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Festival Filosofia Sui Sensi / Philosophical Festival Of The Senses, Richard Mohr
Festival Filosofia Sui Sensi / Philosophical Festival Of The Senses, Richard Mohr
Richard Mohr
Three cities, three days, how many senses? I lost count in the eruption of designer menus, philosophy "master classes," children's activity spaces, all night music parties, herbs and spices, exhibitions including Picasso erotica, and strolls past the flower, fish and formaggio sections of the market in Modena. The latest edition of the city's philosophy festival organized each year since 2001 was dedicated to the senses. From Friday to Sunday, 16-18 September, 2005 Modena and its smaller neighbors Carpi and Sassuolo gave over their piazzas, exhibition spaces, libraries, restaurants and churches to the festival. The trains between the three centers were …
(Review) Critical Legal Positivism By Kaarlo Tuori, Richard Mohr
(Review) Critical Legal Positivism By Kaarlo Tuori, Richard Mohr
Richard Mohr
Kaarlo Tuori, professor of law, judge, and counsellor to the Constitutional Committee of the Finnish Parliament, has embarked on an ambitious project. He aims to build on the positivism of Kelsen and Hart, but to discover a normative justification of law which goes beyond their limited validity claims. This is the ‘critical’ element which he adds to ‘legal positivism’. Kelsen’s basic norm and Hart’s rule of recognition are irreducible underlying principles. The arbitrary nature of such principles is intellectually suspect, while their internal self referentiality renders them morally sterile. The law is the law — because we recognise it as …
Law And Identity In Spatial Contests, Richard Mohr
Law And Identity In Spatial Contests, Richard Mohr
Richard Mohr
Law has had a traditional reference to land, conceived as territory, in the notion of a jurisdiction, where the law of the land applies equally to all individuals. Recent critiques of this view have suggested that a plurality of laws may apply in particular places. How this spatial pluralism impacts on dominant views of law is considered through two instances in which law has interacted with competing conceptions of place and territory in relations between European and Indigenous Australians. Space, law and identity are seen to constitute each other in complex forms. Indigenous beliefs and practices challenge the claims to …
Reconciling Independence And Accountability In Judicial Systems, F. Contini, Richard Mohr
Reconciling Independence And Accountability In Judicial Systems, F. Contini, Richard Mohr
Richard Mohr
Since the mid 1990s, the contraction of available resources and the spread of ‘new public management’ approaches have presented new challenges to European judicial systems, expecting them to improve simultaneously their efficiency, quality of service delivery and accountability mechanisms, in line with the expectations on other branches of the public sector. Through an analysis of some of the findings of several research projects financed by different institutions, this article considers ways in which these expectations, and the projects to which they give rise, play off against the very different traditions of the law and the judiciary. In various countries these …
Judicial Evaluation In Context: Principles, Practices And Promise In Nine European Countries, Richard Mohr, F. Contini
Judicial Evaluation In Context: Principles, Practices And Promise In Nine European Countries, Richard Mohr, F. Contini
Richard Mohr
The evaluation of judges’ performance takes place in many ways. Traditionally, there are avenues of appeal and legal accountability mechanisms. More recently, ministries of justice and judicial councils across Europe have introduced a range of complaints mechanisms, quality assessment procedures and other managerial methods of judging judges and the courts within which they operate. This paper reports on a study of these mechanisms in nine member countries of the European Union. Our purpose is to survey the possible ways in which the judiciary can be evaluated, with a view to improving those practices and, ultimately, contributing to a better functioning …
Living Legal Fictions: Constituting The State Or Submerging The Signifier, Richard Mohr
Living Legal Fictions: Constituting The State Or Submerging The Signifier, Richard Mohr
Richard Mohr
This is an inquiry into the ways the state is constituted as an effective legal fiction. It is based on the premise that the state was not constituted, once and for all, some three centuries ago (as Bourdieu suggests) but that the existence of the state relies on continuing legal and social processes. The focus is on the translation from the legal to the social, specifically the semiotic interaction between law, space and daily life in the dynamics of this on-going mise en scène. This requires re-thinking a number of semiotic issues: first, Lefebvre's challenge to a semiotics which neglects …
Some Conditions For Culturally Diverse Deliberation, Richard Mohr
Some Conditions For Culturally Diverse Deliberation, Richard Mohr
Richard Mohr
This is an inquiry into the ways in which reasoning attaches to cultural context. It considers whether to seek grounds for decision-making in some common ground or in a recognition of diversity. The essay considers feminist criticisms of Habermas's discourse ethics and Benhabib's efforts to revise such an approach in response to cultural diversity. While the conditions for communication across cultures may be readily met with good will and good procedures, the conditions for reaching binding or consensual decisions are more challenging. The essay rejects the possibility of universal standards for reasoned decisions on three grounds. Reasons conforming to the …
(Review) Desmond Manderson, Songs Without Music: Aesthetic Dimensions Of Law And Justice, Richard Mohr
(Review) Desmond Manderson, Songs Without Music: Aesthetic Dimensions Of Law And Justice, Richard Mohr
Richard Mohr
This elegant, wide-ranging and stimulating book has everything but the music. In graphic form, even the music is available as a frontispiece to each chapter, introduced with an extract from the score of the music for which it is named. The work begins with a ‘Prelude’ and ‘Fugue’ (Bach) and has a ‘Requiem’ (Mozart) on the death penalty, while ‘Quartet for the End of Time’ (Messiaen) opposes modernism and the reification of law, looking to space (in legal geography), rather than time, for the source of a ‘critical pluralism’. Surprisingly, this apparently precious device works, and it works at a …
Local Court Reforms And 'Global' Law, Richard Mohr
Local Court Reforms And 'Global' Law, Richard Mohr
Richard Mohr
Discussions of globailisation arose in the late twentieth century out of economic discourse about market liberalisation and the scale and global reach of transnational corporations. Legal discussions of the subject have tended to follow in the wake of these economic and geopolitical trends.
