Seminar with Ngaire Naffine (Bonython Professor of Law, Law School, The University of Adelaide) - Why the Legal Person is a Male Concept?
About this event
This is an on-line seminar co-organized jointly by Law-Language-Philosophy Research Network as well as Institute of Philosophy,Jagiellonian University and Faculty of Law and Administration, University of Warsaw. It will take place via Zoom on 27th May 2021. To get the link before the event, please register on Eventbrite (until 25th May 2021). In case you have any question, please contact the host: p.banas@uw.edu.pl
Registration: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/llprn-on-line-seminar-why-the-legal-person-is-a-male-concept-tickets-153992871825
Please, make sure that you check your time zone (this event is scheduled for 10:00 am in Poland which is 5:30 pm in Adelaide)
ABSTRACT:
The Riverbed of Law: Why the Legal Person is a Male Concept (by Ngaire Naffine)
Why has the dramatically-changed status of women in law, and thus of men, over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, not made more of a difference to mainstream legal thinking about its subject: the legal actor, the legal person? The facts are striking. Over this period the place of women in law altered fundamentally and hence, so did the status of men, reciprocally. For men ceded exclusive powers which had served to define them as men, at the upper echelons of power. After insisting, strongly and explicitly, that the term ‘legal person’ was one which designated men, not women, men of law let go of their exclusive monopoly of public offices, in the 1920s, by endowing women with personhood. And finally, in the 1990s, the men of law removed their own immunity, as husbands, from prosecution for the rape of their wife. In an important sense, perhaps the most important, the personhood of women was finally declared within the home.
Notwithstanding what might seem to be crucial legal changes, we have not seen a fundamental reconceptualisation of the legal subject, from the ground up. A century ago, there was little doubt that he possessed masculine attributes. Legal discourse was explicitly and unashamedly oriented towards men who were treated as the general case of the human. Now the legal subject is also supposed to be female, as well as male, and yet the jurisprudence of the twenty-first century does not reflect this sex change; it hardly mentions it. The maleness of the legal person has necessarily had a strong bearing on law’s concepts, its priorities, its interests and yet we don’t really know precisely how because there has been so little interest in these sex effects. A significant way that patriarchy has been deployed and sustained in society’s major institutions is through the concept of ‘the person’ and legal decisions about who is to count as one and yet this is not part of the official story of jurisprudence. Why? The reason I suggest is that the sex of the legal subject is perhaps the hardest problem of law.
This book will consider the uses of the concept of the person, by men of authority, to secure and sustain men’s immense legal power, and the ensuing costs to the polity and to society in general. I ask: How was the concept deployed by the men of law to achieve this feat? What was in the Riverbed of Law, the deep thinking supporting such profound patriarchy? And then what changed when the legal person changed his sex; what did not? What was the underlying thinking?
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This seminar is a free event, a part of the project no 2020/36/C/HS5/00600 funded by the National Science Center of Poland (Analysis of the concept of a legal person from an ontological and linguistic perspective; Pricipal Investigator: Paweł Banaś PhD)