Intimations of Global Law is a dazzling book.1 Its multi-level, deeply theorised analysis of law ... more Intimations of Global Law is a dazzling book.1 Its multi-level, deeply theorised analysis of law is a signature of Neil Walker’s scholarship. The idea of global law he formulates here adds a sociol...
The German chancellor, the French president and the British prime minister have each grabbed worl... more The German chancellor, the French president and the British prime minister have each grabbed world headlines with pronouncements that their state’s policy of multiculturalism has failed. As so often, domestic debates about multiculturalism, as well as foreign policy debates about human rights in non-Western countries, revolve around the treatment of women. Yet there is also a widely noted brain drain from feminism. Feminists are no longer even certain how to frame, let alone resolve, the issues raised by veiling, polygamy and other cultural practices oppressive to women by Western standards. Feminism has become perplexed by the very concept of “culture.” This impasse is detrimental both to women’s equality and to concerns for cultural autonomy.
We propose shifting gears. Our approach draws on what, at first glance, would seem to be an unpromising legal paradigm for feminism - the highly technical field of conflict of laws. Using the non-intuitive hypothetical of a dispute in California between a Japanese father and daughter over a transfer of shares, we demonstrate the contribution that conflicts can make. Whereas Western feminists are often criticized for dwelling on “exotic” cultural practices to the neglect of other important issues affecting the lives of women in those communities or states, our choice of hypothetical not only joins the correctives, but also shows how economic issues, in fact, take us back to the same impasse. Even mundane issues of corporate law prove to be dazzlingly indeterminate and complex in their feminist and cultural dimensions.
What makes conflict of laws a better way to recognize and do justice to the different dimensions of our hypothetical, surprisingly, is viewing conflicts as technique. More generally, conflicts can offer a new approach to the feminism/culture debate - if we treat its technicalities not as mere means to an end but as an intellectual style. Trading the big picture typical of public law for the specificity and constraints of technical form provides a promising style of capturing, revealing and ultimately taking a stand on the complexities confronting feminists as multiculturalism is challenged here and abroad.
After more than twenty years of worldwide feminist activism, transnational litigation, and diplom... more After more than twenty years of worldwide feminist activism, transnational litigation, and diplomatic stalemate, on December 28, 2015, Japan and South Korea announced a historic agreement intended to provide closure to the so-called " Comfort Women issue " – the issue of what Japan must do to atone for the sexual enslavement of up to 200,000 women from throughout Asia in service to the Japanese troops before and during World War II. Reactions to this landmark agreement have been mixed, and the question for many is whether it will hold. One challenge is how to respect the scale and systematicity of the crimes without imposing a single narrative, or without projecting an overdetermined understanding of the gendered past onto the future. We offer an analysis of this question in a wider lens: how to address grave historical injustices when legal claims and advocacy goals spread and metamorphose not only over time, but also across jurisdictions Focusing on one high profile and particularly contentious provision of the settlement, concerning the status of a privately erected statue honoring the Comfort Women outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul, we first show that the usual questions about settlements – whether they can or cannot achieve closure – can productively be traded for attention to where and when closure and reopening occurs. Borrowing our analytical lens from the field of conflict of laws, we then refine the problem as a manifestation of a pervasive issue for feminist justice in a globalized world that we call " spatio-temporal diffusion. " We argue that a novel response to this diffusion of historical injustices can be grounded in conflict-of-laws techniques. Using the hypothetical of a case brought by Korean Comfort Women in California, we re-describe the field's techniques for dealing with time across space as a matter of what we term the " sequencing " of different spatio-temporal horizons. This approach resonates with, but also goes a step beyond the arguments of certain feminist social theorists that feminist politics must be polytemporal. In the mode of an interdisciplinary experiment, we deploy the conflicts technique of sequencing spatio-temporal horizons as a more specified and hopeful approach to a feminist future.
ABSTRACT The “Comfort Women incident,” now at least several decades old, troubles the familiar vi... more ABSTRACT The “Comfort Women incident,” now at least several decades old, troubles the familiar view of law as a funnel for politics. Viewed as a funnel, the wide range of legal, political, cultural, and diplomatic efforts to seek or resist redress for the system of sexual slavery institutionalized by the Japanese military during the Second World War would be assessed as ultimately pushing in the same direction: toward vindicating human rights. We see in the Comfort Women incident a far more chaotic interaction of law and politics. As critical legal feminist, we are concerned with finding a truthful and ethical way to respond to the horrors of sexual slavery, while also recognizing that claims on behalf of victims are often appropriated by nationalist, imperialist, and capitalist agendas. The first step in our project on the place of multi-situational law in a multi-situational politics of responses to the Comfort Women issue, this brief presentation identifies what we term the diplomatic style and analyses its collision with the constitutional law style in a landmark 2011 judgment of the Constitutional Court of Korea. In contrast to the reluctance of courts in many countries to intervene in foreign affairs, the Constitutional Court held that the constitutional rights of the plaintiffs, former Korean Comfort Women, required the Korean government to use the dispute settlement provisions in a bilateral treaty to seek compensation for the plaintiffs from the government of Japan. Legal scholars tend not to separate out courts’ assumptions about the nature of diplomacy as one reason for their hands-off approach to foreign affairs, as distinct from concerns about law on the one hand and politics on the other. We show that focusing on diplomacy and the diplomatic style helps us to think about the implications of the Constitutional Court’s more interventionist approach. The relationship of law to politics becomes, as with the relationship of diplomacy to politics, more of an eddy than a funnel. It is on this point that we perceive a glimmer of feminist hope in the decision.
