In this course the students are invited to join me in discussing my personal journey into the sociology of law over the last forty years. The trajectory could be summarized as: learning that there is a south, learning to go south, learning from the south. Two ideas will be emphasized: the deep mutual intertwining of intellectual and political work; the importance of paying attention to the social, political, cultural and epistemological diversity of the world holding a cosmopolitan conception of science and law. In the last fifteen years I have submitted my previous theorizing on law to a more profound epistemological, methodological and pedagogical questioning. The source of such questioning is what I call the epistemologies of the south. Much of my most recent work is a work in progress to which the students are invited to join me.
March 5: unsuspected trajectories to build a sociological theory of law
March 6: Law and the epistemologies of the south
March 7: A legal sociology of absences: law and abyssal exclusions
March 8: A legal sociology of emergences: post-abyssal legal pluralism
March 9: Law, democracy and revolution