UCL CLGE: Law's Migration (Judith Resnik)

The UCL Centre for Law and Governance in Europe lecture on

Law's Migration

Speakers:
Professor Judith Resnik
Yale Law School
Professor Joanne Scott
UCL Faculty of Laws

Discussant
Professor Albert Weale, University of Essex, Dept of Government

Chaired by Professor Maria Lee, UCL Faculty of Laws

Wednesday 13 January 2010, 5-7pm 
at UCL Law Faculty

About the talk:
What role should the law of one country play in another, when it is formulating rules or interpreting its own constitutional or statutory provisions?  In the United States, a good deal of concern is focused on these questions, as arguments are made that constitutional democracies ought to be wary of importing "foreign"  precepts.  Further, go such arguments, to the extent such importation is permissible, it should come at the national level.

Missing are practices, both translocal and transnational, that turn "foreign rules" into domestic law.  For example, while the EU has embraced the "precautionary principle", in the United States environmental law has focused on a "cost/benefit" analysis. Yet, in 2003, San Francisco made "the Precautionary Principle" local law, and in 2007, -- following the EU's concern about certain chemicals --- California banned "toxic toys."  Moreover, while the United States has yet to ratify either the
Kyoto Protocal, more than 800 mayors representing more than 80 million people in the United States have subscribed to efforts to respond to climate change.  Those activities are, in part, the outgrowth of translocal organizations of government actors (or "TOGAs") that serve as conduits, at times "domesticating" what could be seen as "foreign" law.  Those practices cut across a wide array of concerns, and their trajectories can be progressive (such as the spread of the concept of gender mainstreaming found in the Commonwealth countries, the EU, and in the United Nations in its efforts to make meaningful its Convention on the Elimination of All
Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW)) or not (such as the shared
shift toward regimes of preventive detention). This session will examine both the practices of law's migration and the theoretical questions raised by the import and export -- by diverse sets of actors, from judges to NGOs to elected officials  -- of legal rules.

About the speakers:
Judith Resnik is the Arthur Liman Professor of Law at Yale Law School, where she teaches about federalism, procedure, feminism, and local and global interventions to diminish inequalities and subordination. Her writings include Law as Affiliation: “Foreign” Law, Democratic Federalism, and the Sovereigntism of the Nation State, (International Journal of Constitutional Law, 2008); Representing Justice: From Renaissance Iconography to Twenty-First Century Courthouses, (with Dennis E. Curtis) (published in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 2007); Law's Migration: American Exceptionalism, Silent Dialogues, and Federalism's Multiple Ports of Entry (published in the Yale Law Journal, 2006); Judicial Selection and Democratic Theory: Demand, Supply, and Life Tenure (published in a symposium in Cardozo Law Review, 2005); and Trial as Error, Jurisdiction as Injury: Transforming the Meaning of Article III (published in the Harvard Law Review, 2000). Her book, Migrations and Mobilities: Citizenship, Borders, and Gender (co-edited with Seyla Benhabib) has recently been published by New York University Press.

Joanne Scott is Professor of European Law at UCL Faculty of Laws and Member of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. She taught previously at the Universities of Cambridge, Queen Mary and Kent. She has been a regular visiting professor at Columbia Law School, and was a visiting professor at Harvard Law School in 2005/6. Joanne's main areas of research are in EU Law, WTO Law, and the interface between the two. She is particularly interested in environmental governance. This is reflected in her recent writing on the EU Water Framework Directive and on the new REACH Regulation concerning chemicals regulation. Joanne has recently prepared a commentary on the SPS Agreement, forming part of an OUP series of commentaries on the various WTO Agreements. As a result she developed an interest in non-judicial governance mechanisms in the WTO (such as the SPS Committee).

Albert Weale will be joining the department as Professor of Political Theory and Public Policy at UCL Department of Political Science from 1 January 2010. A Fellow of the British Academy and Chair of its Research Committee, he also chairs the Nuffield Bioethics Committee. He currently holds an ESRC Professorial Fellowship on ‘Social Contract, Deliberative Democracy and Public Policy’, which he will be transferring from Essex to UCL along with his research team. As well as contributing to on-going research and teaching within the department on political theory and public policy, particularly on democracy and citizenship in the EU and projects in the Constitution Unit on the deliberative qualities of Parliament, Professor Weale’s work on health and environmental policy will bring new policy areas to the department and add respectively to the UCL cross-faculty initiatives within the Institute of Global Health and the Centre for Philosophy,  Justice and Health and its MA in the PPE of Health, and UCL’s Environment Institute.

About the Centre for Law and Governance in Europe
The Centre for Law and Governance in Europe is a research and teaching centre in all areas of EU law and governance. It is co-directed by Dr Ioannis Lianos and Professor Joanne Scott, and brings together more than a dozen scholars in this area.

The research interests of the members of the Centre are diverse. They include the constitutional and administrative law of the EU, including external relations, and a wide range of policy areas. Prominent among the latter are social policy, competition policy, migration policy, environmental policy, employment policy, consumer policy, agricultural policy, and intellectual property.

One feature of the research undertaken by members of the Centre is a conviction that it is through analysis of distinct policy areas that the constitutional and administrative law of the EU can best be illuminated and evaluated. The interests of members of the Centre in governance takes them beyond a static analysis of institutional form in the EU. Much of the research undertaken is concerned with the emergence of novel governance forms, which bring together different levels of governance, and private as well as public actors. Many of these experiments in governance are controversial, raising important legitimacy concerns. Addressing these concerns is at the heart of the research of many members of the Centre.