Speaker's Series Feb. 2

Friday, February 2, 2018 - 15:00

Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation & Rhetoric along with the PhD in Argumentation Studies at the University of Windsor invite you to a talk by

 

Dr. Bill Conklin

Argumentation Studies faculty

 

“Two Forms of Legal Time”

Abstract: This Paper examines the importance of time in understanding the identity and binding character of a law. The Paper claims that a special sense of time has been adopted in Anglo-American legal theory. This sense of time has been structured into distinct phases or periods, each unconnected with the next. Each distinct structure is parsed with a beginning of the constitutional order as a whole. Legal justification and the conceptual structures of justification are presumed to follow suit in distinct historical periods.

Such a beginning of structured time has taken two forms in legal justification. The beginning has been described as Originalism in contemporary legal theory. I shall identify a very different sense of time that also figures in legal time, however. This is experiential time. Experienced time is immanent in events as if experienced time lies in an uninterrupted continuity of time. I shall draw from my own unpublished anthropological research about the sense of law in contemporary Nomadic groups and pre-contact Indigenous Peoples in North America. This contrasts with the above-mentioned positivism of Originalism. This Paper argues that in the act of displacement of experienced time by structured time, the sense of time as experienced is forgotten by jurists who are trained to accept the Originalism of a legal order.

 

Friday, February 2, 2018

3:00 pm

Memorial Hall, Room 105

 

All are welcome

(519)253-3000