An interdisciplinary workshop organised by the Centre for Law Ethics and Globalisation (LEAG), University of Southampton Law School; English at the University of Southampton; and the Southampton Marine and Maritime Institute is being held on ‘Piracy and Jurisprudence’.
Adored and detested, pirates evoke moral and ethical ambivalence: and piracy as a term of law has always been exceptionally vulnerable to political agendas. More precisely, it has always been a term of both high imperial/hegemonic art, and significant radical potential. As such, it is a word with a weighty history of complex moral and ethical loading and reloading. But it always invokes a refusal of juridification: it is a term that defines the margins of criminal and international law as juridical categories.
This workshop will aim to explicate and explore the multiple significations of piracy, and to track the implications of these significations for both abstract and practical notions of justice. Always pursuing a long view of legal histories, the commitment of the workshop and the publication are to disciplinary and geographical diversity, and to methodological innovation. The workshop will tussle with the distinctiveness and boundlessness of piracy as a ‘category’ (that refuses categorization).
Date: 21- 22 June
Venue: 65/1097 Avenue campus
Find out more about the event here