We’re excited to announce the fourth annual Penn-Rutgers-Princeton social epistemology workshop! The workshop aims to bring together scholars of social epistemology to gain familiarity with each other’s work and encourage future collaboration. The workshop will be March 19-20 at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.
We welcome proposals for presentations of work in social epistemology, broadly construed, from graduate students, faculty or scholars in any discipline. Possible topics include but are not limited to: rational responses to peer disagreement, knowledge by testimony, deference to experts, group beliefs and their justification, division of cognitive labor, and institutional design. Please send a blinded abstract of roughly 500-700 words to daniel.rubio@rutgers.edu with the subject “PRPSEW15 Proposal” by February 10th. The program committee aims to notify participants by February 21st about the decision.
With keynote presentations by:
Caroline Levine
Professor of English and David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of Humanities
Cornell University
Author of Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton University Press, 2015)
Seth Brodsky
Assistant Professor of Music and the Humanities
University of Chicago
Author of From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious (University of California Press, forthcoming 2016)
This interdisciplinary conference proposes to consider approaches to form that emphasize its materiality, affective dimensions, and political effectivity, as well as considerations of new directions for the humanities and the social sciences in which these notions of form might be central. Questions to be contemplated include: Do approaches such as affect theory and surface reading imbricate art, music, and literature with the social and political realm, or do they divide them from it? Is there a cohesive new formalism, and what distinguishes that new formalism from previous formalisms? How might attention to form shift our understanding of the relationship between materiality and abstraction? Where does an attention to surface leave the position of art vis-à-vis world?
We invite paper proposals from across the humanities and the social sciences that consider, use, or critique:
- Form and formalism, as well as new formalism, formalisticism, and post-formalism
- The materiality of sound and art objects
- Affect theory, and the feeling of form
- Surface reading, and theories of the literal, the obvious, or the apparent
- Digital methods of interpretation, and modes of theorizing the digital humanities
- Formlessness, noise, and excess
- The historicity of form
Please submit abstracts of under 250 words as .pdf attachments prepared for anonymous review before December 21, 2016 to Jocelyn Rodal and Daniel Villegas Vélez at: formalism.conference@rutgers.edu
The last two decades have seen a significant outpouring of criminal law reform efforts throughout the English-speaking world and beyond – including in the U.S., England and Wales, Scotland, Australia, the Balkans, Georgia, Germany, Norway, Poland, and Rwanda. Despite, or possibly because of, all this activity, there has been relatively little consideration of the underlying theoretical issues that such reform raises. And there has been even less dialogue among criminal law reformers across jurisdictions. This project will seek to fill these voids by bringing together some of the leading figures in contemporary criminal law reform, as well as younger scholars and law reformers, to participate in an international workshop on the subject.
The idea of “criminal law reform,” as we conceive of it, entails not just any change to the criminal law, but rather an intentional process of revising, reordering, and reformulating a substantial area of the criminal law in some systematic way. Our interest here is not in the particular reforms one might think worthy in, say, the law of homicide in Argentina or the insanity defense in Greece. Rather, we are interested in the possibility of identifying and analyzing the kinds of general principles that underlie, or should underlie, the process of criminal law (or criminal procedure) reform across jurisdictions and subject matters.
Among the issues that we hope to see addressed are the following:
• How should a given jurisdiction determine that reform is needed? What kinds of concerns – whether arising from perceived social problems, international obligations, regime change or political revolution, structural inconsistencies and formal defects in the law, or short-term political ends – constitute appropriate justifications for reform?
• What makes for successful (or unsuccessful) criminal law or procedure reform? What are the formal attributes of good criminal law reform? Is reform best achieved in a comprehensive code, or in a more piecemeal manner? What is the proper scope of a criminal code? How does the process of criminal law reform differ depending on the part of the criminal law being considered, whether general principles or particular offenses? How accessible should criminal codes be to the general public? How should criminal law reformers deal with gaps and redundancies? How important is comprehensiveness?
