Collaborative Research Networks
Organizer
Samantha Godwin, Amin Ebrahimi Afrouzi, and Tobias Arnoldussen
The Philosophy & Legal Theory CRN aims to create a forum to share and collaborate on research in philosophy of law, laws, or legal institutions, and legal scholarship engaged with philosophy, broadly construed. This includes scholarship on philosophy of law generally, and on individual legal questions from all philosophical traditions (e.g. analytic, continental, non-western, critical theory). This also includes political philosophy, political theory, moral philosophy, social epistemology, social ontology, moral psychology, metaethics, philosophy of action, decision theory, and history of thought on topics relevant to law or socio-legal topics. It finally includes socio-legal scholarship that draws from work in philosophy, or that employs philosophical methods. We hope to spark philosophically informed conversations on questions in law and society – both the foundational and the highly specific. Topics appropriate for this CRN range from work on classic debates in analytic jurisprudence, such as the relationship between legality and morality, to scholarship applying contemporary social ontology literature to doctrinal questions in contract law, and everything in between. Research on normative philosophical topics commonly regarded as within “philosophy of law” or “legal theory” as a field, such as the nature or justification of law, the state, coercion, self-defense, paternalism, consent, restitution, equality and rights. This CRN welcomes a multidisciplinary set of participants to foster interdisciplinary discussions, drawing perspectives not only from philosophy and legal academia, but also political science and political theory, sociology, psychology, history, economics, literature, anthropology, social policy, and other social science and humanities disciplines.
The Philosophy & Legal Theory CRN hopes to both facilitate meetings among the already very substantial number of scholars presenting law and philosophy papers at the Law & Society Association’s annual meeting, as well as drawing new participants working in law and philosophy to the LSA. As an interdisciplinary subfield that necessarily addresses the relationship of law and legal institutions to society and persons, the LSA is a natural home for work in law and philosophy. The establishment of a CRN focused on law and philosophy will help to facilitate the advancement of law and society scholarship in several ways. First, it exposes those working in law and philosophy outside the LSA to scholarship in various fields within law and society. Second, it highlights how philosophical methods might enhance work within other subfields of law and society.