... Court of Canada judges suggest that the Court sees itself as engaged in a more constructive i... more ... Court of Canada judges suggest that the Court sees itself as engaged in a more constructive interpretive exercise.43 Justice La Forest has written: [I]n the field of human rights, and of otherlaws im-pinging on ... 2000] INTERNATIONAL LAW IN DOMESTIC COURTS 515 On the ...
Intimations of Global Law is a dazzling book.1 Its multi-level, deeply theorised analysis of law ... more Intimations of Global Law is a dazzling book.1 Its multi-level, deeply theorised analysis of law is a signature of Neil Walker’s scholarship. The idea of global law he formulates here adds a sociol...
The German chancellor, the French president and the British prime minister have each grabbed worl... more The German chancellor, the French president and the British prime minister have each grabbed world headlines with pronouncements that their state’s policy of multiculturalism has failed. As so often, domestic debates about multiculturalism, as well as foreign policy debates about human rights in non-Western countries, revolve around the treatment of women. Yet there is also a widely noted brain drain from feminism. Feminists are no longer even certain how to frame, let alone resolve, the issues raised by veiling, polygamy and other cultural practices oppressive to women by Western standards. Feminism has become perplexed by the very concept of “culture.” This impasse is detrimental both to women’s equality and to concerns for cultural autonomy.
We propose shifting gears. Our approach draws on what, at first glance, would seem to be an unpromising legal paradigm for feminism - the highly technical field of conflict of laws. Using the non-intuitive hypothetical of a dispute in California between a Japanese father and daughter over a transfer of shares, we demonstrate the contribution that conflicts can make. Whereas Western feminists are often criticized for dwelling on “exotic” cultural practices to the neglect of other important issues affecting the lives of women in those communities or states, our choice of hypothetical not only joins the correctives, but also shows how economic issues, in fact, take us back to the same impasse. Even mundane issues of corporate law prove to be dazzlingly indeterminate and complex in their feminist and cultural dimensions.
What makes conflict of laws a better way to recognize and do justice to the different dimensions of our hypothetical, surprisingly, is viewing conflicts as technique. More generally, conflicts can offer a new approach to the feminism/culture debate - if we treat its technicalities not as mere means to an end but as an intellectual style. Trading the big picture typical of public law for the specificity and constraints of technical form provides a promising style of capturing, revealing and ultimately taking a stand on the complexities confronting feminists as multiculturalism is challenged here and abroad.
After more than twenty years of worldwide feminist activism, transnational litigation, and diplom... more After more than twenty years of worldwide feminist activism, transnational litigation, and diplomatic stalemate, on December 28, 2015, Japan and South Korea announced a historic agreement intended to provide closure to the so-called " Comfort Women issue " – the issue of what Japan must do to atone for the sexual enslavement of up to 200,000 women from throughout Asia in service to the Japanese troops before and during World War II. Reactions to this landmark agreement have been mixed, and the question for many is whether it will hold. One challenge is how to respect the scale and systematicity of the crimes without imposing a single narrative, or without projecting an overdetermined understanding of the gendered past onto the future. We offer an analysis of this question in a wider lens: how to address grave historical injustices when legal claims and advocacy goals spread and metamorphose not only over time, but also across jurisdictions Focusing on one high profile and particularly contentious provision of the settlement, concerning the status of a privately erected statue honoring the Comfort Women outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul, we first show that the usual questions about settlements – whether they can or cannot achieve closure – can productively be traded for attention to where and when closure and reopening occurs. Borrowing our analytical lens from the field of conflict of laws, we then refine the problem as a manifestation of a pervasive issue for feminist justice in a globalized world that we call " spatio-temporal diffusion. " We argue that a novel response to this diffusion of historical injustices can be grounded in conflict-of-laws techniques. Using the hypothetical of a case brought by Korean Comfort Women in California, we re-describe the field's techniques for dealing with time across space as a matter of what we term the " sequencing " of different spatio-temporal horizons. This approach resonates with, but also goes a step beyond the arguments of certain feminist social theorists that feminist politics must be polytemporal. In the mode of an interdisciplinary experiment, we deploy the conflicts technique of sequencing spatio-temporal horizons as a more specified and hopeful approach to a feminist future.
