Richard Mohr
Richard Mohr incorporated Social Research Policy & Planning in 1991, to evaluate and develop social, legal and urban plans and programs. He has since been Research Director of the Centre for Court Policy and Administration, and Director of the Legal Intersections Research Centre at the University of Wollongong. Until 2011 he was managing editor of the international journal Law Text Culture. He has held honorary appointments at the University of Wollongong, the University of Sydney and McGill University. He continues to work closely with colleagues at Monash University, CES Coimbra, and the Institute of Legal Informatics and Judicial Systems in Bologna (IGSG-CNR), having published a book and several articles with Francesco Contini.
ORCID ID 0000-0003-2127-0440
ORCID ID 0000-0003-2127-0440
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Papers by Richard Mohr
pandemic crises at the beginning of the 2020s. What is the role of the law in times of crisis? How does this force for continuity, predictability and order react to the discontinuity characteristic of disasters? The suspension of the law or its day-to-day operations is a moment of extreme danger, rivalling that of the disaster itself, in the licence it gives to powerful actors, governments and others to exercise unfettered force. Yet it also presents institutions, communities and disruptors with opportunities for reinvention and renewal. In this symposium, legal, political science, clinical psychology, history and sociology researchers investigate critical conditions from pandemic responses and extreme weather to terrorist attacks and parental disputes. Law courts have responded by modifying their operations and applying new technologies. This was observed in the United Kingdom and in cross-border European proceedings. A major terrorist trial in France established new architectural and information and communication technology configurations. Courts and the technologies they use can also cause critical incidents, including the disruption of artificial intelligence applications and the critical condition of the Italian justice system. Research into the Portuguese family courts investigated whether they alleviate or exacerbate disputes over the healthcare of children. Government responses to extreme weather events and the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic are studied at the intersection of law and politics in Australia. The individualising forces of neoliberal finance and law, and of urban communication technologies are criticised as dysfunctional when crises require solidarity.
This collection of papers examines the use of soft technology in law (in record-keeping and artificial intelligence), as well as law as a means of directing the uses of technologies that impinge on the natural environment (ecological jurisprudence) and the human body (nutrition and parenting).
The project emphasises the importance of applying theoretical and empirical analysis to practical technological issues, because only through understanding all aspects of the relations between technology, humans and the environment can we identify problems and find solutions: political, cultural, ethical and theoretical. This collection aims to show how applying theory and research to practice can identify the sources of these issues and propose solutions.
complex olfactory web that defines places and regulates time. Outsiders generally privilege the sense of sight over smell, admiring the views while admonishing the inhabitants for the stenches that arise from piles of garbage or filthy habits. Legal outsiders observe regularities in behaviour that indicate the presence of laws. On the other hand, law is also seen as a set of rules to which one must conform (which Hart regards as the insiders' view). Rules and regularities seem inadequate to understand the complex ways Neapolitans negotiate their olfactory and legal environment. They can smell the rotting garbage and the stench of the Camorra, but these are only a background to everyday life and the regular round of meals and seasons, feasts and festivals, that make up their own smellscapes. This takes us beyond the Enlightenment's lines of sight and monolithic view of law to appreciate a Baroque interlegality, inhabited by bodies and experienced in smells. If sight is linked to rules (from the laws of perspective to the rule of recognition), then smell promotes judgment of the sort that Gracián considered necessary to negotiate an ingenious and prudent passage through
life.
Places, like texts, help to slow down and position the law. Performances of the law always take place: they are situated. Each encounter of formal and informal law, or of one legal culture with another, is negotiated anew. The state plays a role in this process, but it is not the simple hegemonic act of "accommodation", the grudging and minimal acceptance of difference. This study has shown both ethical and empirical reasons for preferring "negotiation" to "accommodation" or "tolerance" as the means for working out formal and informal legal encounters between cultures. Negotiated sovereignty is a form of radical street level positivism, based not on the mythical or legal foundation of a Grundnorm, but on the negotiated facts of empirical experience and the instituting praxis of law. These are patterns without certainty; indeterminate regularities that both make and break rules, always at the same time.
Resumen: Los costes crecientes de la vivienda y los procesos de gentrificación están excluyendo a personas más pobres de vecindarios cómodos donde siempre habían residido. Este artículo responde a la pérdida de la diversidad que se ha experimentado en la parte occidental interior de Sydney, que ha sido una primera residencia para varias generaciones de inmigrantes. Se toman en consideración reclamaciones de derechos y formas de capital como posible base de la resistencia a la gentrificación y la mercantilización de la vivienda, y para su potencial para promover una participación generalizada más igualitaria; además, plantea si hay algún sentido en las proclamaciones de un derecho territorial. La conclusión es que la interacción entre derechos y formas de capital está mediatizada por el intercambio y la contestación. Estos conceptos se utilizarán para examinar algunas de las formas sociales, políticas y económicas para promover reclamaciones de derechos culturales y la primacía del valor de uso de la vivienda.
pandemic crises at the beginning of the 2020s. What is the role of the law in times of crisis? How does this force for continuity, predictability and order react to the discontinuity characteristic of disasters? The suspension of the law or its day-to-day operations is a moment of extreme danger, rivalling that of the disaster itself, in the licence it gives to powerful actors, governments and others to exercise unfettered force. Yet it also presents institutions, communities and disruptors with opportunities for reinvention and renewal. In this symposium, legal, political science, clinical psychology, history and sociology researchers investigate critical conditions from pandemic responses and extreme weather to terrorist attacks and parental disputes. Law courts have responded by modifying their operations and applying new technologies. This was observed in the United Kingdom and in cross-border European proceedings. A major terrorist trial in France established new architectural and information and communication technology configurations. Courts and the technologies they use can also cause critical incidents, including the disruption of artificial intelligence applications and the critical condition of the Italian justice system. Research into the Portuguese family courts investigated whether they alleviate or exacerbate disputes over the healthcare of children. Government responses to extreme weather events and the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic are studied at the intersection of law and politics in Australia. The individualising forces of neoliberal finance and law, and of urban communication technologies are criticised as dysfunctional when crises require solidarity.