• Who should be engaged in the process of law reform? What kinds of pre-legislative bodies should be created to assess needs for reform and to propose reforms, and with what kind of remit? To what kind of scrutiny, by what kind of body, should proposed reforms be subjected? How should criminal law reform bodies be constituted? What relationship should they have to legislatures, courts, prosecutors, and other constituencies?
Different jurisdictions approach criminal law reform in different ways: Some use government-appointed law reform bodies; others rely on private, self-appointed expert bodies. Some rely on a “civilian”-type approach to codification; others on a common law-inspired one. By drawing on the experience conference attendees might have had participating in, or observing, the process of criminal law reform in their own or other jurisdictions, we hope to be able to find what general lessons (if any) can be learned about the principles, methods, and problems of systematic criminal law reform.
Participating in the conference will be a collection of leading authorities in criminal law reform and criminal law theory, some of whom will present papers, and others of whom will serve as commentators. Confirmed participants (so far) include Vera Bergelson, Roger Clark, Antony Duff, Lindsay Farmer, Pamela Ferguson, Stuart Green, Adil Haque, Jeremy Horder, Tatjana Hörnle, Douglas Husak, Jørn Jacobsen, Margo Kaplan, Karl Laird, Paul Robinson, Alec Walen, and Gideon Yaffe.
Submission of abstracts and papers
Our aim is to feature a total of twelve short papers of approximately 5,000 words each. Approximately half of these will come from invited participants. The other half will come from this Call for Papers.
Interested parties are invited to submit an abstract of approximately 500 words describing the paper they would like to write and have discussed at the conference, along with a CV. Abstracts and CVs are due by May 15, 2016, and should be sent, in Word or PDF format, to Ms. Mimi Moore (mmoore@kinoy.rutgers.edu).
Applicants will be advised by June 30, 2016 whether their abstract has been accepted.
Successful applicants will then have until February 15, 2017 to submit a full, original draft of approximately 5,000 words. We hope you will consider publishing your contribution in a book of journal symposium that would come out of the conference, though you would not be obligated to do so, and we will not decide what the next steps in the process should be until we have had a chance to confer with attendees and to work out how the project can best be developed.
Each draft will have a commentator assigned to it. Workshop attendees will be expected to read the drafts in advance.
We invite submissions from both younger and older scholars and law reformers from diverse backgrounds and with diverse perspectives on, and experience, in the field.
Funding
We have secured initial funding sufficient to pay hotel and other local costs for all participants whose papers are selected. We hope that participants will be able to find their own funding for travel, but we will do what we can to help with the travel costs of those who cannot find funding themselves.
Stuart Green (Rutgers Law) – sgreen@kinoy.rutgers.edu
Alec Walen (Rutgers Law and Philosophy) — awalen@law.rutgers.edu
Antony Duff (Stirling Philosophy) – r.a.duff@stir.ac.uk
Jeremy Horder (LSE Law) — J.Horder@lse.ac.uk
LPW is an annual conference designed to foster reflection on the nature of law and the philosophical issues underlying its different areas. Our aim is to promote work that connects legal philosophy with other branches of philosophy (e.g., moral and political philosophy, metaphysics, philosophy of language, epistemology, or philosophy of action) and to create a venue for the critical examination of different viewpoints about law.
The format of the workshop is pre-read. Each session will start with a very short presentation by the author (5-10 minutes). A commentator will then kick off the discussion; the author will respond to the comments, and then the remainder of the session will be dedicated to Q&A.
We are inviting abstracts (up to 1,000 words). Once we have received abstracts, we aim to put together a diverse program that we hope will be of interest to a wide range of people within legal philosophy.
If you would like to submit an abstract, volunteer to comment, or register to participate, you can do so here: https://legalphilosophyworkshop.typeform.com/to/SRNU3m
You can also find the CFA for this event on our website.
https://sites.google.com/site/legalphilosophyworkshop/home