The dominant theoretical frameworks that define the ontological and epistemological limits of legal theory have marginalized or excluded alternatives visions on justice and social organization. Moreover, and in spite of being deeply embedded in specific political and ideological matrix, these frameworks have attempted to obscure the role of the political in the definition of its conceptual basis. The theoretical perspective that is developed in this article - and that is part of a long tradition of critical theories (in plural) - seeks to reveal the deep relation between Law and Politics and reformulate it analytically in order to propose a broad vision of the legal theory from Latin America. / Los marcos teóricos dominantes que definen los límites ontológicos y epistemológicos de la teoría legal han marginalizado o excluido visiones alternativas sobre la justicia y la organización social. Además, y a pesar de estar profundamente arraigados a una matriz política e ideológica determinada, estos marcos teóricos han pretendido oscurecer el rol de lo político en la definición de su base conceptual. La perspectiva teórica que se desarrolla en el presente artículo, y que es parte de una larga tradición de teorías críticas (en plural), busca revelar la profunda relación entre el Derecho y la Política, y reformularla analíticamente para proponer una visión amplia sobre la teoría legal desde América Latina.

This thesis consists in a critical analysis of international law’s traditional historical narrative about the prohibition of the use of force. Most contemporary textbooks teach that this prohibition was a creation of the twentieth century, and that beforehand States were free to resort to armed force against each other unconstrained. Positive international law, the story goes, was ‘indifferent’ to the use of force – it did not prohibit it but did not authorize it either, which meant that, in practice, States could do as they pleased. ‘Reality’ as it stems from historical sources, however, appears much more complex. In fact, not only did the vast majority of nineteenth century authors claimed war and measures short of war to be strictly ring-fenced by international law, but it also seems that States quasi-systematically felt the urge to justify their actions when they employed force against another nation. Starting from the observation of this discrepancy and using tools of history, sociology, anthropology and social psychology, the present research seeks to understand the roots of the ‘indifference’-narrative and how it became the commonly accepted version of the history of the use of force in international. / Doctorat en Sciences juridiques / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Peace bonds are a legal tool of governance dating back to 13th c. England. In Canada, a significant change in the application of peace bonds took place in the mid-1990s, shifting their purpose from governing minor disputes between individuals to allowing for persons who have not been charged with a crime to be governed as if they had. Given the legal test for a peace bond has always been the determination of ‘reasonable fear’, the advent of these ‘specialized’ peace bonds suggests that the object of reasonable fear has changed. Despite their lengthy history, peace bonds have limited coverage in academic literature, a weakness compounded by a predominant doctrinal approach based in a liberal framework. The central inquiry of this thesis moves beyond this predominant perspective of ‘peace bonds as crime prevention’ by developing a governmental criminology, which deepens our understanding of the role of specialized peace bond law in contemporary society. Specifically, governmental criminology takes a Foucaultian critical legal studies approach, which acknowledges legal pluralism and sets out the historical context required for analysis. Ultimately, by unearthing underlying social, economic, and political power relations it is possible to critique the accompanying modes of calculation of fear and risk, thus challenging the regimes of practices that make specialized peace bonds possible. Specialized peace bonds merely manage the consequences of a criminal justice system limited by social, political, and economic circumstances, in a broader biopolitical project of integrating risky populations.