This collection of papers examines the use of soft technology in law (in record-keeping and artificial intelligence), as well as law as a means of directing the uses of technologies that impinge on the natural environment (ecological jurisprudence) and the human body (nutrition and parenting).
The project emphasises the importance of applying theoretical and empirical analysis to practical technological issues, because only through understanding all aspects of the relations between technology, humans and the environment can we identify problems and find solutions: political, cultural, ethical and theoretical. This collection aims to show how applying theory and research to practice can identify the sources of these issues and propose solutions.
complex olfactory web that defines places and regulates time. Outsiders generally privilege the sense of sight over smell, admiring the views while admonishing the inhabitants for the stenches that arise from piles of garbage or filthy habits. Legal outsiders observe regularities in behaviour that indicate the presence of laws. On the other hand, law is also seen as a set of rules to which one must conform (which Hart regards as the insiders' view). Rules and regularities seem inadequate to understand the complex ways Neapolitans negotiate their olfactory and legal environment. They can smell the rotting garbage and the stench of the Camorra, but these are only a background to everyday life and the regular round of meals and seasons, feasts and festivals, that make up their own smellscapes. This takes us beyond the Enlightenment's lines of sight and monolithic view of law to appreciate a Baroque interlegality, inhabited by bodies and experienced in smells. If sight is linked to rules (from the laws of perspective to the rule of recognition), then smell promotes judgment of the sort that Gracián considered necessary to negotiate an ingenious and prudent passage through
life.
Places, like texts, help to slow down and position the law. Performances of the law always take place: they are situated. Each encounter of formal and informal law, or of one legal culture with another, is negotiated anew. The state plays a role in this process, but it is not the simple hegemonic act of "accommodation", the grudging and minimal acceptance of difference. This study has shown both ethical and empirical reasons for preferring "negotiation" to "accommodation" or "tolerance" as the means for working out formal and informal legal encounters between cultures. Negotiated sovereignty is a form of radical street level positivism, based not on the mythical or legal foundation of a Grundnorm, but on the negotiated facts of empirical experience and the instituting praxis of law. These are patterns without certainty; indeterminate regularities that both make and break rules, always at the same time.
Resumen: Los costes crecientes de la vivienda y los procesos de gentrificación están excluyendo a personas más pobres de vecindarios cómodos donde siempre habían residido. Este artículo responde a la pérdida de la diversidad que se ha experimentado en la parte occidental interior de Sydney, que ha sido una primera residencia para varias generaciones de inmigrantes. Se toman en consideración reclamaciones de derechos y formas de capital como posible base de la resistencia a la gentrificación y la mercantilización de la vivienda, y para su potencial para promover una participación generalizada más igualitaria; además, plantea si hay algún sentido en las proclamaciones de un derecho territorial. La conclusión es que la interacción entre derechos y formas de capital está mediatizada por el intercambio y la contestación. Estos conceptos se utilizarán para examinar algunas de las formas sociales, políticas y económicas para promover reclamaciones de derechos culturales y la primacía del valor de uso de la vivienda.
La traduzione del testo dall'inglese all'italiano è stata effettuata dalla redazione di EJL e non è stata revisionata dagli autori.
The study concludes that various constituencies and impulses to reform refer to different versions of the ‘universal’ for their conception of right and legitimacy. These are neither inherently local nor unambiguously global. Local religious or egalitarian movements may refer to universal religious or political values (such as Islam or international socialism) just as interests in fair commercial dealing can call on international legal norms (lex mercatoria). In contrast to the local sites where law is performed, these universal sites exist in a multitude of indigenous, religious, political and legal imagined communities, each of which may be invoked in attempts to reform local practice.
To overcome the stalemate that so often results, we review the concept of accountability, drawing attention to the breadth of values and interests to which courts must respond. We further note that independence is not an end in itself, but must be appreciated instead as the guarantee of judicial impartiality. We are then in a position to compare different European case studies of implementation of new mechanisms of accountability with the goals and values of the justice system.
Poor efforts are typically ritualistic zero-sum games, devoting increasing amounts of energy to measurement while losing sight of why anything is being measured. Successful review mechanisms bring together various interested parties to identify important outcomes that are readily measurable and capable of improvement.
While the form of technology may have changed from symbolic regimes to ICT, from icons to apps, the interactions between humans and technics illustrate many persistent forms and social mechanisms, from architecture to ritual and performative enunciation. These technologies and mechanisms will be explored intensively over 3 days by participants from law, sociology, philosophy, semiotics, political sciences, architecture and other disciplines.
Papers and discussions may address urban planning, ICT, court architecture, regulation of food or other vital human needs, the settings and techniques of religious deliberation and dispute resolution, or other interfaces between social order and technologies. Discussion will be informed by theory and research, and will work towards ethical and practical needs and consequences.
establishing liability for a debt or a fine, particular bond conditions – the alternative paths to these outcomes are not exact functional equivalents of the traditional operations of courts. Because they employ different architectures, with different modes of access and meaning structures, as well as different ways of processing
information, the various technologies produce diverse results, even if they are called by the same name.