A humanities of resistance: fragments for a legal history of humanity

Law and the Humanities: An Introduction brings together a distinguished group of scholars from law schools and an array of the disciplines in the humanities. Contributors come from the United States and abroad in recognition of the global reach of this field. This book is, at one and the same time, a stock taking both of different national traditions and of the various modes and subjects of law and humanities scholarship. It is also an effort to chart future directions for the field. By reviewing and analyzing existing scholarship and providing thematic content and distinctive arguments, it offers to its readers both a resource and a provocation. Thus, Law and the Humanities marks the maturation of this ‘law and’ enterprise and will spur its further development

‘Framing the project’ of international human rights law: Reflections on the dysfunctional ‘family’ of the Universal Declaration

Full text embargoed until November 2013.The task of ‘framing the project’ of international human rights law is daunting to say the least. First, there is the sheer enormity and complexity of the international human rights law ‘project’: adequately mapping the subject and its key related issues is impossible in a whole book, let alone a short chapter. Secondly, it is daunting because of the sense of epistemic responsibility involved. Every framing inevitably involves selection – if not pre-selection – through the conscious (and/or unconscious) placing of focus upon features or factors considered to be significant and/or valuable. As Gitlin puts it, framing is a way of choosing, underlining and presenting ‘what exists, what happens and what matters’. In this sense, the founding document (or as Entman might put it, the inaugural ‘communicating text’) of international human rights law (the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, UDHR) functions as a particularly potent form of framing, for it selects aspects of perceived reality, making them not just salient but symbolically central to the entire philosophical, moral, juridical order designated by the term ‘international human rights law’

ENTRE LA POLIS Y EL COSMOS: EL COSMOPOLITISMO QUE VENDRÁ

A través de una revisión de la tradición cosmopolita, en la cual se desestabiliza la versión corriente de dicha tradición (cínica en vez de estoica) y se la resitúa geográficamente (en Scythia en vez de una Grecia europeizada), el autor propone no solo una genealogía más plural, sino antes bien, una imagen del cosmopolitanismo como resistencia y actividad política de rebeldía que active el pasado en el presente desde el punto de vista de un futuro emancipatorio por venir. Ello resulta en una fuerte crítica del cosmopolitanismo liberal y su reemplazo por una forma anti-imperial y emancipatoria

Constitutional law and freedom of expression: a critique of the Constitution of the public sphere in legal discourse and practice with special reference to 20th century American law and jurisprudence

Freedom of expression has been postulated in the American legal system as a constitutional right and the Federal Judiciary has undertaken to enforce it against legislative enactments that abridge it. Thus, the various liberal and democratic justifications for the free exchange of ideas, opinions and information have been moulded in legal theory and practice with the theory of constitutionalism. Constitutionalism is analysed as the amalgam of the theories of natural law, legal positivism and popular sovereignty. In the 19th century the natural law element predominated and freedom was identified with property rights. But after the New Deal, the democratic element and political freedom asserted a central position in constitutional discourse. Constitutional theory, however, remained within a paradigm dominated by concepts of the classical political philosophy: power is presented as a unitary essence, law as a unified and coherent body of rules and legitimation as a normative characteristic of the sociopolitical order, while the Constitution represents the unity of these elements. The constitutional mode of discourse built around these concepts, seeks to emphasize the legal and social continuity guaranteed by the Constitution and the Supreme Court but is a poor description of the mass democratic- welfare state. Power should be examined as relational, law as a social process politically determined and contradictory and legitimation as a complex and contested characteristic not exclusively normative. American law and jurisprudence on freedom of expression are then examined. The cases are analysed as the political claims of groups and individuals to enter the public sphere; judicial intervention is one of the means through which the latter is constituted. Issues, ideas, individuals and organisations claim participation in it and through their officially sanctioned admission/exclusion the parameters of public discourse are continuously contested and differentially demarcated in each historical moment. Four periods of free speech adjudication are distinguished, each of which presents thematic and doctrinal similarities. The "bad tendency" of speech doctrine was utilised in the first quarter of the century against socialists, pacifists and syndicalists. In the 30s and 40s the contextual characteristics of expression became the subject of regulation and the legal persecution of political dissenters became relaxed. But in the 50s and 60s an attempt to purge the public sphere from radical or reformist ideas and people was undertaken, which was endorsed by the Supreme Court by means of the "balancing" doctrine. Finally, in the 60s and 70s the federal judiciary distinguished among the various methods of protest through a number of particularistic approaches and while it did not recognise a full right to protest publicly, it prevented an outright legal repression of public political dissent

The “Right to the Event”: the legality and morality of revolution and resistance

The rights of modernity, first and foremost the right to resistance against oppression and domination, were created by revolution. The philosophical rejection and the removal of this right from law was an attempt to foreclose radical change by making a particular conception of legal rights the insurance policy for the established order. The attempt was doomed to fail. This essay examines the legal, jurisprudential and moral arguments for the right to resistance. It concludes that a “right to the event” has always accompanied legal rights in a ghostly form ensuring that the law is regularly shaken to its core and not allowed to become sclerotic

Notes towards an analytics of resistance

New forms, subjects and strategies of resistance have emerged in recent mass protests and insurrections, from the Arab Spring to Spain, Greece, Turkey and Brazil. Insurrections, exodus and democratic experimentation respond to the economic and social landscape of neoliberal capitalism and the biopolitical operation of power. Using historical and recent examples, this essay proposes seven theses on the philosophy of resistance. We have entered a new age of resistance and potentially radical change after fifty years of failures and defeats of the left

Democracy, Neoliberalism, and Resistance: an interview with Costas Douzinas

No abstract (available)

The management of Castleman's disease of the mediastinum: a case report

Castleman's disease or angiofollicular lymph node hyperplasia is a rare clinical entity that may present in many sites and with a variety of symptoms. We report here a case of unicentric Castleman's disease (hyaline vascular pattern) located in the mediastinum as a solitary mass. The patient was a Caucasian female 58 years old presented after incidental discovery of the mass in a x-ray. In Castleman's disease surgery is generally recommended for localised lesions to remove the mass as completely as possible reserving other treatment modalities for unresectable cases or multicentric disease