Suspending the desire to change the world as legal scholars

Law and Methods Seminar

Invited Guest: Professor Rebecca Mignot-Mahdavi

A central concern within mainstream legal thought and practice has been the ultimate desire, if not goal, to positively change the world, or at least to theorize the possibility thereof. At the same time, the argument is by now familiar that legal practice and thinking can equally operate as arts of not changing the world: that the law also offers tools, discourses, and frameworks that stabilize and normalize practices that manufacture bodies, behaviors, and societies in oppressive manners. Yet, even the ambition to unmask such practices and processes often comes with the hope that this unmasking might allow their undoing, thereby continuing the notion that legal research should necessarily have an impact upon the world.

This session proposes to explore the following questions: what happens if we, legal scholars, suspend the preoccupation to change the world? If, for a moment, we move away from juggling binary motivations of pride/shame, hope/disappointment, and instead, or additionally, we take seriously scholarship that is rooted in curiosity about the various lives of legal thought and practice; in telling stories, from diverse – including unconventional – loci of international law beyond the familiar problem-solving script.

The conference takes place in room 410T (13, rue de l'Université) and online.

Invite-only event.