The question of form: Methodological notes on dialectics and international law

Emil Cioran often likened the experience of abandoning his native Romanian for French to submitting to a straitjacket.2 Indeed, the language in which he would go on to secure his reputation was itself, he wrote, best understood as 'the combination of a straitjacket and a salon'.3 It was only by undergoing an 'exercise in ascesis',4 suspending his commitments to what he regarded as an earthier, less regimented tradition, that he had been able to don the garb of a French author, if still only as a 'Balkan reject'.5 The rigour and crispness of his adopted tongue flew in the face of his desire. The severity of its lucidity stifled his passions, or simply channelled them along directions deviating from their natural path. '[Y]et', Cioran went on to observe, 'it is precisely on account of this incompatibility that I have attached myself to this language'.6 So much so that what caused him the greatest grief of all was to see that '[t]oday, when this language is in full decline,... the French themselves do not seem to mind.' 7 Copyrigh

‘Receiving’ the Swiss Civil Code: Translating authority in early republican Turkey

The promulgation of the Turkish Civil Code of 1926, a nuanced translation of the Swiss Civil Code of 1907, has long been celebrated as an exceptionally thoroughgoing instance of ‘legal transplantation’. Despite their pervasiveness, such assessments cloud appreciation of the multifarious power dynamics at work in the Code's preparation and implementation, especially the mechanisms through which it was made to serve Kemalist ideology's twofold agenda of ‘modernising’ socio-legal relations while retaining – and, in certain instances, augmenting – those ‘traditional’ practices which early republican legislators and administrators found to be of especial value for their ‘nation-building’ project. The chief objective of this study is to reveal the inadequacies of the Turkish Civil Code's standard characterisation as a ‘success story’ in comparative legal scholarship. Specifically, I demonstrate that the 1926 Code is best understood as the product of a deeply gendered tension between Kemalism's dedication to a state-driven programme of national ‘modernisation’ and elements of the ‘tradition’ this programme was crafted for the sake of mobilising, radicalising and transforming

Neoliberalism and the new international economic order: A history of “contemporary legal thought”

Duncan Kennedy’s “Three Globalizations of Law and Legal Thought: 1850–2000” (2006) is well known for its engaging macro-historical typology of Euro-American law. A staple of the kind of legal structuralism that examines (partial) indeterminacy in interpretation and adjudication against the background of law’s generative “grammar” (Desautels-Stein 2015: 56), Kennedy’s essay is a decidedly taxonomic enterprise, relying on a relatively small set of analytical tools to map a complex series of doctrinal and theoretical developments across a range of different periods and jurisdictions. For Kennedy, the history of Euro-American law’s consolidation into a more or less universal idiom, a common point of reference for jurists throughout the extra-European world, is best understood as having proceeded in three stages, which he terms “classical legal thought,” “the social,” and “contemporary legal consciousness,” respectively. A product mainly of the German legal academy, “classical legal thought,” on Kennedy’s rendition, is distinguished chiefly by a desire to draw and maintain a series of sharp distinctions: public and private, status and contract, market and household, domestic and international, and, perhaps most fundamentally, the legal and the extralegal. The primary juridical manifestation of a late nineteenth-century laissez-faire sensibility, “classical legal thought” insists on enforceable contracts, stresses the need for clear proprietary title, fetishizes notions of individual will and consent, and generally prioritizes private over public international law. Law, on this account, is an apolitical and essentially deductive science that generates largely predictable results and congeals (at least aspirationally) in the form of an internally coherent and immanently rational system. For its part, “the social,” originating in a wide-ranging critique of its predecessor, is marked by a commitment to the view that law is a purposive enterprise, both responsive to and responsible for “society,” this being an ill-defined concept typically affiliated with broadly solidaristic notions of “organic” interdependence. Viewed from the standpoint of such sociological jurisprudence, which achieves its fullest form in the interwar period and strives to remain aloof from nineteenth-century liberalism and Marxism alike, “classical legal thought” is excessively individualistic and unsustainably formalistic

Fabricating fidelity: Nation-building, international law, and the greek"turkish population exchange

Supported by Athens and Ankara, and implemented largely by the League of Nations, the Greek"Turkish population exchange uprooted and resettled hundreds of thousands. The aim here was not to organize plebiscites, channel self-determination claims, or install protective mechanisms for minorities " all familiar features of the Allies' management of imperial disintegration in Europe after 1919. Nor was it to restructure a given economy and society from top to bottom, generating an entirely new legal order in the process; this had often been the case with colonialism, and would characterize much of the Mandate System in the interbellum. Instead, the goal was to deploy a unique legal mechanism " not in conformity with European practice, but also distinct from most extra-European governance regimes " in order to resolve ethno-national conflict by redividing land, reshaping national identities, and unleashing new processes of capital accumulation

Formalizing Displacement : International Law and Population Transfers

Provides a detailed study into the 1922-34 exchange of minorities between Greece and Turkey, in which nearly two million people were forcibly relocated Examines how the enforced mass movement of people was formalized through international law Analyzes the role of the League of Nations and the Permanent Court of International Justice in the legitimation of population transfer Investigates the Ottoman Empire's significance for the development of minority protection, population transfer, and humanitarian interventio

Experimenting with Temporal Relational Databases

In this paper we describe an implementation of a temporal relational database management system based on attribute timestamping. The algebraic language of the system includes relational algebra operators, restructuring operators and temporal operators. We then use this system to carry out experiments on the performance of different types of temporal databases: databases using attribute timestamping, databases using tuple timestamping where relations are in temporal normal form and databases using tuple timestamping where a single relation is used. We run sample queries against these types of temporal databases and measure the processing time of these queries. This study verifies that the major performance trade off between different types of temporal databases is between the restructuring (unpack) operation needed in temporal databases using attribute timestamping and the join operation needed in temporal databases using tuple timestamping. Furthermore, the experiments show that keepin..