Initiating new directions for interdisciplinary and translational research and graduate education on the UIUC campus, this project will establish an institutional framework for collaboration between the Humanities, Economics, and Law. Participants will forge new teaching and research methodologies exploring culture as a regulative force of practices and norms in law, a force that in turn constitutes perceptions of justice, security, and development.

The proposed project will teach students how to identify problems of cultural difference inflecting conceptualizations of justice in such areas as clandestine economies, citizenship, social order, security, health and medicine, humanity and economic development, and sustainable freedom; how to trace historical roots of the aforementioned contemporary problems; how to analyze the interrelationships between culture, socioeconomic conditions, and law; and how to conduct translational research that will contribute to our understanding of and possible solutions to current problems caused by cultural differences in the rule of law.

This project, building on a 2009 Focal Point Project on law and society, will be led by faculty in history, literature, economics, and law, who conduct multi-lingual, cross-disciplinary, and transnational research on the Middle East, China, Russia, the European Union, the USA, and Latin America. In addition to offering graduate student fellowships, it will include a reading group, a sequence of graduate seminars, and a project website, and will co-sponsor several conferences or talks on campus. The faculty PLs and the doctoral students will present their work at academic conferences and publish in different disciplines.

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Our objective is to create and promote an environment of intellectual exchange between the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Law, as well as critically to examine synergies of culture and law in various contexts. Studies of law and culture are essential research concerns of a wide number of faculty and graduate students on the UIUC campus. A framework facilitating this particular area of cross-disciplinary conversation is needed on the UIUC campus.

Law is essential to human society. Legal practices and discourses reflect conceptions of justice and order, and respond to historical events and cultural transformations. All across the globe, law defines social boundaries and norms and regulates political and economic development. This project studies contemporary problems concerning the multiplicity of justices as a historical phenomenon by which diverse cultural idioms and value systems have collided, or been elided, with each other.

Our global environment presents serious challenges emerging from the multiplicity of justices, leading to confusion and confrontation on several fronts: clandestine economies and the criminalization of poverty, terrorism and ultranationalism, sustainability and economic development, gender and immigration law, health and commercialization, medical law and ethics. These challenges require scholars and graduate students to understand and communicate not only across national/continental borders but also across disciplinary lines. An understanding of multiple justices is essential in an age where interactions between peoples from different cultural backgrounds increase with unprecedented speed and scale, whether it is awareness of the vexed history of applying international law principles developed in the West; the legacy of competing interpretations of justice and legality inherited from the past; the importing of biomedical ethics and law in a community with a different view of personhood and the medicine-society relationship; inter-state collaboration and conflict in defining terrorism after 9-11; or different approaches to financial regulation and monetary policies in different cultural contexts. We must cultivate an environment in which our graduate students can develop their ability to identify and study culturally-rooted problems in law and economics arising from globalization, with attention both to macro phenomena and local histories.

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