Yxta Maya Murray at Loyola Law School has passed along a call for papers for a conference on Law, Peace, and Violence: Jurisprudence and the Possibilities of Peace next March at Seattle University's law school. Cribbing now a little from the call for papers:
Can the law help forge a more peaceful world? In this symposium, legal scholars will study law’s potential to increase domestic and inter-national peace. We will also focus on the problems that peace rhetoric creates for rights developments, particularly in the ways that it is used to marginalize outsiders’ direct action efforts.
Nonviolent resistance often rebels against the rule of law. Étienne de La Boétie described this conflict in 1553, noting the dissenter "can deliver [herself] if [she] tr[ies], not by taking action, but merely by willing to be free. . . . I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer." Similarly, in "Resistance to Civil Government" (1849), Henry David Thoreau maintained "I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest." On the other hand, Frantz Fanon suggested that colonized peo-ples have a right to use violence to resist oppression, and his work has inspired anti-colonial and anti-racist activists around the world, including in the Black liberation movement in the United States.
Where does the peacemaking lawyer exist in this politics?
This is a super-exciting question. And long-time readers of the facutly lounge may recall that this is an issue of immense interest to me. And reminds me that very soon I want to talk about the role of the lawyers for the enslaved defendants in the trials following the Nat Turner rebellion. The brutality of the rebellion and its aftermath reminds me of just how damaging violence was. The violence of slavery sparked the rebellion, which led to extraordinary repression. And while some lawyers tried to constrain the violence in the aftermath -- and may have had some success -- there was blood everywhere. There are a lot of examples in our nation's history of just how much violence begets more violence, as well as how difficult it is for the law to constrain or respond to violence. In some instances in our history, it was law that licensed or even encouraged violence.
There is a more optimistic story to tell of the role of law in our nation's history, of course -- about the way that law has helped construct a world of order and justice. Quakers, for instance, after they got done critiquing the injustice of law in the United Kingdom, set about trying to build a better world through law here in the Americas (and here). One piece of that story that particularly interests me is how much law and judges lay at the center of Quaker thought in the 1650s and 1660s. Their mistreatment by the legal system helped to shape their identity and their sense of how law should operate. I think that's one under-explored area of both Quaker history and of seventeenth century law. This is a big part of George Fox's Autobiography and later William Penn. That's been written about some -- but this is also a big part of the lesser-known Quaker pamphlets of the era. Hence I have a picture of the oak at the London Grove Quaker meeting, which is supposed to go back to the era of William Penn (and thus to the early 18th century).
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