institutional risk reporting, technical standard setting in legislative interpretation and adoption). Subsequently, I will illustrate how these developments in regulation and supervision need to be appreciated from an historical and class-based perspective: as constitutive to the historical project of creating a European-level form of state power and governance, and originating in the response to squeezed profit margins and income redistribution to the advantage of wage-earners. In my conclusion, I will return the European Securities and Markets Authority to its place within European financial governance, and consider the relationship between financial regulation and supervision and a contemporary ‘financialization’ of capitalism. Law, scale, anti-zooming, and corporate short-termism Lilian Montcrieff, Glasgow - Lilian.Moncrieff@glasgow.ac.uk This article uses ‘Contact’, an art installation by Olafur Eliasson, and an essay by Bruno Latour to reimagine the problem of corporate short-termism. It investigates what it means to propose that directors and investors look to the ‘long-term’, using the force of law where necessary. The article contends that it is possible to zoom, as if using a telescopic lens, between the demands of different time frames. It is only after an extended amount of ‘contact’ that one is able to plot the relation of the short to the long term and make sense of it, a finding that problematizes the corporate self-governance of time. A way forward is imagined that makes the thesis of anti-zoom fit for renovating corporate law. The Company as Subject Stephen Connelly, Wawrick - S.J.Connelly@warwick.ac.uk Abstract TBC.
Chair: Iain Frame The Value of ‘Corporate Accountability’ in International Law: A Marxist Analysis Grietje Baars, City University London - grietje.baars.1@city.ac.uk In this paper I examine the emergence of the debate on ‘corporate accountability’ (CA). Today the call to ‘hold corporations to account’ as an answer to the latest corporate backlash is heard far and wide.5 CA is generally understood to mean the efforts to force corporations to account for (explain, justify, excuse, compensate, make good) the negative effects of corporate activity on its ‘victims’ and the public at large. The methods employed for this include both ‘self-accounting’, through or with the help of various NGOs, lawyers, media, activists, states and international bodies, corporate-produced corporate social responsibility (CSR) programmes, drawing up voluntary guidelines, standards, creating schemes for compliance, monitoring or (self-) certification, working with PR and the media on corporate image, etc. It also includes the work of states and courts in legally regulating, permitting self-regulation, prosecuting or threatening to prosecute, subjecting to licensing and other bureaucratic procedures, and a variety of actors in advocating and lobbying for or participating in negotiations around CA instruments and policies. CA in this sense is thought of as a vital method of restraining corporate activity, limiting wrongdoing and reducing negative effects of corporate profit-making activities. I propose here an alternative perspective informed by Marxist theory of international law. In my analysis, the value of ‘corporate accountability’ is that it legitimises the current system of surplus value extraction. Corporate accountability struggles effectively reduce capitalism’s violence to occasional ‘wrongdoing’ by the otherwise good corporate citizen, which is ‘fixed’ by the mere existence of ideological CSR schemes and mostly dead letter legal accountability mechanisms, amounting to ‘planned impunity’. Instituting the capitalist State: the trials against German industrialists in post-war Germany Hannah Franzki, University of Bremen - franzki@uni-bremen.de International Criminal Law (ICL) is not usually an area of law that is associated with political economy. This is because since its re-emergence in the 1990s, national and international courts investigating crimes against humanity, genocide, and war crimes have focused predominantly on the criminal responsibility of military officials or head of states. The demand to address the responsibility of economic actors for state-backed violence has only fairly recently gained momentum. In line with the wider legal and political request to strengthen the corporate accountability for human rights abuses, we can observe increased demands to address economic dimensions of state crime by investigating the criminal responsibility of economic actors My paper seeks to intervene in this debate by looking at the trials against German industrialists for war crimes, crimes against humanity and aggressive war that were conducted by the allies in 1947 and 1948, following the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Trials in response to state crime in general are concerned with the excesses of the state, the omnipresence of the state apparatus and the suspension of individual liberties. In the trials against German industrialists, I will be arguing, the lines intended to demarcate the difference between the `evil' past and the new `good' state are twofold. They do not only introduce an opposition between arbitrary state violence and a democratic rule of law, but also distinguish those interactions between the economy and the state considered acceptable from those thought to be conducive towards violence. Against the collectivism, trusts, and monopolies that were identified with the German war economy, the underlying reasoning of the respective judgments suggests, only a juridico-political order based on the principle of competition could prevent history from repeating itself. In this regard, the trials were central to what Michel Foucault, in the The