Cultures of Law in Global Contexts

Vision, Goals and Thematic Basis Our objective is to create and promote an environment of intellectual exchange between the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Law, as well as critically to examine synergies of culture and law in various contexts. Studies of law and culture are essential research concerns of a wide number of faculty and graduate students on the UIUC campus. A framework facilitating this particular area of cross-disciplinary conversation is needed on the UIUC campus. Law is essential to human society. Legal practices and discourses reflect conceptions of justice and order, and respond to historical events and cultural transformations. All across the globe, law defines social boundaries and norms and regulates political and economic development. This project studies contemporary problems concerning the multiplicity of justices as a historical phenomenon by which diverse cultural idioms and value systems have collided, or been elided, with each other. Our global environment presents serious challenges emerging from the multiplicity of justices, leading to confusion and confrontation on several fronts: clandestine economies and the criminalization of poverty, terrorism and ultranationalism, sustainability and economic development, gender and immigration law, health and commercialization, medical law and ethics. These challenges require scholars and graduate students to understand and communicate not only across national/continental borders but also across disciplinary lines. An understanding of multiple justices is essential in an age where interactions between peoples from different cultural backgrounds increase with unprecedented speed and scale, whether it is awareness of the vexed history of applying international law principles developed in the West; the legacy of competing interpretations of justice and legality inherited from the past; the importing of biomedical ethics and law in a community with a different view of personhood and the medicine-society relationship; inter-state collaboration and conflict in defining terrorism after 9-11; or different approaches to financial regulation and monetary policies in different cultural contexts. We must cultivate an environment in which our graduate students can develop their ability to identify and study culturally-rooted problems in law and economics arising from globalization, with attention both to macro phenomena and local histories.