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Collaborative Research Networks (CRNs) were originally formed at the 2000 Annual Meeting in Miami to facilitate international research collaboration in selected topics for presentation at the meeting in Budapest in July 2001. After that meeting, some of the CRNs decided to continue and build on their success by expanding their network of scholars, maintaining electronic communication within the group, and contributing organized sessions to the 2002 Vancouver program.
CRNs were supported in 2000/2001 by travel grants for some members with funds from the National Science Foundation and the American Bar Foundation. Unfortunately, no funds are available for this purpose for the Vancouver meeting.
Expression of Interest:
If you wish to participate actively in one of the CRNs you should identify yourself by sending an email to organizer (simply click on the organizer's name to email these recipients simultaneously). In the email message describe your research interest and how it might fit in the subject of the CRN. Also indicate whether you intend to participate in the Vancouver meeting.
(click on organizer's name to send an email)
The Collaborative Research Network on Constitutional Ethnography will focus on a set of theoretical and empirical issues related to the establishment, maintenance, transformation and collapse of constitutional regimes. The last two decades have seen the evolution of many military dictatorships and soviet-style regimes (particularly in Latin America and Eastern Europe) into constitutional-democratic ones. That same period has also seen the creation of a "constitution of Europe" through the ever-closer union of European nations as well as the strengthening of other regional associations, at the same time that there has been constitutional devolution within a number of diverse countries like Spain, Britain, Brazil and Russia. Constitutional revolutions have overtaken established constitutional regimes like Britain (abolition of the role of the heredity peers, the proposed introduction of a bill of rights, the new parliaments), Canada (creation of a charter of rights), and the United States (federalism strikes back). At the same time as these country-specific changes are occurring, international law has been playing a larger role in the domestic law of many constitutional democracies than it used to as new international bodies take over responsibilities that were once the sole province of sovereignty (e.g. the international criminal court, monetary linkages, the policy contingencies of IMF loans). Through constitutional borrowing from one system to another and through the harmonizing effects of international law, constitutional regimes are becoming more like each other even as they are in other ways becoming more distinctive. The landscape of constitutionalism is quickly changing - and yet there is still the sense that constitutions provide a way to bring stability to politics. Constitutionalism is a field full of paradoxes.Organizer: Kim Scheppele, University of Pennsylvania
Appropriate constitutional subject matter includes not only the
obvious one of constitutional clauses (or equivalents) and their
meanings. Some subjects that are profoundly about the
organization of the state or about the relationship between the state
and the individual (the legal regulation of the state, mechanisms of
elections, constitution of an official currency, the protection of
human rights, the creation of citizenship, the extension of law to
politics) are constitutional subjects even if not all constitutional
texts include them. "Constitutional ethnography"
is meant to include a broad range of specific subjects. If this
description has captivated you, please propose something!
Questions of citizenship and immigration are central to understandings of the role of law in relation to transnational mobility and investment.Organizers: Susan Coutin, Los Angeles State University, and Miguel Diaz-Barriga, Swathmore College
Cause lawyers challenge mainstream representations of professionalism by taking sides in political and social conflicts. In so doing, cause lawyers become advocates not only, or primarily, for their clients but for causes with which the clients? cases are associated--and with which the lawyer identifies. Research possibilities include but are not limited to examinations of the activities of cause lawyers, the role of cause lawyers in divided societies, the connections of cause lawyers to social movements, the impact of their work on state processes, and transnational networks. Beginning in the mid-1990s, the Cause Lawyering Project has organized international and interdisciplinary research teams that have produced two edited volumes. The collaborative research network is an opportunity to extend the geographic and cultural reach of the cause lawyering project; to generate new research, advance theorization of cause lawyering, test existing propositions and uncover new ones--all from a broader base than the current project.Organizers: Austin Sarat, Amherst College, and Stuart Scheingold, University of Washington
4. Lay Participation in Legal Systems
Organizers: Sanja Kutnjak Ivkovich, Harvard University, Valerie Hans, University of Delaware, and Mary Rose, American Bar Foundation
The purpose of this CRN is to bring together scholars working on different forms of lay participation in legal decision making. The legal systems of many countries incorporate laypersons in some decision-making capacity, including lay judges or assessors, mixed tribunals of law-trained and lay judges, and the jury.
Lay participation in the justice system has been justified on multiple grounds. It is said to improve decision making, to reduce the impact of biased or corrupt judges, to keep the system responsive to changing community values, to better represent the diversity of citizen experiences and perspectives, and to enhance the legitimacy of the system. Lay involvement is strongly criticized on multiple grounds as well, including charges that lay participants are incompetent or biased decision makers, lack crucial knowledge of law, or ignore the law. Scholars have also questioned whether lay participation has any real impact on legal system outcomes or whether it is serves only a legitimacy function.
