Symposium, September 5-6, 2014
The requirement of an injury is fundamental to many civil actions in most countries of the world but the meaning of injury is constructed by cultural and social practices and not by law alone. The concept of an injury arises from prevalent understandings of the person - those aspects of human beings that are considered fundamental to their identity and worthy of legal protection. But understandings of the person vary widely across time and space; the law reflects these variations and, at times, produces them.
The Civil Justice Program Symposium will address some of the most difficult and important debates over injury now taking place in societies around the world. Issues will include the tension between physical and reputational injuries, relational and emotional harms, virtual injuries, the normalization and inequitable infliction of injury on vulnerable victims, the hidden issues of causation, and the paradoxical degradation of victims through legal actions meant to compensate them for their disabilities. Participants include social scientists as well as lawyers, and the subject matter will extend to Europe, the Middle East and Asia as well as North America.
Friday, September 5, 2014
9:00 – 9:30 A.M. Registration and Continental Breakfast
9:30 – 9:45 A.M. WELCOME
Victor Gold, Dean, Loyola Law School
Anne Bloom, Associate Director, Civil Justice Program, Loyola Law School
David Engel, SUNY Distinguished Service Professor, SUNY Buffalo Law School
9:45 A.M. – 12:00 P.M. PANEL 1: What Counts as Injury?
Mary Anne Franks, Associate Professor of Law, University of Miami, “Injury Inequality.”
David Engel, SUNY Distinguished Service Professor, SUNY Buffalo Law School, “Chairs, Stairs, and Automobiles: The Interpretation of Injury and the Absence of Claims.”
10:30-10:40 Break
Anne Bloom, Visiting Clinical Professor of Law and Associate Director, Civil Justice Program, Loyola Law School
Marc Galanter, Professor of Law Emeritus, University of Wisconsin Law School, “Good Injuries.”
Sagit Mor, Assistant Professor of Law, Haifa University Faculty of Law, Haifa, Israel, “The Meaning of Injury: A Disability Perspective.”
John Nockleby, Professor of Law, Loyola Law School, Professor of Law and Director, Civil Justice Program, “Responsibility in Tort for Injuries Incurred During Natural Disasters."
Discussant: Marc Galanter, Professor of Law Emeritus, University of Wisconsin Law School.
12:00 P.M. – 1:00 P.M. LUNCH
1:00 PM. - 3:00 P.M. Panel 2: The Injured Subject.
Samantha Barbas, Associate Professor of Law, SUNY Buffalo Law School, “The Law of Personal Image: Libel, Privacy, and Visions of Self in American Law, Culture, and History.”
Martha Albertson Fineman, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law, Emory University School of Law, “Injury and the Vulnerable Subject” (expected topic).
Claire Rasmussen, Associate Professor of Political Science, Interim Director of Graduate Studies, University of Delaware, “One Small Characteristic’: Conceptualizing Harm to Animals and Legal Personhood.”
Maurice Stevens, Associate Professor of Comparative Studies, Ohio State University, “Ruination’s Glow: Trauma and Catastrophic Injury as Complex Cultural System.”
Discussant: Jon Goldberg-Hiller, Professor of Political Science, the University of Hawaii.
3:00 P.M. BREAK
3:15 P.M. – 5:00 P.M. PANEL 3: Injury, Narrative, Community and the State
Greg Johnson, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, University of Colorado, Boulder, “The Remedy is the Injury: Political and Religious Discourses in Hawaiian Responses to Federal Recognition.”
Yoshitaka Wada, Professor of Law, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan, “Incommensurability and Power in Constructing Meaning of Injury in Medical Malpractice Disputes.”
Arzoo Osanloo, Associate Professor, Law, Societies, and Justice Program, The University of Washington, “Righteous Injuries: Victim's Rights and Offender's Suffering in Iran's Islamic Criminal Sanctioning.”
Li Chen, Professor of History and Law, Assistant Professor of History, Global Asia Studies, and Sociolegal Studies, the University of Toronto, “Weapon of the Strong: Political Implications of the Injury Discourse in Early Modern Sino-Western Encounter.”
Discussant: Bryant Garth, Chancellor’s Professor of Law, UC Irvine.
5:15 P.M. Comments and Discussion
Rapporteur, Michael McCann, Professor of Political Science, Gordon Hirabayashi Professor for the Advancement of Citizenship, University of Washington.
Saturday, September 6, 2014
8:30 A.M. Continental Breakfast
9:00 A.M. - 11:00 A.M. PANEL 4: Injuries in Space and Time
Pratiksha Baxi, Associate Professor of Law, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India “Sexual Injuries and the Law.”
Lochlann Jain, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Stanford University, “Cancer Injuries.”
Yukiko Koga, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University/Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Hunter College, “Between the Law: The Unmaking of Empire and the Persistence of Redress in Post-Imperial East Asia.”
Lucie White, Louis A. Horvitz Professor of Law, Harvard Law School, “When Accounting Fails: Living with the Long History of African American Enslavement in the US Today.”
Discussant: Gowri Ramachandran, Associate Dean for Research and Professor of Law, Southwestern Law School.
11:00 A.M. - 12:00 P.M. Comments and Discussion
Rapporteur, Michael McCann, Professor of Political Science, Gordon Hirabayashi Professor for the Advancement of Citizenship, University of Washington.
12:00 P.M. - LUNCH