The University of Wisconsin Law School, Center for Indisciplinary French Studies, and the French House invite you to a talk in French by Vivian Curran, Distinguished Professor of Law, University of Pittsburgh School of Law. (More about Professor Curran here.)
Thursday, September 14, 4pm
The French House
Le va-et-vient de la transnationalisation du droit dans une affaire de crime contre l’humanité
La mondialisation se répand avec la technologie et le flux de la communication et il devient incontournable qu’elle influe sur le droit, ce domaine territorial par excellence, qui ne devient pas international mais de plus en plus transnational. Ce processus doit pourtant s’insérer dans la logique des cultures nationales, car le juridique est le résultat d’une société, d’une histoire et d’un système politique, du vécu d’un peuple et des communautés qui en font partie.
L’affaire Lipietz concernait un crime contre l’humanité, l’embarquement vers des camps d’internement par le gouvernement et le chemin de fer français de personnes ciblées par le Statut des Juifs, première étape vers la déportation à des camps d’extermination. L’affaire juridique s’est déroulée un demi-siècle plus tard par le biais d’un procédé emprunté au système common law des États-Unis. La huée qui l’a entourée en France suggère à la fois les processus de transnationalisation et les défis de déchiffrage qu’elle relève.
The Back-and-Forth of Law’s Transnationalization in a Case of a Crime against Humanity
Globalization has spread with technology and increased streams of communication, and it has become irrefutable that it has influenced law, an area traditionally defined by national territory. Law is not becoming international, but transnational. This process, however, is inseparable from national cultures, as law results from, and is in a dynamic with, a nation’s society, history, political system, and the lived experiences of the communities that form it.
The Lipietz case involved a crime against humanity, the transport to internment camps by the French government and railway of people targeted by the 1940s Statute of Jews, a first step toward what was intended to be their deportation to extermination camps. The case took place half a century later by means of a legal procedure borrowed from the U.S. common law system. The outcry surrounding the case in France is suggestive both of the processes of transnationalization and the challenges of decoding that transnationalization carries in its wake.
This talk, followed by a reception, is free and open to the public.