1st Edition
Stateless Law Evolving Boundaries of a Discipline
This volume offers a critical analysis and illustration of the challenges and promises of ’stateless’ law thought, pedagogy and approaches to governance - that is, understanding and conceptualizing law in a post-national condition. From common, civil and international law perspectives, the collection focuses on the definition and role of law as an academic discipline, and hybridity in the practice and production of law. With contributions by a diverse and international group of scholars, the collection includes fourteen chapters written in English and three in French. Confronting the ’transnational challenge’ posed to the traditional theoretical and institutional structures that underlie the teaching and study of law in the university, the seventeen authors of Stateless Law: Evolving Boundaries of a Discipline bring new insight to the ongoing and crucial conversation about the future shape of legal scholarship, education and practice that is emblematic of the early twenty-first century. This collection is essential reading for academics, institutions and others involved in determining the future roles, responsibilities and education of jurists, as well as for academics interested in Law, Sociology, Political Science and Education.
Biography
Helge Dedek is an Associate Professor of Law and the Director of the Institute of Comparative Law at McGill University, Faculty of Law, Montreal, Canada, where he teaches courses in private law, legal history and legal theory. He holds a doctoral degree from the University of Bonn (Germany), two German ’State Examination’ degrees in law, and an LL.M. degree from Harvard Law School, where he was a Langdon H. Gammon Fellow. He is a Co-Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Comparative Law. He has been an invited Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities ’Law as Culture’ at the University of Bonn and an invited Fellow at the Max-Planck-Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg. Shauna Van Praagh is an Associate Professor of Law at the Faculty of Law and Institute of Comparative Law at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, where she has taught since 1995 and served as Associate Dean from 2007 to 2010. A graduate of the University of Toronto (B.Sc., LL.B.) and Columbia University (LL.M., J.S.D.), she teaches primarily in the area of obligations law, and her research and writing focuses on comparative law, legal education and pedagogy, children and law, and social diversity and law. She has been an active participant and leader in the ongoing and unique development of the McGill Faculty of Law’s programs of legal education and integrated pedagogy, and served as the 2013-2014 President of the Canadian Association of Law Teachers.
’This collection is a brilliant, insightful resource on the relationships between the law and the state in the West. A must-have for anyone interested in critically understanding the historical process of construction of Western law as an intellectual (and largely stateless) discipline.’ Mauro Bussani, University of Trieste, Italy ’Legal educators must open their students to a world of multi-national markets and corporations, the European Union, and the increasing federalization of existing nations, a world in which the identity of law and state is increasingly destabilized. This remarkable set of essays, owing so much to McGill University's trail-blazing effort to shape the legal education it offers to these realities, sets a high standard for scholarship on this challenge.’ Peter L. Strauss, Columbia Law School, USA ’Stateless Law is an extremely impressive collection of ground-breaking contributions concentrating on a much-needed and overdue systematic exploration of law outside of the territorial paradigm. There is a need of this kind of undisciplined scholarship to overcome a state-centered bias that still spells the western lawyer.’ Ugo Mattei, UC Hastings, USA and University of Turin, Italy
