The Consultative Committee
The consultative committee is a group of scholars who, with their expertise and long-standing experience in the department’s areas of research, support its research agenda. All of them are well versed in the study of law and cultural diversity in contemporary settings, whether as anthropologists or as jurists - or in some cases both. They have a special interest, each in their own way, in the three priorities that the department has adopted for its activities: (1) issues of applied anthropology, i.e. on the purposes, dilemmas and problems linked to expertise and consultancy work; (2) the comparison and comparability of concepts, procedures, institutions, etc., within and across normative legal orders; and (3) the increased interconnectedness of law and religion in the contemporary world.
Markus Böckenförde
Markus Böckenförde is currently Executive Director of the Centre for Global Cooperation Research (University Duisburg-Essen) and a regular Visiting Professor at the Central European University (CEU), Budapest. In 2011 and 2012, he was the Head of the Advisory Team to the Policy Planning staff at the Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (Bonn-Berlin) as well as a Senior Researcher at the German Development Institute (DIE, Bonn). From 2009 to 2011 he was Programme Officer and temporarily Acting Programme Manager for the Constitution Building Project at International IDEA, Stockholm, Sweden. Between 2001 and 2008 Markus Böckenförde was the Head of Africa Projects and a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law (MPIL) in Heidelberg. In 2006 and 2007, he was seconded by the German Foreign Office to the Assessment and Evaluation Commission (AEC) in Sudan as its legal expert in the course of the implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement.
He holds a law degree and a PhD from the University of Heidelberg, a Master of Laws degree from the University of Minnesota, and the equivalent of a Bachelor’s degree in political science (University of Freiburg). He has been involved in various constitution-building processes, including in Afghanistan, Nepal, Sudan, Somalia, Tunisia, and Libya, working in part with the relevant constitutional assemblies. He has published widely in the areas of international law, constitutional law, and constitution building and is the co-author of International IDEA’s Practical Guide to Constitution Building, which has been translated into Arabic, Myanmar, and Vietnamese. His principal research interest is constitution-building processes from both a procedural and substantive perspective, which entails working in the respective fields of comparative constitutional law, legal pluralism, law and development, and international law. His most recent publication is ‘From Constructive Ambiguity to Harmonious Interpretation: Religion-Related Provisions in the Tunisian Constitution’ (American Behavioral Scientist, 2016).
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John R. Bowen
John R. Bowen is the Dunbar-Van Cleve Professor in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, and recurrent Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics. He has been studying Islam and society in Indonesia since the late 1970s, and since 2001 has worked in France, England, and North America on problems of pluralism, law, and religion, and in particular on contemporary efforts to rethink Islamic norms and civil law.
His most recent book on Asia is Islam, Law and Equality in Indonesia: An Anthropology of Public Reasoning (Cambridge, 2003). His Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves (Princeton, 2007) concerned current debates in France on Islam and laïcité. Can Islam be French? (Princeton, 2009) treated Muslim debates and institutions in France and appeared in French in 2011. A New Anthropology of Islam from Cambridge and Blaming Islam from MIT Press appeared in 2012. He also writes regularly for The Boston Review. His current two research projects concern sharia and civil law in England, and Islamic courts and property disputes in Indonesia.
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Jean-François Gaudreault-DesBiens
Jean-François Gaudreault-DesBiens is Dean of the Faculty of Law at the Université de Montréal and Canada Research Chair in North American and Comparative Juridical and Cultural Identities. He has also taught at the faculties of law of the University of Toronto and of McGill University, in addition to having been visiting professor at different universities outside of Canada (Aix-Marseille, Sciences Po, Case Western). His teaching and research interests are constitutional law (domestic and comparative), civil liberties, legal theory and epistemology, and the sociology of legal cultures.
His work currently focuses on the legal treatment of religious claims in multicultural liberal societies, on the relations between the civil law and common law traditions in a globalized economy, and on the legal theory of federalism. He is a member of the Québec and Ontario Bars. He serves as the Canadian correspondent for the British journal Public Law.
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Anthony Good
Anthony Good is Professor Emeritus in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, where he was Head of the School of Social & Political Science until his retirement in 2009. His initial ethnographic research in Tamil Nadu, South India, concerned family and kinship, and subsequent field research in a Hindu temple was concerned with the ceremonial economy linking gods, priests and worshippers. He has acted as a senior consultant for the Department for International Development, and frequently acts as an expert witness in asylum appeals in the UK, the USA and Canada, mainly involving Sri Lankan Tamils. Since 2000 he has been carrying out ESRC and AHRC-funded research into uses of expert evidence in the British asylum courts, and (with Robert Gibb) into the asylum processes in the UK and France.
He is the author of Research Practices in the Study of Kinship (1984; with Alan Barnard); The Female Bridegroom: A Comparative Study of Life-Crisis Rituals in South India and Sri Lanka (1991); Worship and the Ceremonial Economy of a Royal South Indian Temple (2004); and Anthropology and Expertise in the Asylum Courts (2007).
