Inaugral Cambridge Doctoral Symposium on Legal Theory in Practice

Law in Fragments
13th - 15th April 2011 | Lauterpacht Centre

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All enquiries should be directed to the organising committee at cambridgesymposium@gmail.com.

"Law in Fragments," the inaugural Cambridge Doctoral Symposium on Legal Theory in Practice, will be held on the 13th, 14th and 15th of April 2011 at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, University of Cambridge. The Symposium will examine the idea of 'fragmentation' in the law.

Legal academics and practising lawyers appear to be increasingly confronted with fragmenting bodies of traditional legal rules and principles (e.g. tort law, constitutional law, commercial regulation), legal systems and institutions (e.g. English law, EU law, international law) or even within legal scholarship and theory itself (e.g. analytical jurisprudence, socio-legal research, law and literature). This Symposium will explore fragmentation from a wide range of viewpoints, and to that end papers from all legal disciplines are welcome.

"Law in Fragments"

Fragmentation is a new metaphor for an old idea, invoked to describe several distinct yet related phenomena. Some recent commentators, for instance, have used it regarding the growing internal or external incoherence of a legal system, body of legal rules, or theoretical subject. This Symposium seeks to examine fragmentation as an empirical fact (or not), its causes, and its consequences for the study and practice of law.

While legal scholars have turned their eyes to fragmentation in the law, most notably international law, its form and extent warrants further exploring. To this end we welcome empirical studies mapping how processes of institutional, doctrinal, and epistemic have specialized, and considering the mechanisms used to manage conflict between the resulting fragments. Proposals may also examine the causes of fragmentation, for instance: the proliferation of specialised courts and tribunals, with potentially overlapping or conflicting jurisdictions; new theoretical models, like legal pluralism, that define 'law' as more than positive state law; or new inter-disciplinary influences. Lastly, the process of legal and academic specialisation may itself lead to fragmenting older bodies of law.

Ultimately, the notion of law in fragments is itself a contested idea, as are its practical and theoretical implications, and thus this Symposium wishes to examine whether 'fragmentation' remains a useful metaphor for legal theory.