ABSTRACT The “Comfort Women incident,” now at least several decades old, troubles the familiar vi... more ABSTRACT The “Comfort Women incident,” now at least several decades old, troubles the familiar view of law as a funnel for politics. Viewed as a funnel, the wide range of legal, political, cultural, and diplomatic efforts to seek or resist redress for the system of sexual slavery institutionalized by the Japanese military during the Second World War would be assessed as ultimately pushing in the same direction: toward vindicating human rights. We see in the Comfort Women incident a far more chaotic interaction of law and politics. As critical legal feminist, we are concerned with finding a truthful and ethical way to respond to the horrors of sexual slavery, while also recognizing that claims on behalf of victims are often appropriated by nationalist, imperialist, and capitalist agendas. The first step in our project on the place of multi-situational law in a multi-situational politics of responses to the Comfort Women issue, this brief presentation identifies what we term the diplomatic style and analyses its collision with the constitutional law style in a landmark 2011 judgment of the Constitutional Court of Korea. In contrast to the reluctance of courts in many countries to intervene in foreign affairs, the Constitutional Court held that the constitutional rights of the plaintiffs, former Korean Comfort Women, required the Korean government to use the dispute settlement provisions in a bilateral treaty to seek compensation for the plaintiffs from the government of Japan. Legal scholars tend not to separate out courts’ assumptions about the nature of diplomacy as one reason for their hands-off approach to foreign affairs, as distinct from concerns about law on the one hand and politics on the other. We show that focusing on diplomacy and the diplomatic style helps us to think about the implications of the Constitutional Court’s more interventionist approach. The relationship of law to politics becomes, as with the relationship of diplomacy to politics, more of an eddy than a funnel. It is on this point that we perceive a glimmer of feminist hope in the decision.
... Court of Canada judges suggest that the Court sees itself as engaged in a more constructive i... more ... Court of Canada judges suggest that the Court sees itself as engaged in a more constructive interpretive exercise.43 Justice La Forest has written: [I]n the field of human rights, and of otherlaws im-pinging on ... 2000] INTERNATIONAL LAW IN DOMESTIC COURTS 515 On the ...
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We propose shifting gears. Our approach draws on what, at first glance, would seem to be an unpromising legal paradigm for feminism - the highly technical field of conflict of laws. Using the non-intuitive hypothetical of a dispute in California between a Japanese father and daughter over a transfer of shares, we demonstrate the contribution that conflicts can make. Whereas Western feminists are often criticized for dwelling on “exotic” cultural practices to the neglect of other important issues affecting the lives of women in those communities or states, our choice of hypothetical not only joins the correctives, but also shows how economic issues, in fact, take us back to the same impasse. Even mundane issues of corporate law prove to be dazzlingly indeterminate and complex in their feminist and cultural dimensions.
What makes conflict of laws a better way to recognize and do justice to the different dimensions of our hypothetical, surprisingly, is viewing conflicts as technique. More generally, conflicts can offer a new approach to the feminism/culture debate - if we treat its technicalities not as mere means to an end but as an intellectual style. Trading the big picture typical of public law for the specificity and constraints of technical form provides a promising style of capturing, revealing and ultimately taking a stand on the complexities confronting feminists as multiculturalism is challenged here and abroad.
We propose shifting gears. Our approach draws on what, at first glance, would seem to be an unpromising legal paradigm for feminism - the highly technical field of conflict of laws. Using the non-intuitive hypothetical of a dispute in California between a Japanese father and daughter over a transfer of shares, we demonstrate the contribution that conflicts can make. Whereas Western feminists are often criticized for dwelling on “exotic” cultural practices to the neglect of other important issues affecting the lives of women in those communities or states, our choice of hypothetical not only joins the correctives, but also shows how economic issues, in fact, take us back to the same impasse. Even mundane issues of corporate law prove to be dazzlingly indeterminate and complex in their feminist and cultural dimensions.
What makes conflict of laws a better way to recognize and do justice to the different dimensions of our hypothetical, surprisingly, is viewing conflicts as technique. More generally, conflicts can offer a new approach to the feminism/culture debate - if we treat its technicalities not as mere means to an end but as an intellectual style. Trading the big picture typical of public law for the specificity and constraints of technical form provides a promising style of capturing, revealing and ultimately taking a stand on the complexities confronting feminists as multiculturalism is challenged here and abroad.