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Mark Goodale
Mark Goodale is Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Lausanne and the founding Series Editor of Stanford Studies in Human Rights. He conducts ethnographic research on law, social and political change, and culture and is the author or editor of twelve books, including Anthropology and Law: A Critical Introduction (NYU Press, 2017), UNESCO Surveys the World: A Prehistory of Human Rights (ed., forthcoming with Stanford UP, 2018), Human Rights at the Crossroads (ed., Oxford UP, 2012), Mirrors of Justice: Law and Power in the Post-Cold War Era (with Kamari Maxine Clarke, Cambridge UP, 2010), Surrendering to Utopia: An Anthropology of Human Rights (Stanford UP, 2009), Dilemmas of Modernity: Bolivian Encounters with Law and Liberalism (Stanford UP, 2008), and The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law Between the Global and the Local (with Sally Engle Merry, Cambridge UP, 2007). He is currently working on a study of law, ideology, and social change in Bolivia based on several years of research funded by the US National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.
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Michele Graziadei
Michele Graziadei is professor of comparative law at the University of Torino. His research concentrates on the methodology of comparative law, legal pluralism, law and language, and on other theoretical problems relating to the comparison of laws. He has published widely in several languages, and has directed or taken part to international research projects concerning law and other social sciences.
Prof. Graziadei is titular member of the International Academy of Comparative Law, Vice President of the Italian Society for Research on Comparative Law (SIRD), President of the Italian Group of the Association Capitant, and fellow of the European Centre on Tort and Insurance Law, Vienna. He has been a visiting professor at Cornell University, Université de Luxembourg, and Bar-Ilan University, and is visiting Professor at the Université Jean Moulin, Lyon III. He teaches at the Faculté internationale de droit comparé, Strasbourg.
His publications include: "Financial Collateral Arrangements: Directive 2002/47/EC, and the Many Faces of Reasonableness", Uniform Law Review, 2012, 497; "Children’s Rights: The Law's Uncertain Search For Principle and the Relevance of Cross-Cultural Thinking". in G. Cortese (ed.), Reflections on Children’s Rights - Marginalised Identities in the Discourse(s) of Justice, Polimetrica, 2011, 187-202; and "Language and Terminology", in Christian Twigg-Flesner (ed.), Cambridge Companion to European Union Private Law, Cambridge University Press, 2010, 70 ff. (with S. Ferreri and G. Danneman).
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Dirk Hanschel
Dirk Hanschel is Professor of German, European, and International Public Law at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. He joined the law school in 2015, having previously worked as a reader at the University of Aberdeen. Much of his work focuses on public international law and comparative constitutional law, in particular with regard to environmental and human rights issues as well as comparative federalism. Publications include the monographs Verhandlungslösungen im Umweltvölkerrecht (Boorberg 2003), based on his doctoral thesis, and Konfliktlösung im Bundesstaat (Mohr Siebeck 2012), based on his Habilitation thesis. During his time in Scotland he examined legal concepts of regional autonomy and self-determination within the context of pressing devolution and independence debates. His current research focuses on, inter alia, the interconnections of environmental protection and individual rights, in particular in light of climate change. This interest is reflected in his inaugural lecture on climate refugees in international law in May 2016, published in ZAR (Zeitschrift für Ausländerrecht und Ausländerpolitik, 2017).
Dirk Hanschel holds a German law degree from the University of Heidelberg, a doctoral degree from the University of Mannheim, and a Master of Comparative Law (Mannheim/Adelaide), all with distinction. He completed his two-year practical training period at Oberlandesgericht Zweibrücken and his Habilitation at the University of Mannheim. He has taught and conducted research at a wide range of German and international universities, the latter including the European University Institute, the University of Melbourne, the University of Connecticut and, in particular, the University of Aberdeen.
Dirk Hanschel is a member of the Association of German Constitutional Lawyers, the German Society of International Law, and the German Society of Comparative Law.
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René Kuppe
René Kuppe, trained in law and cultural anthropology, is a professor at the Law School of the University of Vienna, where he is the coordinator of the Optional Programme ‘Indigenous Legal Studies’. He also teaches law and anthropology to students of cultural anthropology, international development studies and history at the University of Vienna. His research deals with the translation of interests and claims of indigenous peoples into the logic and concepts of (official) state law and the legal protection of indigenous sacred landscapes or sites, especially in North America and the Arctic region.
In the early 2000s, he was the coordinator of a legal cooperation project, funded by the German GTZ, advising the Commission on Indigenous Rights of the National Assembly (Parliament) of Venezuela. From 2006 to 2008, under an EU-funded project, he helped develop models of participation of indigenous peoples of Latin America in the implementation of land and territorial rights. Over the last decade, Kuppe has been participating in legal consultation projects in Andean countries involving the implementation of the indigenous rights to consultation and the coordination of indigenous and state jurisdictions.
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Maleiha Malik
Maleiha Malik is a Professor in Law at King's College London. She studied law at the University of London and University of Oxford. She is a barrister and a member and fellow of the Honourable Society of Gray’s Inn. Maleiha Malik’s research focuses on the theory and practice of discrimination law. She has written extensively on discrimination law, minority protection and feminist theory. She is the co-author of a leading text titled Discrimination Law: Theory and Practice which was published in 2008. She is, along with Dr Jon Wilson from the Department of History at KCL, the co-ordinator of the AHRC project on ‘Traditions in the Present’ which explores the relevance of ‘tradition’ in contemporary societies.
Maleiha Malik's current research focuses on the intersection between sexual and cultural equality, and it explores the adjustments that may need to be made to feminist theory to accommodate increasing cultural pluralism. She teaches courses in Jurisprudence and Legal Theory, Discrimination Law and European Law to undergraduates and postgraduate students.
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