Warwick Law School News

Against jurisprudential reductions of Spinoza’s thinking to a kind of eccentric version of Hobbes, this book argues that Spinoza’s theory of natural right contains an important idea of absolute freedom, which would be inconceivable within Hobbes’ own schema. Spinoza famously thought that the universe and all of the beings and events within it are fully determined by their causes. This has led jurisprudential commentators to believe that Spinoza has no room for natural right – in the sense that whatever happens by definition has a ‘right’ to happen. But, although this book demonstrates how Spinoza constructs a system in which right is understood as the work of machines, by fixing right as determinate and invariable, Stephen Connolly argues that Spinoza is not limiting his theory. The universe as a whole is capable of acting only in determinate ways but, he argues, for Spinoza these exist within a field of infinite possibilities. In an analysis that offers much to ongoing attempts to conceive of justice post-foundationally, the argument of this book is that Spinoza opens up right to a future of determinate interventions –as when an engineer, working with already-existing materials, improves a machine. As such, an idea of freedom emerges in Spinoza: as the artful rearrangement of the given into new possibilities. An exciting and original contribution, this book is an invaluable addition, both to the new wave of interest in Spinoza’s philosophy, and to contemporary legal and political theory.

Featuring an original introduction by the editors, this important collection of essays explores the main issues surrounding the regulation of the environment. The expert contributors illustrate that regulating the environment in the UK is conceptually complex, involves a diverse range of institutions, techniques and methodologies and crosses geographical and national boundaries. In the USA it is more formalised, juridical, adversarial and formally dependent upon legal rules. The articles highlight the fact that despite differences in the UK and the USA's regulatory styles, environmental regulation today has much in common with both traditions.

Law School MSP student Aneesa Khan was awarded a Giving to Warwick prize last week for Widening Participation work. It is a great achievement and very well deserved given Aneesa's dedication to the Law School and the University's Widening Participation agenda.

The new Law School extension was officially opened on Tuesday 28 October by the University Vice-Chancellor, Professor Nigel Thrift. Current and former colleagues from the Law School and across the University, and students, attended to celebrate the new space and its impact on the department.

Few concerns preoccupy contemporary progressive thought as much as the issue of how to achieve a sustainable human society. The problems impeding this goal include those of how to arrest induced global environmental change (GEC), persistent disagreements about the contribution of economic activities to GEC and further differences in views on how these activities can be reformed in order to reduce the rate of change and thus to mitigate threats to much life on Earth.

A tribute to the continuing inspiration of James Boyd White’s work on law.

In 2013, an international group of jurists gathered in London to mark the 40th anniversary of the publication of James Boyd White’s The Legal Imagination, the book that is widely credited with instigating and inspiring the modern “law and literature” and “law and humanities” movements in university teaching and research. The authors of each of the twelve essays in this collection offer a personal reflection on teaching, researching, and practicing law in the light of White’s invitation to reimagine the law and our own relationship with it.

Julio Faundez is to present his lecture, "Bringing About Legal and Political Change for Good Governance: Critical Perspectives on Douglass North and New Institutional Economics" on Friday 26 September at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington DC.

Ana Aliverti's research on "Foreign nationals before the criminal courts: immigration status, deportability and punishment" has been awarded funding from the British Academy. Beginning in October the project wims to investigate the impact of immigration status on the treatment of defendants before the criminal justice system.

Alan Norrie will present a keynote address on ‘Criminal Justice and the Blaming Relation’ at the Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology (ANZSOC) Conference in Sydney, Australia from 1-3 October 2014.

Professor Norrie's address will expand upon his longterm research in criminal law and social theory as well as the development of a new project that will move from the standard legal form of criminal justice (“blaming relation”) to criminal justice's connection with social injustice, the problems of justice when societies perpetrate genocide, the nature of the preventive turn in recent criminal justice, and issues concerning law, transitional and restorative justice.

Alan Norrie’s essay ‘Justice on the Slaughter-Bench: The Problem of War Guilt In Arendt and Jaspers’ is being translated into Spanish and published as a short book (La Justicia en el banquillo de la muerte : El problema de la Culpa de la guerra en H. Arendt y K. Jaspers) by the Universidad Libre, Bogota.

He will discuss it at a seminar in Bogota on ‘Constitutions for Peace’ for law students, legal academics and practitioners on 25 September 2014. The purpose of the seminar is to think about the role of law in Colombia’s postconflict situation, following peace negotiations in Habana.

This book maps out, from a variety of theoretical standpoints, the challenges generated by European integration and EU citizenship for community membership, belonging and polity-making beyond the state. It does so by focusing on three main issues of relevance for how EU citizenship has developed and its capacity to challenge state sovereignty and authority as the main loci of creating and delivering rights and protection. First, it looks at the relationship between citizenship of the Union and European identity and assesses how immigration and access to nationality in the Member States impact on the development of a common European identity. Secondly, it discusses how the idea of solidarity interacts with the boundaries of EU citizenship as constructed by the entitlement and capacity of mobile citizens to enjoy equality and social rights as EU citizens. Thirdly, the book engages with issues of EU citizenship and equality as the building blocks of the EU project. By engaging with these themes, this volume provides a topical and comprehensive account of the present and future development of Union citizenship and studies the collisions between the realisation of its constructive potential and Member State autonomy.