Contemporary Critical Thought and Juridical Practice

Ringvorlesung des Exzellenzclusters "Die Herausbildung normativer Ordnungen": Criminal Justice between Purity and Pluralism - Strafrechtspflege zwischen Purismus und Pluralität

Bernard E. Harcourt (Columbia University & École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris)

24. Mai 2017, 18.15 Uhr

Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main
Campus Westend, Hörsaalzentrum, HZ11

Abstract
Throughout the ages, legal practices have served as critical tools for social inquiry and as models for the discovery of truth in other fields. In Truth and Juridical Forms (1973) and Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling (1981), Michel Foucault traced the birth of certain forms of modern social scientific inquiry to ancient forms of juridical practice, such as, for instance, the quasi-avowal of Antilokus in Book 23 of Homer’s Iliad or the search for truth in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. What of today? What is the relationship today, in contemporary critical thought, between social inquiry in the human sciences and the methods or practices of law? And if that question is ultimately indeterminate, what then should the  relationship look like?

CV
Bernard E. Harcourt is a contemporary critical theorist and the author, most recently, of Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age and The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order.
Harcourt is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia University, Professor  of Political Science, and  the founding director of the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought; he is also directeur d’études (chaired  professor) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. During 2016-2017, heis visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.
Professor Harcourt is also the editor of Michel Foucault’s 1972-73 lectures at the Collège de France, La Société punitive, and the 1971-1972 lectures as well, Théories et institutions pénales. He is also the editor of the new Pléiade edition of Surveiller et punir in the collected works of Foucault at Gallimard.
Professor Harcourt is also an active death row lawyer. He began represented inmates sentenced to death in Alabama in 1990 and continues that work on a pro bono basis today on cases challenging the death penalty and life imprisonment without parole.

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Veranstalter:
Exzellenzcluster "Die Herausbildung normativer Ordnungen"