Dans ce mémoire, nous proposons d’observer la réception de l’ouvrage Force de loi – le « fondement mystique de l’autorité », du philosophe Jacques Derrida, dans la pensée juridique nord-américaine. Dans un premier temps, nous nous attardons au contexte de production de cet ouvrage et en proposons une analyse détaillée. Nous tentons également de définir sommairement les concepts clés de la pensée derridienne mobilisés dans Force de loi, principalement la déconstruction, laquelle a suscité l’intérêt des juristes. Dans un second temps, nous proposons de retracer la trajectoire de Jacques Derrida en Amérique du Nord, sachant que sa pensée y a été reçue selon des termes bien précis, qui ont influencé l’inscription de ses travaux dans la pensée juridique. Dans un troisième temps, nous proposons de poser un regard critique sur la réception de la déconstruction derridienne dans les Critical Legal Studies. Nous soutenons que la pensée derridienne a été mobilisée par les critical legal scholars avant tout comme une technique servant à alimenter leur critique politique du droit. Or cet usage technicien de la déconstruction se serait fait au détriment de sa véritable substance éthico-politique. Nous proposons donc finalement de réfléchir à ce qui pourrait constituer un usage de la déconstruction en droit qui permettrait d’actualiser son plein potentiel critique, en conviant les juristes à élargir le champ épistémologique de leur discipline. / This essay considers the reception and interpretation of Jacques Derrida’s Force de loi – le « fondement mystique de l’autorité » in North American legal theory. In the first chapter, we examine the context in which Force de loi was written and pronounced, provide definitions of the key Derridean concepts mobilized in Force de loi and offer a detailed analysis of the text. In the second chapter, we argue that Jacque Derrida’s work was read and interpreted by American and English-speaking scholars in a very specific way, which shaped its reception in legal thinking. In the third chapter, we look at how Force de loi and “la deconstruction” were mobilized in the Critical Legal Studies. We argue that the critical legal scholars coined a “technical” use of deconstruction that did not fully integrate its ethical and political potential. Finally, we reflect on how deconstruction could be mobilized by legal scholars and jurists to open epistemological and political horizons that Derrida himself had not envisioned.

Certain Small Island Developing States (hereinafter the "SIDS") such as Kiribati or Tuvalu are often incorrectly called "sinking islands" because their highest points are located just a few meters above the sea level. Sea level rise may turn their territories to uninhabitable land gradually disappearing beneath the tide. Worsening of the environmental conditions causes internal displacement, migration and other problems. SIDS repeatedly brought their plight to the United Nations Security Council (the "UNSC") during its meetings in 2007, 2011, 2015, 2018 and 2019. They demanded that the UNSC should deal with their situation as a potential security issue and safeguard more equal distribution of environmental security risks and costs. During the UNSC negotiations, various states attempted to interpret and re-interpreted the UNSC mandate in order to suit their interests. The representatives of SIDS suggested that the UNSC should be a body based on the principles of distributive justice decision-making and thus safeguard fairer sharing of threats and burdens, including those of environmental character. The rapidly developing states strongly opposed; they implicitly claimed that the UNSC should be based rather on the principles of commutative justice, i.e. decide in strictly given situations of violations of...