Birth of Biopolitics, called the “German miracle”, namely “to get the legality of the state from the veridiction of the market”. Thus, rather than being a first attempt to set bounds to the violence of capitalism, as the corporate accountability discourse often suggests, the trials against German industrialists were an important element in the salvation of the reputation of capitalism. The Language of Law and Trade Yoriko Otomo, SOAS - yo4@soas.ac.uk Looking at the public language employed by international lawyers talking about technological risk in war and in trade, my recent book, ‘Unconditional Life: The Postwar International Law Settlement’ extends existing feminist approaches to thinking about the relationship between the market and the state. I argue that what is at stake in this relation is primarily the question of who gets to determine what human life is, in the ontological sense. And particularly since the Second World War, this struggle – a struggle historically between Church and State – is a struggle that has relied upon a gender binary that conflates ideas of masculinity with ontological wholeness and superiority. The diagnosis also shows that this dynamic that structures our political economy is in crisis, breaking apart the modern pact between state, corporation and the individual. And it can be shifted by changing the way in which we use language, to change the conditions for, and logic of, global economies. Panel 3: Legal intersections and comparative law Chair: Iain Frame Responses to gender pay equality impediments: Deciphering the Equal Remuneration cases and substantive equality in Australia. Amanda Viriri, Kingston Law School - k1062864@kingston.ac.uk The presence and the availability of information is arguably a hallmark in accurately identifying, assessing and resolving legal issues. This is certainly true within the sphere of discrimination law and in particular gender pay equality. It remains undeniable that the gender pay gap still persists despite 46 years of equal pay legislation in the United Kingdom (UK), but questions remain as to why. This paper aims to comparatively analyse the approaches to information gathering and the use of information, as it pertains to equal pay between Australia and the UK. The legislature within the UK has taken some steps in facilitating disclosure and the ease of access to relevant information by the introduction of transparency with the enactment of the Equality Act 2010 but appears to stop short of allowing a substantive analysis of the gender pay gap. Recent developments with Australian federal law appear to demonstrate the benefits of the substantive examination of information gathered regarding contributing factors to the gender pay gap and ways of eliminating it. Although these developments are relatively new and their full effects are yet to be observed, there appears to be positive effects to the way in which the gender pay gap is dealt with. This paper will argue that the state in its law making capacity should facilitate the discovery and availability of this information so as to substantively assist in eliminating the gender pay gap. It will also argue that by revising the model of economic regulation, the ‘business case’ argument advanced within the UK will be a moot point. Recovery of pure economic losses under a comparative analysis Renato Lovato Neto, Universidade do Porto/CAPES - rlovatoneto@gmail.com Pure economic losses are financial losses that does not results from an injury to the victim’s personal or property rights. The claimant is usually a third party who is affected by the conducts of other subjects, which are involved in a contractual relationship between them. This loss makes the division between contract and tort very tenuous and it can demand the usage of instruments such as the “contract in favor of third parties” (e.g., art.443.o, Portuguese CC, and §§328-335 BGB, for example) to achieve that kind of protection. Although from the point of view of economic efficiency its contemplation by civil liability is more advantageous than not repairing that loss, it is not fully accepted by doctrine. The social loss is not necessarily equal as the personal loss and full compensaion creates incentives for excessive precaution – and it would be more efficient in contract law than in tort law. Those damages are not related with an offense of an absolutely protected legal position and they are only compensable on an exceptional basis. The difference to other economic losses (such as medical expenses and lucrum cessans) is that these are immediately consequences of an injury to the person or property and the only problem will be to verify remoteness. Some kinds of these losses are analyzed as non-pecuniary damages, in particular resulting from the death or injury of someone in a compensation owed by the liable person to the victim's family, and can be named as préjudice par ricochet and danno riflesso. The study aims to analyze the compensation of pure economic loss in comparative law, from the treatment by legal orders from Europe – such as the Portuguese, French, English and German Law – and also by the soft law instruments – e.g. PETL, Art. 2:102, n.º 4, and the DCFR, art. III.-3:701. Directory: law law -> Law in American Society Black History Month Essay Contest law -> A brand New Image? Should Personality Rights be law -> Jurisdiction of the Courts law -> Luther V. Borden: a taney Court Mystery Solved law -> ‘Intellectual Property Rights in Sport’ law -> The law of tort introduction a. What is a Tort? law -> Law of Delict Chapter 1: General Introduction law -> Appendix C: Federal and Minnesota Case Law Summaries Download 0.92 Mb. Share with your friends:
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