This CRN will help facilitate the exchange of research findings and comparative research about lay involvement in legal decision making. What are the strengths and drawbacks of different forms of lay participation as practiced in different countries? How do a country's historical and contextual factors shape the forms of lay participation? To what extent does lay participation fulfill its multiple functions?
5. Regulatory Governance
Organizers: Cary Coglianese, Harvard University, and Joe Rees, Virginia Polytechnic Institute
The CRN on Regulation will focus on the study
of regulatory instruments, institutions, and actors. The network is
concerned with how law interacts with economic activity and with the
challenges that emerging social trends, such as privatization and
globalization, pose for regulatory and administrative institutions. It
examines how traditional as well as emerging regulatory instruments --
such as self-regulation, covenants, management systems, and market-based
regulation -- work in theory and in practice. It also explores the
behavior, culture, and design of regulatory institutions and actors,
with particular attention to the varied demands of accountability,
rationality, and legitimacy. The network seeks to build a dialogue
among researchers focusing on regulation in domestic and international
settings and across a variety of regulatory domains.
6. Public Opinion and the Courts
Organizers: Cheri Wilson, Loyola College in Maryland, and Jose Juan Toharia, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid
The purpose of this CRN is to promote the systematic comparison and to encourage the production of opinion data regarding the operation and evaluation of the systems of justice.
7. New Directions in Inequality and Legal Consciousness
Organizers: Benjamin Steiner, University of Delaware and Laura Beth Nielsen, American Bar Foundation and Northwestern University
This CRN focuses on the constitution, reproduction, contestation, and resistance of social inequalities such as race, ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality in lay and professional narratives of "law" in a variety of contexts. Conceiving of law and legality as inseparable from broader societal systems of unearned privilege and reward, we seek to build on and combine perspectives of scholars of critical legal studies, inequality, legal consciousness, and critical empiricism, who seek to develop new empirical and theoretical models in both the American and global/transnational contexts. This CRN strives to create an intellectual environment that facilitates interaction between critical legal scholars including critical race and feminist theorists, empirical social scientists, as well as policy-oriented scholars who focus on the lived truth/real world implications/law in action of legality. In addition to disciplinary barriers, this collaborative research network hopes to break down geographic and cultural walls as well.
8. Labor Rights
Organizer: Frank Munger, University of Buffalo, SUNY
In a global economy, there is a need for new approaches to the age-old challenge of protecting workers' rights and improving labor standards. Globalization affects the nature of work and the character of the employment relationship around the world. Pressures on firms to improve competitiveness through restructuring workforces and production across national borders have led to increased challenges for nation-states. States in the North look for ways to preserve existing levels of employment and income support while those in the South struggle to simultaneously promote growth and investment and raise labor standards. To these ends, national laws may need to be revised, international norms developed, and transnational advocacy explored.
This network seeks to encourage research by sociolegal scholars on these issues and bring sociolegal scholars and experts on industrial relations together. We hope to foster work along two intersecting dimensions. First, what is the impact of changes in firms, production processes and global market forces on work, workforces, and worker's rights and conditions in the North and South? Second, how do existing legal institutions function and what kinds of new governance mechanisms are needed? We hope to explore the role of states, courts, unions, NGO's, existing international institutions such as the ILO, 'social clauses' in trade agreements, the World Bank and other IFI's, as well as industries and private firms through codes of conduct and otherwise.
9. Integrating Gender into Legal Education: Transforming Women’s Legal Status
Organizers: Ann Shalleck and Tammy Horn, American University
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Organizers: Tanina Rostain, New York Law School and Austin Sarat, Amherst College
This collaborative Research Network examines transnational corporate legal practice. The aim of the project is to encourage legal scholars and social scientists interested or engaged in empirical study of corporate lawyers and their role(s) in creating and shaping international legal regimes and markets. In this early stage, we invite participants to frame research inquiries that focus on the role of international corporate practice in countries in such areas as the European Union, Eastern Europe, Latin America and East Asia. Some of the questions participants are encouraged to consider are: What substantive legal arrangements have international corporate lawyers sought to promote on behalf of their clients? Which specific rule of law values do they seek to advance? To what extent have such lawyers been concerned with creating markets for their clients or for their own services? And what interrelationships are there among these issues and corporate lawyers' professional values and commitments?
11. New Topic
If you wish to organize a CRN on a topic not covered by others, contact Valerie Hans with your proposal, including a brief description. If the CRN is approved it will be added to this list for solicitation of members.
