Crunching the Core: Critical Moves

We will end our collective exercises by crunching moves associated with the experience of legal indeterminacy. We will meet on Zoom on Friday, May 6^th at 10:00am-11:30am EST.  We are thrilled that the conversation will be started by three great commentators, Hani Sayed (American University Cairo), Aliki Semertzi (IGLP fellow), and David Kennedy (Harvard Law School), who will guide us through our move(s), before opening to a wider discussion among all attendees. We would also like to invite you, after our 90 minute session, to stick around for a more social end to the session, where you can chat more informally to round off the year.

Excerpts: This week we will read selections from the following texts:

• A. Rasulov, draft blog post (selected excerpts) (2022) (with special thanks to Akbar for distributing this);
• S. Marks, ‘False Contigency’ (2009) 62 Current Legal Problems 1, pp. 10-12;
• D. Kennedy, ‘A Left Phenomenological Alternative to the Hart/Kelsen Debate’, in D. Kennedy, Legal Reasoning: Collected Essays (Davies Publishers 2008), pp. 166-170
• M. Koskenniemi, ‘Miserable Comforters: International Relations as new Natural Law’ (2009) 15 European Journal of International Relations 395, pp 411-416;
• Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (Vintage Books 1956), p. 20;
• Crunching the Core 2021-22 Schedule – we include this here to give a sense of the various ways in which indeterminacy has featured throughout our sessions this year.

We also offer these questions to guide your readings, and an extra one based on our schedule:

• Based on the texts, what is the critical move?
• How has this critical move been used in different times, places and contexts?
• What does the move uncover?
• How has indeterminacy featured differently in different critical moves throughout the year?