The Legal Theory Forum will hold the last meeting of the semester next Wednesday April
20 at noon in Lewis 102. Lunch will be served.

For that meeting, we will discuss a working paper by Gustavo Ribeiro, a current LLM
candidate. The tentative title is: “No Need to Toss a Coin: Conflicting Scientific
Expert Testimonies and Intellectual Due Process.” The article is available upon
request by emailing  gribeiro at llm11.law.harvard.edu.

We look forward to seeing you all next week.

Best,
Gustavo & Anthony

Continuing with the topic of legal pragmatism, we will hold our
second meeting on Thursday, March 24 at 7:15pm in Pound 418. For
that meeting, we will read and discuss a great piece by William
H. Simon, “Solving Problems vs. Claiming Rights: The Pragmatist
Challenge to Legal Liberalism.” The article is available here.

Non-pizza dinner will be provided. We look forward to seeing you
all next week.

Best,
Anthony & Gustavo

The new semester is off to a good start, and now so is Legal Theory Forum. As we discussed in the fall, we will dedicate this semester to reading some texts on legal pragmatism.

We will have our first meeting of the semester this coming Tuesday, February 15 at 7:15pm in Pound 203. Dinner will be provided. For Tuesday, we’re going to start with two short background readings on philosophical pragmatism. The first is a short chapter on the European origins of pragmatism from Native Pragmatism: Rethinking the Roots of American Philosophy by Scott L. Pratt. The other is a short text by Williams James, What Pragmatism Means. Both of these pieces are available here and here.

Also, we would like your help to have some more events this coming semester. If you have any academic papers you would like to present or have workshopped, please contact us ASAP, and we can try to schedule a time. Or, if there is a professor or speaker you would like to have present, we have a budget and would be happy to help facilitate and sponsor a lunchtime talk.

We look forward to seeing you all next week.

Sincerely,
Anthony & Gustavo

Jon Elster will be speaking on Thursday, December 2 at 4:30pm in Ames Courtroomon “Secrecy and Publicity in Jury Proceedings” as part of the Edmond J. Safra Centerfor Ethics Public Lecture Series. Jon Elster is Robert K. Merton Professor of SocialSciences at Columbia University, and his research interests include: Constitution-Making, Theory of Rational Choice, History of Political Thought (Tocqueville andMarx), Empirical Studies of Justice, Emotions and Social Theory.

Ronald Dworkin (professor of philosophy, and Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law,New York University) will be speaking on Friday, December 3 at 4:00pm on “Truth inInterpretation.” The event will take place in Emerson 105 at Harvard College and is sponsored by The Humanities Center at Harvard andHarvard Law School.

The last Legal Theory Forum meeting of the semester will be Monday, Nov. 29, Pound 207. Food will be provided.

For the last session we’ll be reading two shorter pieces by Posner, representing his shift towards pragmatism. The first reading is the Pragmatist Manifesto (from Problems of Jurisprudence), which provides a brief theoretical overview of pragmatist jurisprudence. The second reading, a chapter on Pragmatism (from The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory), gives some concrete examples of pragmatic adjudication. If you’re pressed for time, feel free to focus on the first, although the second provides helpful illustrations.

The readings are available here.

Looking forward to seeing you.

Best,
Anthony & Gustavo

The next Legal Theory Forum meeting will be this coming Tuesday (Nov 02) at 7pm in Pound 418. Once again, we’re planning on serving dinner. This week we’ll be reading a CLS critique of law & economics. The text is an excerpt from Duncan Kennedy, Cost-Benefit Analysis of Entitlement Problems: A Critique, 33 Stanford Law Review 387 (1981). The article is rather long, so feel free to focus on pages 1-14 and 36-59 (that is: skip part III “The Offer-Asking Probllem”). The file is available here.

And for anyone who is interested on extra work, we recommend Duncan Kennedy’s entry in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics and the Law on “law-and-economics from the perspective of critical legal studies.” Available here.

Best,
Anthony & Gustavo

Thanks to everyone who made it to the reading group last week. A few quick updates:

1) Our next meeting will be on Tuesday, October 19 at 7pm in Pound 203. Continuing with the Law & Econ theme, the reading for next week is a response to the Posner piece by Ronald Dworkin entitled “Is Wealth a Value?” Journal of Legal Studies, 9, 1980, pp.191-226 (available here).

We’ll be ordering food this time (Thai). If you can, please let us know in advance if you’re planning to come so we don’t order too much or too little.

2) Let us know if you’ve been working on a paper that you’d like to present or workshop.

3) We’d also like to pass on some information about the 2010 Harvard Graduate Conference in Political Theory.

The Department of Government (FAS) at Harvard University will host a conference for graduate students in political theory and political philosophy on November 5-6, 2010. The conference will take place at the Center for Government and International Studies (CGIS). All events will be held on the concourse level of the Center for Government and International Studies (CGIS) South, 1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA 02138.

Additional information, including a detailed schedule, can be found here http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k16266 or by emailing or e-mail politicaltheory.harvard@gmail.com.

Cheers,
Anthony & Gustavo

Thanks to everyone who signed up for the Legal Theory Forum at the Student Activities Fair. I wanted to share two quick announcements and encourage everyone to attend our first meeting next week.

1) We’re planning our first session of the semester for Tuesday, October 5 at 7pm.

In the past Legal Theory Forum has read some canonical pieces in legal theory and also read works in social theory, philosophy, and political theory as they relate to the law. Several people have expressed interest in reading some theoretical works on Law & Economics, so we thought we would start with Richard Posner’s “The Ethical and Political Basis of the Efficiency Norm in Common Law Adjudication.” 8 Hofstra Law Review 487 (1979-80).

Depending on people’s interests, we could move on to another topic or go on and read some of the theoretical and normative debates surrounding the law & economics movement. The goal is to pick readings people are actually interested in discussing, and we can adjust as the semester goes on.

2) The HLS Program on the Legal Profession is sponsoring a Theory-Practice Colloquium modeled on the Summer Theory Institute. The Colloquium will be meeting five times during the academic year. They’ll be reading short excerpts from a number of social theorists and discussing those readings in the context of public interest law practice. I’d like to encourage anyone interested to apply. There’s more information available through the PLP website here: http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/plp/pages/theory-practice_colloquium.php.

If you have any questions or if you are interested in joining the board, please please email us:  hltf at mail.law.harvard.edu.

My institute of research has created a new trilingual (French, English, German) peer-reviewed electronic law journal: “Scientia Juris – Metz Law School Journal” : http://www.univ-metz.fr/ufr/dea/revue/

A call for paper in English (“Law and Borders”)  http://www.univ-metz.fr/ufr/dea/revue/ap…) is already available.

Submissions outside this special subject are also possible.

Daniel Rosenthal, who will present, has his paper available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?a….