York Law School Research News Spring 2010
New People
York Law School was joined in Autumn 2009 by two new colleagues in Law, two in the Centre for Applied Human Rights. Dr Sarah Wilson arrived from the University of Manchester in September and is leading the Equity and Trusts teaching team. Sarah has research interests in Equity and Trusts, and in History of Financial Crime. Charlotte O’Brien joined in October from the University of Liverpool where she has recently completed her PhD. Her research interests lie in the intersection of Social Security, European, and Public Law.
The Centre for Applied Human Rights has appointed Lars Waldorf and Martin Jones. Lars has done human rights monitoring and fieldwork in Rwanda and has interests in human rights, international criminal law, and transitional justice; Martin has done transnational advocacy on refugee issues and has interests in international human rights and migration.
The Law School’s first two PGR students also arrived in October 2009. Carol Forrest’s research aims to conceptualise the notion of a compensation culture through a comparative study of work-related stress claims in England and Germany. Carol is supervised by Jenny Steele. Patrick Gallimore’s project concentrates on the origins of the principles and philosophies of the legal system and, in particular, the relationship between legal and wider social understandings of the concept of justice during the eighteenth and nineteenth century and the impact of thinking about justice upon developments in the criminal justice process during that period. He is supervised by Sarah Wilson.
Research Projects, Conferences and Conference Papers
York Law School, together with the Erasmus University of Rotterdam, co-hosted a seminar on ‘Justice for the Masses’, in Rotterdam, 11 December 2009. The seminar papers have formed the basis for a collection of essays on ‘Mass Justice: Challenges of Representation and Distribution’, co-edited by Professor Jenny Steele (York) and Professor Willem van Boom (Rotterdam) and to be published by Edward Elgar Press.
On 18 th and 19 th September 2009, York Law School co-hosted the annual UK Analytic Legal and Political Philosophy Conference, together with the Morrell Centre for Toleration in the Department of Politics.
Dr TT Arvind (York) and Dr Lindsay Stirton (Manchester) were winners of the Best Paper Prize at the SLS Conference at the University of Keele, in September 2009. Their paper, ‘Explaining the Reception of the Code Napoleon in Germany: A Fuzzy-Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis’, was published in (2010) Legal Studies 1-29.
The Wordwide Universities Network, Research Mobility Programme, awarded funding to support collaborative research with the University of Wisconsin-Madison on ‘Globalizing Repair’, to be carried out by Professor Paul Gready and Lars Waldorf in summer 2010. This research tackles the urgent need to move beyond the limitations of human rights discourse and transitional justice mechanisms to more contextualised explanations of violence and more holistic forms of social repair. The York WUN Development Fund awarded funding for a workshop on ‘Globalizing Repair’ in 2010.
Lars Waldorf is the Principal Organiser of a Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar Series on “Fratricide and Fraternité: Understanding and Repairing Neighbourly Atrocity” at the University of London 2009-2010. The Mellon Foundation has awarded $144,000 to support the Series.
In June 2009, at the University of Nicosia as part of the 12 th biennial conference of the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration, Martin Jones convened a series of 5 panels (with Prof. Susan Kneebone of Monash University) looking at governance of international refugee law. He also presented papers at the conference on “Proposals for Reform of the Governance of Refugee Law” and “Beyond the Rejection of Refugee Law in South East Asia”.
Martin Jones is involved in an extended research project into Domestic Refugee Law. The first stage, beginning in 2010, will concentrate on the states of East Africa, Southern Africa, and South-East Asia, and is being undertaken in association with the Refugee Programme of the Fahamu Trust and the Refugee Rights Project of the Faculty of Law of the University of Capetown. Martin is also conducting research (2010-2013) into the Law of Asylum in Asia, in conjunction with (and supported by a grant from) the United States Institute of Peace. The project involves the development and training of networks of lawyers in eight Asian jurisdictions, in partnership with over a dozen local NGOs. Martin is also involved in a project in international refugee law and military service evasion.
