What does legal reasoning to History and Culture and what do History and Culture to Law in Courts?

This workshop proposes to reflect on the relationship between law and social sciences addressing this broad question from an ethnographic and empirical perspective. What is to be learned about legal reasoning when embedded in or facing cultural and historical elements in the diversity of their enunciations in courts (facts, knowledge, claim, argument or identities)?

During the two sessions, the speakers and the audience will analyze case studies of entanglements of legal reasoning and cultural and historical arguments as well as facts brought to courts. In the context of transitional justice and international criminal justice, establishing facts and navigating chronotypes are intrinsically linked to (re)writing history: an ambivalent and volatile mission. In comparison, cultural arguments are rather treated through patterns of affiliation and disaffiliation in international criminal justice and national asylum courts. Instead of generating an abstract agenda for interdisciplinarity in sociolegal research, this comparison through ethnographical perspectives in courts aims to develop systematic and empirical
methods to document how legal reasoning, here in courts, react, entangle or neutralize « non legal » dimensions of cases where history and culture are more than mere context.

More informations…