'Queer Phenomenology in Law: A Critical Theory of Orientation' by Nick J. Sciullo in (2019) 39
Pace Law Review comments
This article argues for the application of phenomenology to legal understanding, specifically as a way to think about and though queer people’s interactions with law as well as queer theory in law. There are both pragmatic and theoretical justifications for this project. The pragmatic justifications include the need to better address the legal issues and experiences of queer people, recent political and legal decisions and debates that affect queer people specifically, the need to better provide epistemological resources for queer lawyers, law scholars, law students, and their allies, and the need to better understand how law affects minoritarian populations regardless of specific identity characteristics. The theoretical justifications include the relative under-theorization of queer theory in law, the improvement of legal theory’s interaction with related theories in the humanities and social sciences, and the development of a more robust theory of everyday interactions with law consistent with individuals’ diverse experiences and identities. These justifications counsel for further study and attempts to account for diversity in law.
'What Good is Abstraction? From Liberal Legitimacy to Social Justice' by Nimer Sultany in (2019) 67(31)
Buffalo Law Review comments
The stakes could not be higher. Post-World War II political and economic institutions are under unprecedented pressure. The social coalitions that have sustained them are crumbling. Welfare-state capitalism is in retreat, and liberal institutions are besieged. Right-wing populists are cementing their power and consolidating their grip on political and legal institutions around the globe. The answer to these historical changes cannot be a return to the very status quo that led to them in the first place.
This Article argues progressive liberal theoretical frameworks are unfit for purpose. They betray a loss of conviction and commitment to the very egalitarian ideals that progressive liberals advocate for. Specifically, it critiques abstraction as a mode of argumentation in political and legal theory in which there is a retreat from controversial political and moral territory to establish a consensual political regime and binding legal order. It is an internal critique to liberal theory that illustrates that this abstraction does not meet the theory’s own standards and fails to achieve its declared objectives.
The main family of theories that betray this lack of conviction is “political liberalism,” as developed by eminent scholars such as John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin. Political liberalism draws a clear distinction between the ambitions of liberal justice and the institutional commitments of liberal legitimacy. Progressive liberals allow as legitimate policies and practices, such as welfare-state capitalism and neo-liberalism, that are detrimental to the very goals that they aspire to. Therefore, the egalitarian bark of progressive liberal theory is louder than its egalitarian bite. Ultimately, liberal legitimacy is not merely different from justice but it also defers justice and legitimates injustice.
'The Computational Analysis of International Law' by Wolfgang Alschner in Rossana Deplano and Nicholas Tsagourias (eds),
Research Methods in International Law: A Handbook (2019)
comments
When traditional international law techniques reach their conceptual and methodological limits, we need to look for help in other disciplines. International law scholars have in the past drawn inspirations from economics, political science or sociology to enrich the study and our understanding of international law. Now the time has come to add a new discipline to this list: computer science. The computational analysis of international law renders legal analysis scalable and empowers international lawyers to study international law in unprecedented depth and breadth. In this contribution, I provide an overview of computational techniques for the doctrinal and legal-institutional study of international law highlighting this neglected, but increasingly important field of interdisciplinary study.
