Highlights
[Upcoming] CLT Book Launch: The Materiality of Literature: Rereading Authorship and Copyright with Kant by Dr Benjamin Goh, National University of Singapore
The Materiality of Literature retraces the emergence of conceptions of authorship in late-eighteenth- century Germany by studying the material form of Immanuel Kant’s 1785 essay, ‘On the Wrongfulness of Reprinting’. Drawing upon book history, media theory and literary studies, this book analyses the essay’s paratexts as indices of literary production in the German Enlightenment. Far from being an idealist proponent of intellectual property, Kant is shown to be a media theorist and practitioner, whose critical negotiation with the evolving print machinery in his time helps to illuminate our present struggle with digital technology and the mounting pressures borne by copyright as a proprietary institution.
[Upcoming] CLT Seminar: "Polyphonic Legality: A New Framework for Understanding the Experience of Law and Regulation for Cognitively Disabled Adults" by Professor Rosie Harding, University of Birmingham
Understandings of disability in law, particularly those elements focused on adults with cognitive impairments, have been undergoing a seismic shift over the last two decades, catalysed by the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2008). In her forthcoming monograph, Polyphonic Legality, Prof Harding builds on eight years of empirical socio-legal research involving cognitively disabled people and those who work with them to explore how law and regulation works in the everyday lives of cognitively disabled adults.
[Upcoming] CLT Seminar: “Against the Metaphysical Turn in Recent American Jurisprudence” by Professor Brian Leiter, University of Chicago Law
I argue against the recent fad in American general jurisprudence of characterizing debates about the nature of law as debates about how “legal facts” (the content of law) are determined by “social facts” and “moral facts.” The reframing is due to Mark Greenberg in a 2004 article (“How Facts Make Law”), but was popularized by Scott Shapiro in a 2011 book (LEGALITY). In Part I of the paper (pp. 165-181 of the chapter circulated, which will be my focus), I argue that (1) Greenberg’s reframing distorts the historical debates in jurisprudence (which were about validity, not content);
CLT Seminar: Recognising Rights
Private law is often described as the ‘law of obligations’, but it is better described as the law of interpersonal obligations. Who is empowered to enforce these obligations? One general rule we have is that it is only the person to whom an obligation is owed—the right-holder—who can enforce it, and no one else. This rule is wide in scope; it covers a broad range of coercive remedies in private law, explaining why private law enforcement typically appears bilateral in form. However, what about declaratory judgments? Declarations do not enforce obligations. Neither do they create new rights. A declaratory judgment changes nothing, unless it be to render certain what was previously uncertain. It involves only the authoritative recognition of pre-existing rights. Who should be empowered with powers of recognition, to have our private law rights (and others’ correlative duties) authoritatively recognised by the courts? The aim of this essay is to explore this question and its implications.