Advanced Faculty Colloquium – Heterodox Legal and Social Thought: Renewing the Tradition

Jointly convened by Bucerius Law School, The Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School, Sciences Po Law School, and Copenhagen Business School.

We are living through dramatic shifts in the politics, economics and social arrangements of the world. The twilight of open market ideologies in the global north, great powers entangled in conflicts and rivalries, “de-coupling” and “friend-shoring” the new watchwords – is the political economy of the world shifting? Meanwhile, a shifting climate raises new questions about uses and abuses of the natural world. New technologies and social pathologies reframe old questions about the nature of “truth” in governance and society. And about the pathways for “human intelligence.”

The old arrangements – political, cultural – were built on legal foundations. They were legal projects and practices, encoded in legal vocabularies and bolted together as bundles of entitlements and liabilities. The traditions of “critical” and “socio-legal” inquiry have illuminated those foundations, sought new opportunities for progressive politics within them and criticized the many ways law contributes to the reproduction – and sustainability – of an unjust world. Where do we go from here?

In this Advanced Research Colloquium, we will return to the heterodox methodological, historical and theoretical traditions that have long inspired and supported our work. What do they offer as we try to make sense of the contemporary world? Of new – and old – global hierarchies, often framed in the language of colonialism? Of new subjectivities, identities – and their limitations? Of diversity in all its forms – is ‘legal pluralism’ the right place to start? The significance of legal arrangements – and legal reform – in the consolidation of hierarchy, injustice and climate change is clear. Are societies susceptible to social change through law – to epistemic, foundational, radical change? How?