Beyond The Bounds, Richard Mohr
Beyond The Bounds, Richard Mohr
Richard Mohr
The contributions to this edition of Law Text Culture arose from a series of workshops and seminars which Luke McNamara and I organised through the Legal Intersections Research Centre at the University of Wollongong during 2001 and 2002. Having recently formed a research group focusing on the social and disciplinary intersections of law, we set out to explore these intersections with the help of colleagues working in law, humanities and social sciences in Australia, North America and Europe. Some of their contributions to this exploration are collected here.
Authorised Performances: The Procedural Sources Of Judicial Authority, Richard Mohr
Authorised Performances: The Procedural Sources Of Judicial Authority, Richard Mohr
Richard Mohr
Media criticism of the courts, or perceptions of a declining 'public confidence' in the judiciary have led to concems over law's authority. There has been dcbate on concems over 'judicial activism' in North and South America, Europe and Australia. In Australia this has been played out in political criticism of the judges of the High Court, while other courts have come in for criticism from sections of the media for being too lenient in sentencing and generally being 'soft on crime'. Judicial concern over these criticisms has been expressed in extra-curial responses by High Court judges and in several recent …
Identity Crisis: Judgment And The Hollow Legal Subject, Richard Mohr
Identity Crisis: Judgment And The Hollow Legal Subject, Richard Mohr
Richard Mohr
modern legal subject. There is something missing, a gap in the middle of that subjectivity, which clouds our judgment. This split had its origin in the Enlightenment, its first effect being the separation of knowing from doing. Our experience of the world could only be mediated through self-conscious sense data and thought, without our being in direct contact with the satisfaction of our needs or the consequences of our actions. This new conception of subjectivity has become an impediment to judgment, since splitting the actor from the spectator, and the judge from the life of the community, results in a …
Shifting Ground: Context And Change In Two Australian Legal Systems, Richard Mohr
Shifting Ground: Context And Change In Two Australian Legal Systems, Richard Mohr
Richard Mohr
Indigenous land claims in Australia have brought Indigenous law into contact with the Australian common law, changing some of the terms of each of these systems of law. By tracing these contacts back to one of the first engagements, when the Yolngu people of northern Australia framed a petition to parliament in pictorial descriptions of their law, I explore the means by which changes have occurred. This is characterised as a process of mutual framings and re-framings. The delicate and contentious issue of meaning change in Yolngu law and in Australian common law's dealings with Indigenous law is examined in …
Flesh And The Person, Richard Mohr
Flesh And The Person, Richard Mohr
Richard Mohr
What connection is there between flesh and the legal person? Flesh is the most material aspect of human existence, while the legal person is one of its most abstract manifestations. The method is a phenomenological analysis of legal records of the body and identity, including everyday documents such as credit cards. These are analysed in terms of the information they contain or refer to, and the physical processes by which they are compiled or activated. These physical traces are linked to law and selfhood by narratives, including those by which we makes sense of our lives as well as forensic …
Enduring Signs And Obscure Meanings: Contested Coats Of Arms In Australian Jurisdictions, Richard Mohr
Enduring Signs And Obscure Meanings: Contested Coats Of Arms In Australian Jurisdictions, Richard Mohr
Richard Mohr
In the Australian state of New South Wales judges have sat under the coat of arms of the British monarchy since the nineteenth century (figure 1). Having been accustomed to seeing this symbol over the course of many years doing research in New South Wales courtrooms I was surprised to notice, during some research into the physical form of courts in 2000, that a different coat of arms had appeared above the bench in a new court building. This was the State arms of New South Wales. This change had been officially introduced into new courtrooms by an executive decision …
Territory, Landscape And Law In Three Images Of The Basque Country, Richard Mohr
Territory, Landscape And Law In Three Images Of The Basque Country, Richard Mohr
Richard Mohr
Spending time in the Basque country while preparing a contribution to a workshop on landscape and identity focussed my attention on how the Basques were expressing their own identity in their own characteristic and lovely landscape. On arriving in Bilbao a few weeks before the regional elections in 2001, I read the Spanish newspaper El Mundo's description of the Basque landscape as a "Gulag", where the populace lived in fear of terrorism and xenophobia. This was hardly the first impression that came to my mind as I walked streets full of election posters, shoppers, and groups of people dropping in …