CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF LAW WORKSHOP
presents
Jonathan Yovel
University of Haifa
Language and Power in Law’s House: The Polyphony of Self-Representation
Tuesday, November 19, 2013
12:30 - 2:00
Solarium (room FA2) - Falconer Hall
84 Queen's Park
How does language mediate our access to justice? Specifically, how do we access justice when it is not mediated by professional counsel and technical legal language? This paper explores what language allows, but also how it spoils the communicative representation of experience in court. It does this through presenting the encounter with justice of non-represented litigants, who approach courts equipped with their ordinary linguistic competences, vocabularies, narrative patterns, conceptions of relevance and of binding social norms. The paper, based on ethnographic research conducted in Israel's ethnically-diverse northern region, attempts to raise general critical claims. It presents a set of challenges to conventional notions of due process based on tacit biases in favor of some patterns of linguistic argumentation over others, then correlates those with a set of demographic parameters such a ethnicity, gender, income level, education and age. It then presents law as a locus of linguistic polyphony and attempts to draw conclusions as to the significance of polyphony both to self-representation and to a socially-oriented, institutional and relational conception of law in more general terms.
Jonathan Yovel is a professor of law and humanities at the University of Haifa, Israel, who is currently a Straus Fellow at NYU Law School. He has studied law, philosophy and linguistics at Tel Aviv, Oxford, Northwestern and Chicago. His diverse work lies mostly at the junction of the linguistic construction of normativity in various forms, yet he has also worked and published in legal theory, political theory, international and comparative law, contract law and theory, formal and applied logic, human rights law, pragmatics and metapragmatics, narrative theory, Biblical hermeneutics, law and cinema and the epistemological relations between law and the social sciences. His most recent work attempts to render a new account for the role of legal language in secularization processes in early modernity that centers on cultural and literary texts rather than on the canon of liberal political philosophy. Yovel advises and appears for various civil rights NGOs in Supreme Court cases and has testified in parliamentary committees on international justice, minority rights, election finance and other issues. Yovel has recently held the position of senior research scholar at Yale Law School; prior to that he has taught or held visiting research positions at Columbia Law School, The Max Planck Institute for Public International Law (Heidelberg) and for Comparative and International Private Law (Hamburg), Toronto Faculty of Law and Brooklyn Law School and has served as an academic observer at UNCITRAL. He is a returning visiting professor at Lucerne University. Since 2009 he has been conducting the interdisciplinary Aquinas Reading Group (which he founded). His work was published in some forty articles in law reviews and peer-edited journals, book chapters and encyclopedia entries in the US, Europe and Israel. Since 2011 Yovel serves as a lay judge on Israel’s Court of Standard Contracts. Yovel has also published collections of short stories (Trojan Horse, 2009) and poetry (Songs of the Homo Urbanus, 2005) and has translated into Hebrew work by Aquinas, Milton’s Samson Agonistes, and verse from English, French and Aquitaine.
A light lunch will be provided.
For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.
