Law and Philosophy in a Cross-Cultural Perspective

This course aims at training a jurist for a globalized world where the Western legal categories - chiefly those of civil and common law - often get exported or transplanted into alien legal traditions not seldom with unintended consequences that are hardly predictable in advance. Further, in a legally globalized world the jurist will be often confronted with legal institutions that are completely incommensurable with Western institutions. By having recourse to a philosophical approach (understood as a search for questions rather than a search for answers, as well as an invitation to what Ancient Greeks called thaumázein, that is, being surprised by phenomena, in turn, understood as a preliminary stage to their critical understanding), students will be sensitized, on the one hand, to the relativity of some Western legal institutions, on the other hand, to the possibility of some human legal universals, some of which sometimes can be traced even among non-human animals. In this way the student will develop a non-Western-centric approach to new or alien legal problems.
During the course texts by legal philosophers as well as by legal sociologists, anthro-pologists, psychologists and ethologists, will be assigned and critically discussed. Attention will be devoted to relativism, in general, and, in particular, to some legal institutions like revenge, punishment, promise, property, per
son and status groups, as well as sexual and other taboos.

Analytical program

1. Western-centric vs. non-Western-centric conceptions of legal phenomena
2. Relativism
3. Revenge and vindicatory justice
4. Punishment
5. Promises
6. Property
7. Person and status groups
8. Sexual and other taboos
9. Physiology vs. pathology of legal phenomena: search for law outside legal courts
10. Non-human legal phenomena