Archive of Events

Archive of Events

Location: Freiburg – via Zoom (link see below)

Inequality: A Key Social Determinant

Guest Lecture Series “Society: Status Quo and Normative Change”
Societies with bigger income differences between rich and poor suffer from higher rates of a wide range of health and social problems, including poorer life expectancy, worse mental health, more violence, drug abuse, and lower levels of trust. The effects of inequality also reduce the prospects of moving towards envi­ron­mental sustainability, and our general willingness to pull to­gether and provide mutual support. Prof. Dr. em. Wilkinson will also elaborate on social and psychological processes behind these patterns. [more]
The lecture will examine how questions of cultural difference be­tween Member States’ legal traditions are being constructed, ad­dressed, and resolved in the development of the European Area of Freedom, Security, and Justice. It will explore some of the paths that may be followed by the EU in seeking to cope with national diversity in the field of criminal justice, and provides some in­sights into various forms of legal and cultural resistance offered by Member States to the European harmonization process. The lecture is held against the background that the expanding ambi­tions of the European Union on criminal matters have been met with increasing hostility to deeper European integration. This sheds light on the growing potential for conflict between ever expanding EU law on the one hand and national legal traditions on the other, while EU primary law emphasizes the need to accommodate national diversity within the European framework. [more]
Interpretive practices of courts and other adjudicative bodies indicate that the law of any community comprises not only (i) an explicit part that consists of enactments, judicial decisions, and settled legal practices, but also (ii) an implicit part which judges rely on in adjudicating novel issues not addressed by any part of the explicit law. Legal positivists have in general been resistant to recognizing implicit law, while natural law theorists have conceived implicit law in moralized terms. Both views appear to be discredited when checked against considered interpretative judgments. This lecture broaches a new way of conceiving implicit law by exploiting two analogies: (i) an analogy between implicit law and implied fictional truths – i.e. what are true in a work of fiction but are not explicitly specified as such by the author or artist; and (ii) an analogy between the interpretive principles that we rely on to generate implied fictional truths (what are often called “principles of generation” in philosophical aesthetics), and the principles that we rely on to construct counterfactual scenarios for a variety of purposes – e.g. in explaining and predicting each other’s thoughts and behavior, in our backward-looking moral emotions such as regret and relief. The two aforementioned analogical arguments suggest that the principles we rely on to generate implicit law are deep-seated and fundamental features of our psychological makeup. The overall implication that this paper teases out is that the implicit law of any legal system is neither a set of moral principles as natural law theorists argue, nor a set of principles that we agree on or manufacture as legal positivists conceive laws in general. Instead of being a product of human making, the implicit law of any legal system is likely a product of human makeup. [more]
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