Call for Papers, WG Hart Legal Workshop 2017: Law, Society and Administration in a Changing World (London, July 10-11, 2017)

Readers may be interested in the following call for papers, issued by my Cambridge colleagues Peter Cane and Hayley Hooper and UCL’s Jeff King:

We invite applications to participate in the 2017 WG Hart Legal Workshop at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, London, on 10-11 July, 2017.

The main aim of the Workshop is to explore political, institutional, economic and cultural factors that influence (or have in the past influenced) the emergence and development of legal regimes for controlling administrative power. Particular attention will be given to six systems of administrative law, namely those of France, Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and ‘global governance’.

We understand a regime for controlling administrative power as encompassing legal rules and principles (‘administrative law’), but also institutions and practices relating to control of administrative power. Administrative power is understood broadly in terms of any and all of the multifarious functions and activities associated with modern ‘governance’.

It is anticipated that papers will adopt explanatory methodologies – historical, sociological, anthropological, comparative and so on – rather than normative perspectives addressing the proper design of control regimes or the relative value of different designs. Broadly, the goal is to enhance ‘observational’ understanding of control regimes as social phenomena rather than to describe and evaluate administrative law from an insider’s perspective.

Our hope is to bring together not only lawyers but also historians, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists and others who consider legal rules, institutions and practices to be worthy of ‘empirical’ study in their own right, but also ‘in context’.

It is also anticipated that papers will be concerned with at least one of the six systems mentioned above. Papers that use comparison to illuminate two or more of those systems will be particularly welcome.

We aim to publish suitable contributions to the WG Hart Workshop as an edited collection or special edition of a journal.

Those wishing to offer a paper should send an abstract of around 250 words to Peter Cane via email (pc286@cam.ac.uk cc’d to hooperhayley@hotmail.com and jeff.king@ucl.ac.uk) by 31 December 2016. Full versions of accepted papers will be due by 31 May 2017. Please treat both of these dates as firm and final.

This content has been updated on October 7, 2016 at 12:10.