About this Event
Edinburgh Law School’s ‘Global Law Futures’ seminar series explores questions relating to global law, broadly construed, from transdisciplinary and diverse methodological perspectives. Law in a plural global context requires a radical re-imagining of the practice, study, and theory of legal orthodoxies. This seminar series questions and attempts to push the boundaries of thinking about law. The series will touch on issues such as the space-time of legal imaginaries, the place of law in times of anthropocentric ecological crisis, the relationalities and materialities of law, what it means to decolonise legal thinking in a global context, the meaning of ‘global legal order(s)’, the relationship between law and algorithmic governance, the exploration of decentralised and deformalised legal practices, and many more besides.
Beginning in January 2024, the seminar series is convened by Amalia Amaya Navarro, Gail Lythgoe, and Veronica Ruiz Abou-Nigm, collaborating with Nehal Bhuta, Deval Desai, Simone Lamont-Black. The series is supported by the Edinburgh Centre for International Global Law and the Edinburgh Centre for Legal Theory.
About this event
Horatia Muir Watt will speak about her book The Law's Ultimate Frontier: Towards an Ecological Jurisprudence (Hart, 2023). This important book offers an ambitious and interdisciplinary vision of how private international law (or the conflict of laws) might serve as a heuristic for re-working our general understandings of legality in directions that respond to ever-deepening global ecological crises. Unusual in legal scholarship, the author borrows (in bricolage mode) from the work of Bruno Latour, alongside indigenous cosmologies, extinction theories and Levinassian phenomenology, to demonstrate why this field's specific frontier location at the outpost of the law – where it is viewed from the outside as obscure and from the inside as a self-contained normative world – generates its potential power to transform law generally and globally.
Combining pragmatic and pluralist theory with an excavation of 'shadow' ecological dimensions of law, the author, a recognised authority within the field as conventionally understood, offers a truly global view. Put simply, it is a generational magnum opus. All international and transnational lawyers, be they in the private or public field, should read this book.
About the speaker
Horatia Muir Watt is a tenured Professor at Sciences Po, where she is Co-Director of the program Global Governance Studies (which covers private, public and economic international law, arbitration and litigation, human rights and development) within the Master’s Degree in Economic Law. Horatia Muir Watt received a PhD in private international law from the University of Panthéon-Assas Paris 2 in 1985 and passed the agrégation examination in private law in 1986 (ranked second). She is a tenured Professor in private international law and in comparative law. She taught at the University of Tours, at the University of Paris XI, and at the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne between 1996 and 2009 and was appointed to Sciences Po in 2009, when she participated actively in the creation of the law school. She is a Member of the Institute of International Law (since 2013) and of the Institut Universitaire de France (since 2018).
She is Director of the Revue critique de droit international privé (the leading French-language journal on private international law) and a member of the publication committees of numerous other legal journals, among which the Journal of Private International Law, European Review of Contract Law and Transnational Legal Theory. She is part of the core faculty of IGLP (Institute of Global Law and Policy).
She runs the PILAGG (private international law and global governance) research group of which the launching article is « Private International Law beyond the Schism », (2011) 2(3) Transnational Legal Theory 347–427. The research group’s collective work has given rise to several books, published with OUP, Edward Elgar and Pédone.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Edinburgh Law School, South Bridge, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
USD 0.00
