Posted on 03 July 2012
A legal conference has been underway last week to mark the work of Professor David Trubek; a visiting scholar at the EUI who based at the University of Wisconsin Law School.
The two-day ‘Global Governance: Critical Legal Perspectives’ conference was launched by a global governance debate and a keynote speech yesterday. Professor Duncan Kennedy of Harvard Law School gave the speech on ‘Globalising Critical Discourse on Law’ – a topic chosen by Trubek.
Kennedy met Trubek as his student 45 years ago, and chose to interpret the elected subject through a reading of Trubek’s work since the early 1960s – the same decade the Harvard academic studied under Trubek.
Examining the phrase ‘critical discourse on law’, Kennedy told the audience that the phrase was invented by Trubek in 1976, and has since become commonplace: “Critique is directed at the global legal phenomenon that is characteristic of our time. The left project in a globalisation of law as a project of poor country capitalist imperial domination of the global south, and the second is the critique of the ways in which the place of the world legal phenomena functions as an ideology”.
The Harvard Professor went on to highlight Trubek’s evolving work and key texts of his career, on a broad range of legal areas from the environment to civil justice.
He described one early work, the 1977 ‘Complexity and Contradiction in the Legal Order: Balbus and the Challenge of Critical Social Thought About Law’, as “one of the most striking”. A second article, ‘Global Restructuring and the Law: Studies of the Internationalization of Legal Fields and the Creation of Transnational Arenas,’ was co-authored by Trubek in 1994 and praised by Kennedy as “astonishing”. Having taught the article to his own students, Kennedy praised Trubek’s examination of “the legal profession and its relationship to government, private multinational and public interest – as a structure”.
Trubek’s skill over the past 50 years has been to produce texts which have credible policy proposals, the keynote speaker said. Conference panels explored everything from development policy to transformations in global governance, a further testimony to the scope of Trubek’s career.
(Text: Rosie Scammell. Image: Duncan Kennedy)