Les arguments du mouvement Critical Legal Studies sur l’indétermination du droit ne sont doublés d’aucune théorie sur la légitimité des interprétations qu’offrent les juges et donc d’aucun critère juridique pour critiquer une décision. La théorie pluraliste critique du droit, qui prend acte de la pluralité du droit officiel pour redéfinir le phénomène juridique plutôt que de nier qu’il puisse exister, pourrait toutefois fournir un tel critère. En effet, elle présente plusieurs correspondances avec les travaux de Dworkin, qui défend que les citoyens sont en droit d’obtenir les fruits d’une attitude interprétative en germe dans le concept même de droit. Ces deux théories maintiennent que le droit sert à reconnaître la valeur de l’histoire d’un groupe dans sa conception de lui-même tout en soutenant qu’il doit trouver une pertinence contemporaine pour être effectif et légitime. Les pluralistes priorisent toutefois la résonance actuelle des règles de droit et croient que toute communauté est divisée entre diverses définitions du bien. Selon eux, le droit est avant tout un procédé pour penser la conduite humaine et lui conférer un sens, qui dépend des capacités créatrices des citoyens. Chaque règle est alors la cause d’une pluralité d’ordres juridiques concurrents. Suivant ce portrait, seule l’acceptation d’une interprétation par un groupe, sa capacité à lui reconnaître un sens, pourrait rendre cette interprétation légitime. Ce critère nous mène vers un modèle de justice négociée où deux personnes s’adressent à un juge pour développer une lecture en commun du droit, pour identifier une interprétation légitime dans leurs univers juridiques respectifs. / No theory of the legitimacy of judges accompanies the Critical Legal Studies’ arguments on the indeterminacy of law, which entails there are no criteria to identify a legitimate interpretation. Critical legal pluralism, which redefines law to take account of its inherent plurality rather than denying its very possibility on these grounds, could however provide such criteria. Indeed, it presents many resemblances with Dworkin’s theory of law which argues that citizens are entitled to reap the benefits of the interpretative nature of law. Both theories defend that law allows to bridge a group’s past, which is essential to its self-understanding, with the present, and both insist that law must be made to appear relevant in the present. Pluralists however prioritize the current significance of law and stress that communities are split by a variety of definitions of the good. According to them, law is mainly a process to think about human conduct and grant it meaning, and it depends as such on citizens’ creative capacities. Accordingly, only an interpretation that is accepted by a group and seen as meaningful can be considered legitimate. This criterion forces us to consider a form of negotiated justice, where two persons consult a judge to develop a common reading of a rule which would be legitimate in each person’s legal universe.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-27T17:27:12Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Luiz Carlos Montans Braga.pdf: 2026970 bytes, checksum: b9e75123d2d8a0ce2129b35361430610 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-10-30 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / The research started from the relationship among affects, politics and right in Spinoza s philosophy. Indeed, the Ethics Part III is the place where all affects are taken as specific topic. However, the affect subject also appears, in a more or less explicit way, in the exclusively political texts of the author, namely the Theological-Political Treatise and the Political Treatise, in addition to being quickly presented in argumentative moments of the Ethics Part IV, in which the issue of civitas is posed. Another aspect is the presence of the concept of power in the very definition of the concept of affect, in the Ethics Part III, thus closing the circle where the three concepts are presented, because Spinoza identifies right to power (jus sive potentia). The initial hypothesis referred to the existence of ties and intersections between such concepts, which was later confirmed by the detailed reading of Spinoza s texts, as well as of some of his commentators that have worked on the topics presented in the initial issue. The hard core of the dissertation tries to approach this conceptual relationship, explaining it by analyzing the author s texts, namely Ethics, the Theological-Political Treatise and the Political Treatise. In this argumentative proposition, the main thesis I try to defend is that Spinoza creates a political philosophy founded in the theory of affects. From this assumption, a second formulation comes up (but not a second thesis) over the pertinence of Spinoza s concepts for the contemporary emancipatory right. So, the path followed throughout the research has had two approaches, one far more finished and derived from the initial project, which makes an effort to solve the issue hereby posed, and another one more characterized by notes, bringing Spinoza s concept to the analysis of contemporary legal issues. This second moment of the dissertation looks into the pertinence of Spinoza s natural right concept for the contemporary right, besides analyzing the importance of the author s concepts to lend potency to one of the aspects of critical legal studies / O problema do qual partiu a pesquisa foi o da relação entre afetos, política e direito na filosofia de Espinosa. Com efeito, a Ética III é o local em que os afetos são tomados como tema específico. Ocorre que o tema dos afetos aparece também, mais ou menos explicitamente, nos textos exclusivamente políticos do autor, a saber, o Tratado Teológico-político e o Tratado-político, além de ser apresentado brevemente em momentos da argumentação da Ética IV em que a questão da civitas é posta. Outro ponto é a presença do conceito de potência na definição mesma do conceito de afeto, na parte III da Ética, fechando-se o círculo em que se apresentam os três conceitos, pois Espinosa identifica direito a potência (jus sive potentia). A hipótese inicial foi a da existência de laços e intersecções entre tais conceitos, o que se confirmou pela leitura em detalhe dos textos espinosanos, bem como dos comentadores que trabalharam os temas apresentados no problema inicial. O núcleo duro da tese procura alinhavar esta relação conceitual, explicitando-a por meio da análise dos textos do autor, especialmente a Ética, o Tratado Teológico-político e o Tratado-político. Neste movimento argumentativo, a principal tese que procuro defender é a de que Espinosa constrói uma filosofia política fundada na teoria dos afetos. Decorre desta tese uma elaboração (não uma segunda tese) acerca do tema da pertinência dos conceitos espinosanos para o direito emancipatório contemporâneo. Assim, o caminho percorrido em todo o trabalho tem dois movimentos, um mais bem acabado e decorrente do projeto inicial, o qual procura resolver a questão lá posta, e outro mais caracterizado por apontamentos, trazendo os conceitos espinosanos para a análise de questões jurídicas contemporâneas. Esse segundo momento da tese se debruça sobre o tema da pertinência do conceito de direito natural espinosano para o direito contemporâneo, bem como analisa a importância dos conceitos do autor para dar potência a uma das vertentes do direito crítico

