An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Michael Murphy (Postdoctoral Fellow 2022; Max Planck Institute of Comparative and International Private Law)
A Post-Western Jurisprudence: Critical Cosmopolitanism, the Plurality of Pluralism, and agency
The primary objectives of this concept paper are not only to enquire into what jurisprudence is, but to also envision what can it achieve? To do so it takes up Andrew Halpin’s challenge to invert the apex of jurisprudential methodology, traditionally majestically detached from existing social relationships, to root it in the ground of actual social processes. The recent proliferation of juristic engagements with notions of legal pluralism(s) and the globalisation of ideas is timely, important, and required. However, the fundamental concern of this paper is that these run the risk of propagating another form of conceptual Eurocentrism, a project of foundationalism, that subjects legal reasoning to isomorphic conformity with a conceptual structure implied by text, precedent, or legal personality. To contribute to these debates, this paper aims to advance the domain of jurisprudence by drawing on new perspectives from the socio-epistemic logic of a post-western account of critical and cosmopolitan social theory (CCT). The ultimate units of analysis for CCT are a radical pluralism, grounded in an enactive and relational account of individual and collective agency. The main claim of this paper is that a post-Western account of jurisprudence can offer the legal imaginary, and democracy, the opportunity to imagine new legal-ontological identities, human, non-human, collectivities, legal subjects. To develop this novel approach the intention is to critically engage CCT with the works of William Twining (global and pluralistic jurisprudence), Eugen Ehrlich (living law), Patrick Glenn (cosmopolitan logic and convivencia), and Santi Romano (legal orders and consubstantiality between the individual and society). What emerges through pollinating these works with CCT is that mainstream understanding of jurisprudence, universal, monist, temporal, and concerned with the personality of legal entities, is transiently underdetermined. The introduction of a radical account of pluralism, a plurality of pluralism (beyond cognitivism), that recognises the ontological irreducibility of factual existence’s meaningful relationality, and an account of legal and political agency understood as enactive and generative, rather than a passive norm-taker, offers the potential for a juristic imagination that arises through an energetic interaction with underdetermination. Its grounding in existing social relations, transcending the obsolete oppositions of subjectivist or holistic accounts of social reality, looks to the loci of enunciation of injustices. This site of legal reasoning provides it jurisgenerative potential. Epistemically, this allows such an account to move beyond the application of absolute universalism to instead draw from multiple sites of evidence gathering; methodologically rather than focus on monistic unts of analysis its emphasis is on the plurality of plural sites of rationality; its modal focus on spatiality reflects its concern with engaging with the facticity of everyday life, rather than temporal ideals; finally its social ontological commitment is to enactive human agency rather than a legal modality focused on temporality.
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/81322391722
Passcode: Vr8f3ew2