Faculty Colloquium
Presents:
Horatia Muir-Watt
Sciences Po
Jurisprudence Of The Border
Thursday October 31, 2024
12:30pm - 2pm
Falconer Hall, 84 Queens Park
Room: Michael J. Trebilcock Solarium FH103/FA2
Abstract: An “ontology of the border” is a mode of existence that weaves in-between different life worlds and cultural forms, crossing frontiers, changing shape, creating hybridity and revealing our enmeshed interdependence with alterity. It acknowledges the coexistence on our planet of multifarious universes that are not separate or exclusive, but overlapping and interacting. For lawyers, the primary lesson to be learned from those who “dwell in the border” is that our normative universe is not one (in the sense of unique or exclusive) but multiple (in that a plurality of modes of access to reality coexist in time and space). Moreover, these alternative strands of in-between thinking all seek to make visible beneath all the (modern) binaries and categories that construct our vision of the world or affect our sense of belonging, the fuzziness of confines (metaphorical or geographical) and the foultitude of traces, residues, practices and concurrent imaginaries that contribute to form our subjectivities. Importantly, then, these are all attempts, in diverse disciplinary idioms, to unearth and trace the constitution of power asymmetries niched within our nomos. Dwelling on the border is a resistance to colonial forms of universalism enodeed within the “jurisprudence of jurisdiction” that flattens lifeforms and empties the world of its alterity.
Horatia Muir Watt is Professor at the Law School, Sciences-Po Paris, where she co-directs the speciality ‘Global Governance Studies’ within the Master of Economic Law. She teaches and publishes in the field of private international law and comparative law, where she develops critical and interdisciplinary approaches. She was elected in 2013 to the Institute of international law and in 2018 to the Institut Universitaire de France. She is co-director of the Revue critique de droit international privé and on the editorial board of the Journal of Private International Law, European Review of Contract Law and Transnational legal Theory. She is co-editor of International Studies in the Theory of Private Law (Hart, Kluwer, Dalloz), Private law in European Context (Kluwer Law International) and A droit ouvert (Dalloz, with Antoine Lyon-Caen). Her books include Aspects économiques de droit international privé (Recueil des Cours, Hague Academy of International Law, 2005); Droit international privé (Thémis, 2017) with Dominique Bureau; a co-edited volume (with D. Fernandez Arroyo), Private international law as global governance (OUP, 2014); Private International Law and the Application of Public Law, (Elgar, 2016) ; Discours sur les méthodes du droit international privé : des formes juridiques de l’inter-alterite, (RCADI 2017); and (with Lucia Bizikova et al.) Global Private international law : adjudication without frontiers, 2019. Her latest publication is Law’s Ultimate Frontier : Towards an Ecological Jurisprudence (Hart 2023). She co-directs the public research seminar designed to encourage interdisciplinary thinking from a legal standpoint, attached to a wider research and pedagogical initiative co-organised by the Law, History, and Political Theory departments at Sciences-po Paris.
For further workshop information contact events.law@utoronto.ca