Professor Stefan Enchelmaier has recently presented papers on “The Legal Framework for Company Accounts under the Companies Act 2006” at the Second Heidelberg Roundtable on Accounting in May, and on “Licensing, Charging, and Transfer of Ownership in Intellectual Property Rights” at the 2009 Congress of the Association of Teachers and Researchers in Intellectual Property (ATRIP) in Vilnius in September. He also taught courses on “Free Movement of Goods and Intellectual Property in EC Law” at the Summer School on European Intellectual Property Law, Academy of European Law (ERA), Trier, in July, and on “The Relationship Between Free Movement of Goods, Intellectual Property, and Competition Law” at DüsseldorfUniversity’s Fifth Summer School on European Business Law in August. He delivered courses on “The control of mergers in the EC law”; “EC state aid law and procedure”; “Cartel enforcement under Reg. (EC) No. 1/2003” in the framework of the Regional Master in EU Business Law in South East Europe, Belgrade, in November. In December 2009, he presented two papers on comparative company law and comparative commercial law, respectively, at the University of Kyoto.
Charlotte O’Brien presented a paper on ‘Access to justice and the exploitation of migrant workers’ to the European Association of Labour Court Judges in June 2009, and a paper on ‘EU free movement, liberty and rights’ at the Association for Legal and Social Philosophy conference in July 2009. She is developing a joint paper with Professor Stefano Giubboni of the University of Perugia on the right to strike, presented to the European Sociological Association in September 2009. The Vrije University in Amsterdam invited her to give a guest lecture on European citizenship, and to hold a seminar on disability discrimination in February 2010, and she has been invited to present a paper on the reconfiguration of frontier work in the EU at a workshop convened by the Universities of Liverpool, Durham and Edinburgh on the ‘Empowerment and disempowerment of the European citizen’ in April 2010.
In February 2010, Dr Katarzyna Gromek-Broc gave a lecture on 'Legal Responses to Exploitative Labour Practices in the UK and in Europe: A Critical Assessment' in the Royal Flemish Academy for Arts and Sciences. The event was organised in collaboration with L'Université Libre de Bruxelles and forms part of an ongoing research project into ‘Modern Forms of Slavery’. In November 2009, Dr Gromek-Broc spoke at the Wilberforce Institute for Slavery and Emancipation about ‘Women in the UK Labour Market’.
Professor Caroline Hunter has received funding from the University of York pump priming fund to develop her work on abuse of mothers by their teenage children. The funding will be used to interview family, social work and criminal justice professionals who may encounter families where such abuse is occurring. The research is being developed with Judy Nixon and Sadie Parr at Sheffield Hallam University. Hallam has provided funding for an academic symposium on March 25 and 26, 2010 which they are jointly organising.
Dr Sarah Wilson is currently engaged in archival research at the Bank of England, supporting two projects funded by the University of York’s pump-priming funds. First, a project seeking to explore the role of banking scandals in forging societal conceptions of and responses to what is termed “business crime” or “financial crime” has been funded from Departmental, devolved pump-priming funds. Second, a larger project entitled “Regulation, responsibility and remuneration: social norms and the significance of nineteenth-century responses to “socially useless” banking practices for current reflections on bankers’ pay and re-orientations towards responsible risk-taking” is being undertaken with the support of the university’s central pump-priming funds.
Professor Jenny Steele was a speaker at the SLS Centenary Seminar (Judges and Jurists: Reflections on the House of Lords) in London, 5-6 November 2009, organised by James Lee of the Law School, University of Birmingham. SLS Centenary Seminar November 2009
Jenny’s paper, ‘(Dis)owning the Convention in the Law of Tort’ will be published as part of a collection edited by James Lee, From House of Lords to Supreme Court: Judges, Jurists and the Process of Judging (Oxford: Hart Publishing, forthcoming, 2010). (http://www.hartpub.co.uk/books/details.asp?isbn=9781849460811)
Other developments in research
On July 8 2009, 18 academics from a range of British and European law schools gathered at a seminar in the York Law School to discuss the use of empirical legal research in the undergraduate curriculum. The seminar was funded by the Nuffield Foundation and led by Professor Caroline Hunter. The report from the research is now available at http://www.lersnet.ac.uk/?p=78 and Caroline presented a paper based on the report at the Learning In Law Annual Conference at Warwick University in January 2010.
A North East Regional Obligations Group (NEROG) had its first meeting at York in September 2009, and its second at Durham on 8 January 2010. NEROG has contributors from the Universities of York, Hull, Newcastle, Durham, Northumbria, Sheffield, and Sheffield Hallam, the next meeting of the group will be at Hull in July.
Professor Jenny Steele joined the editorial team of Clerk and Lindsell on Torts in 2009, and is the editor of four chapters of the 20 th edition, which will be published in 2010. A second edition of Jenny’s Tort Law: Text, Cases and Materials is published in April 2010.
The new Law and Management Building is in the final stages of development and appears to be on target for opening in August 2010.
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