Hans Lindahl (University of Tilburg & Queen Mary University of London)
Monday, 18 May 2020, 15.30 – 17.00 hrs
The paper ‘Inside and Outside Global Law’ is available online from Sydney Law Review.
This seminar with Hans Lindahl will be the first in a series of inter-faculty events organised within the framework of the sector plan theme ‘Transformative Effects of Globalisation in Law.’ Participants in the seminar are warmly encouraged to read the paper in advance.
Abstract
Protracted and bitter resistance by alter-globalisation and anti-globalisation movements around the world shows that the globalisation of law transpires as the globalisation of inclusion and exclusion. Humanity is inside and outside global law in all its possible manifestations. How is this possible? Conceptually: how must legal orders be structured such that, even if we can now speak of law beyond State borders, no emergent global legal order is possible that can include without excluding? Normatively: is an authoritative politics of boundaries possible, which neither postulates the possibility of realising an all-inclusive global legal order nor accepts resignation or paralysis in the face of the globalisation of inclusion and exclusion? In the spirit of Julius Stone’s approach to jurisprudence, addressing these urgent questions demands integrating doctrinal, sociological, and philosophical perspectives and insights concerning the law.
The Speaker
Hans Lindahl holds the chair of legal philosophy at Tilburg University, the Netherlands, and a chair of global law at the Law Department of Queen Mary University of London. He obtained law and philosophy degrees at the Universidad Javeriana, in Bogotá, Colombia, before taking a doctorate at the Higher Institute of Philosophy of the University of Louvain (Belgium) in 1994. He has worked since at Tilburg, first in the Philosophy Department, currently in the Law School. His primary areas of research are legal and political philosophy. Lindahl has published numerous articles in these fields. His monograph, Fault Lines of Globalization: Legal Order and the Politics of A-Legality, was published with Oxford University Press in 2013 (also published in Italian and Spanish translations). A follow-up monograph, Authority and the Globalisation of Inclusion and Exclusion, has been published with Cambridge University Press in 2018. His current research is primarily oriented to issues germane to globalization processes, such as the concept of legal order in a global setting; the relation of boundaries to freedom, justice, and security; a politics of boundary-setting alternative to both cosmopolitanism and communitarianism; transformations of legal authority and political representation; immigration and global justice; collective identity and difference in the process of European integration. In dealing with these topics Lindahl draws on (post-) phenomenology and theories of collective action of analytical provenance, while also seeking to do justice to the nitty-gritty of positive law.