In the U.S. legal context, psychoanalysis is viewed by most scholars (and most judges) as outdated, even unscientific, and there is little room for psychoanalytic expertise in U.S. courts of law. However, there are some scholars who continue to do theoretical work in the conventional Freudian tradition, as well as numerous critical legal theorists who have appropriated the psychoanalytic conceptions of Jacques Lacan in their critiques of the law. This is a brief survey of how these scholars conceive of the law in psychoanalytic terms. Is it the judge being analyzed? Is it the lawyers, or the law students? Is the law itself viewed as subject with an unconscious and with symptoms? Or is it an analysis of legal texts as having an unconscious dimension that is hidden like an ideology? I identify examples of all four frameworks, and conclude that these scholars, notwithstanding their theoretical orientation, have practical goals for law in mind. / En el contexto jurídico de los Estados Unidos, el psicoanálisis es visto por la mayoría de académicos (y jueces) como anticuado, incluso anticientífico, y hay poca cabida para el conocimiento psicoanalítico en los tribunales de justicia estadounidenses. Sin embargo, hay algunos académicos que continúan realizando labor teórica en la tradición convencional freudiana, así como numerosos teóricos críticos del derecho que han adoptado la visión psicoanalítica de Jacques Lacan en sus críticas al derecho. Este es un breve estudio de cómo dichos académicos conciben el derecho en términos psicoanalíticos. ¿Se está analizando al juez? ¿O se está analizando a los abogados, o a los estudiantes de derecho? ¿Se percibe el derecho en sí como un paciente con subconsciente y con síntomas? ¿O se está analizando los textos jurídicos como textos que poseen una dimensión inconsciente, como una ideología? En este ensayo identifico ejemplos de los cuatro contextos y concluyo que estos académicos, a pesar de su orientación teórica, tienen metas prácticas para el derecho en mente.

This dissertation looks at the concept of “trafficking in persons” and how it has been created, interpreted and utilized in the international sphere and in Canada. Using the approach of Critical Legal Pluralism (CLP), it examines the legal regulation of trafficking as being created through a bi-directional constitutive process, with paradigmatic conceptions of trafficking having a hand in creating regulation as well as being influenced by it. Through a review of data retrieved using a variety of qualitative methods as well as classic legal analysis, this dissertation explores the operation of various social actors and their effect on the determination of what trafficking is, and who is worthy of protection from it. In Part One the international framework is outlined through a discussion of the creation of the dominant paradigm of trafficking and implementations of it. Chapter One traces the history of the anti-trafficking movement by looking at the development of the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, and by examining the creation of dominant discourses around trafficking. Chapter 2 uses CLP to examine the influences of a variety of actors on the creation of these discourses and the repercussions the discourses have had on the implementation of anti-trafficking policies. Part Two then turns to the Canadian context. In Chapter Three, classical legal methodologies are employed to discuss Canada’s obligations under international law with respect to trafficking, as well as the creation of definitions of trafficking in the Canadian legal regulatory context. Chapter Four then reviews data from Canada to discuss the ways in which various actors have been involved in the creation and operation of the dominant paradigm and how it in turn affects the operation of trafficking-related legal constructs. Ultimately, it is found that due to the influence of the dominant paradigm and the motivations that aid in its operation, programs and policies framed under the rubric of “trafficking” necessarily fail to achieve meaningful redress for the groups they purport to benefit. On this basis, an alternative approach is suggested to address phenomena currently being dealt with through anti-trafficking frameworks. A move is suggested away from a focus on “trafficking” to a sectoral approach, accounting for the complexities and histories of individuals subject to exploitative circumstances.

An embedded case study investigating the ongoing securitization of migration in the EU from 2014-2020 and the role of legal institutions, in this case the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in these processes. Securitization Theory is used in combination with Critical Legal Theory to create a framework that attempts to both illuminate the role of the functional actor in Securitization Theory further, and the impact securitization has on legal institutions. It provides explanations for sudden shifts in legal argumentation, especially in cases of high political relevance with the use of Critical Legal Theory. The case of N.D. & N.T. vs. Spain serves as an example of a functional actor providing two contrasting judgments on the same events within a short period of time and opens up discussions about political influences on legal institutions. Securitization and the framing of refugees as existential threats to European identity and culture is one of the many ongoing political processes related to the issue of migration and refuge in Europe. As the political landscape shifts and right-wing populist parties establish themselves in European Member States, illegal pushbacks have become common practice at the outer borders of the EU and are challenged both politically and legally. This study investigated cases of illegal pushbacks to renew criticism against the institutions engaging in and enabling the practice.