The ANU Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies, in collaboration with the ANU Centre for Law, Arts and the Humanities, is pleased to present this symposium exploring comparative, historical, and cultural dimensions of laws, rules and norms. Scholars from across the disciplines will be exploring alternative traditions of hermeneutics, with papers drawing on Islamic, indigenous, gender theory, and critical legal perspectives, as well as Australia’s own common law tradition. This symposium will suggest new ways of seeing the relationship between interpretation, law, and justice: other spaces and cultural practices, other ways of reading and non-reading, other crystallisations of rules, order and discipline.
After the Rule is interested in traditions that break our comfortable understanding of law as a formal set of procedures and institutions standing above the hurly-burly of life. We look to the playing out norms and rules: in liturgy, in courtroom drama, in religious traditions, in the vocation of the lawyer or advocate, in gendered characters, and in visual and other forms of art and narrative. In this context, papers will cover research as diverse as classical modes of Sharia interpretation, sorcery in PNG, radical figures in the contemporary graphic novel, comparative constitutionality, and the Uluru Statement from the Heart.
The symposium should be of particular interest to students and scholars of law, socio-legal studies, and Islamic studies, as well as the general observer interested in alternative traditions of decision-making and interpretation.
This symposium has received financial support from the ANU Gender Institute and the Humanities Research Centre.
