CONFERENCE: Leuven, March 4-6th, 2010 - Undoing law, framing contexts. Normativity across the disciplines

Conference proposal

The aim of this conference is to bring together scholars of law who tackle it from different disciplinary perspectives. Our wish is to understand and critically assess the widespread urge to “contextualise” law which characterises a large spectrum of academic endeavours addressing the quaestio iuris.
How and to what extent can “contextualisation” still be claimed to be a useful guiding principle for such studies? The idea that law cannot be entirely understood if it is not situated in, or related to, a (social, economic, or cultural) context in which it actually lives is certainly not new. This idea gained prominence in the first half of the 20th century as an attack against the predominantly formalist legal orthodoxy of the times. It found expression in many currents of legal thought, mainly American Legal Realism, and has not disappeared from the radar screen of jurisprudential enquiry since then. Critical Legal Studies, Feminist Legal Theory, Law and Economics can all be seen as contemporary forms of this critique. For sociologists, anthropologists, historians, and other scholars not directly participating in these jurisprudential debates, the idea that law could be separated from its multiple contexts and considered abstractly is likely not to make much sense. The question to be asked would rather concern the role that the law plays in the more general process of social normativity.
Apart from any disagreement, many feel that a line can, and has to be drawn between what is law and what is not, between the text of law and its con-text. It is precisely this activity of distinguishing between the legal and the non-legal that we would like to examine more closely. In order to come to grips with this complex question, we propose a two-fold strategy. First, we would welcome specific “case studies”, which draw on already existing work and analyse it with the following questions in mind: How does the notion of context come into play as an analytical tool in studies taking law as their object? What are the merits and limits of various “contextualising” methodologies? How does the notion of context appear (explicitly or implicitly) in specific historical narratives of a particular legal institution or the law in general? How are these narratives structured? What has “context” been taken to mean in various theoretical contributions? Should it be redefined?
On the other hand, we also expect contributions which approach the subject matter of the conference in more general terms, addressing questions such as: How can historians, philosophers and sociologists challenge representations of the law as pertaining to a purely formalistic normativity, devoid of any history, on the one hand, and depictions of the law as a pure course of events, indifferent to formal legal norms, on the other? Is the formalist habit of drawing a line between law and non-law still to be denounced as a “lethean draught” which makes all historical and political particulars fall into oblivion? Or is it rather the case that all the currents which attempt to balance the formalistic approach with a closer look at the empirical level (by studying, for example, the “actual” functioning of the judiciary) have induced us to neglect the specific kind of logic which characterises legal norms as such? Finally, would it not be useful to distinguish between the set of institutions that is generally called the law (with its jurists, judges, law professors and students) and a more pervasive legal function, dispersed and immersed in society and sailing under the colours of con-text?
Hopefully, but not necessarily, these two manners of approaching the question of law and its contexts will intersect at some point at the conference, opening up new perspectives on an apparently familiar theme. We are therefore not strictly limited to the outlined agenda, but will also accept proposals framing the law-context-problem differently. By combining contributions from international scholars with different disciplinary backgrounds – ranging from historians, philosophers, and lawyers to sociologists – it is our intention to offer an all-too-rare opportunity to catch a transversal glimpse of the law as well as to question the assumptions which shape the various disciplines that study it.