Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law

The first convener of Workshop 2, “Claiming the Past, Belonging for the Future,” that we would like to introduce is Marianne Constable. She is Professor of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley and has published broadly on a range of topics in legal rhetoric and philosophy. Her most recent book, entitled Our Word is Our Bond: How Legal Speech Acts, (Stanford University Press, 2014) shows how legal utterances, in speech and writing, are forms of law-in-action. She is currently working on the “new unwritten law” that ostensibly exonerated women who killed their husbands in Chicago a century ago, as a way of exploring the rhetoric of law and the rhetoric of history. Her earlier books include Just Silences: The Limits and Possibilities of Modern Law (2005) and The Law of the Other: The Mixed Jury and Changes in Conceptions of Citizenship, Law and Knowledge (1994), which won the Law and Society Association’s J. Willard Hurst Prize in Legal History.

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The second workshop we want to introduce this week will deal with a variety of questions on claims to/of heritage and their implications. Workshop 2 “Claiming the Past, Belonging for the Future” will be convened by Marianne Constable and Leti Volpp. This is their abstract for this workshop:

Heritage, heredity, and inheritance all come from the past and yet their claims are not simply historical. Indeed, as present-day acts, claims of heritage set up what belongs to whom for the future. What kinds of claims are these? Are they distinct as claims? What is it to make or state or stake a claim? How are legal claims performed? What do claims, as speech acts, involve? Does every claim involve an assertion of fact plus a demand for recognition? When are claims as to heritage factual? When are they claims of law? To what do they appeal? And what sort of evidence do they call for? How does what counts as evidence of a particular claim change over time?

Drawing in part on the work of J. L. Austin on speech acts and referring to a small number of documents drawn from various legal contexts — particular statutes, local regulations, trial transcripts, and possibly UN documents — we’ll begin to touch on the complexity of these issues as they relate to cultural heritage and historic preservation. Readings will include scholarship about the 20^th-century legal history of archeology and about encounters between different traditions.