This PILAGG seminar animated by Professor Horatia Muir Watt will revolve a core question for global or post-monist jurisprudence: What are the law’s modes of encounters with alterity? Indeed, the “global turn” in law is not limited to a tightening of its own structural linkages with the economy, but involves constant exposure or interactions with foreign societies, cultures and ideologies. One response in legal form to ubiquitous otherness, including cultural difference, can be found by joining up with various strands of contemporary interdisciplinary scholarship in exploring the insights to be found in the specific methodologies of private international law.
Post-monist legal approaches appear as a “dangerous method” that leads to a decentering of the self, a moment of void at the point of encounter of difference, a suspension of judgment. While such a method leaves behind the comfortable linearity of legal monism, a look towards private international law’s specific intellectual schemes show that the ensuing vertigo is to be embraced as a form of enrichment of law’s horizons and modes of reasoning.
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