CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Fourth International Conference
June 29 - July 2, 2002, Tampere, Finland
Culture and the Rule of Law
Organiser: Koray Tutuncu
Sabuktay, Aysegul (Public Administration
Institute for Turkey and Middle East, Turkey) VALIDITY OF CULTURAL APPROACHES TO
RULE OF LAW : INTERPRETING THE DEBATES ON RULE OF LAW IN THE CONTEXT OF THE
SUSURLUK CASE
A political scandal disclosing some illegal activities of the state, which was
called the 'Susurluk Case', has promoted debates on rule of law in Turkish
public opinion since 1996. Almost all arguments about the Case emphasize that it
was an outcome of the deficiency in rule of law and in culture of democracy in
general. I will inquire into the appropriateness of these arguments and
interpret the Case from the perspectives of 'rule of law' and 'reason of state'.
Furthermore, I will question the validity of the concept of rule of law and
cultural frameworks in criticizing the state affairs and inquire into some other
conceptual frameworks.
Luci, Nita (University of Michigan, USA)
REGULATING PROPERTY: HOUSING CLAIMS, PROPERTY AND POWER IN KOSOVA
The so-called "transitions" of post-socialist East Europe have been
characterized by the centrality of issues regarding privatization, restitution,
and "democratization". The creation of new property regimes, and the
delegitimation of old ones, is a crucial component of these transformation.
Currently in Kosova some of these projects are explicitly connected to policies
whose aim is to adjudicate and regulate property, particularly in regard to
rights and claims to housing. I will argue that it is exceedingly pertinent to
identify processes and practices regarding definitions of rights and claims to
housing in Kosova, as constitutive of exclusionary nationalist politics. Arguing
against a universal definition of property, I would like to show how discussions
about, and definitions of property are embedded in specific political and social
processes which give rise to different forms of property relations. I will thus
compare these relations as they existed in the Yugoslav ethnocracy, and how they
continue to exist in concert or conflict with current attempts to articulate
"international standards" in property regimes.
Gozlukaya Tutuncu, Fatma (University of
Michigan, USA) LAW FOR ALL, JUSTICE FOR WHOM?
In his search for a just society, Rawls assumes that we all become autonomous
and our society becomes just so as to be ruled by the law accepted by all of us
on the basis of a public use of our reason. In arguing so, he ratifies law as
the expression of the reason, as the guarantor of justice and, in a sense as
justice. Can law as a system of regulated and coded prescriptions promise
justice that is infinite, incalculable, heterogeneous and singular? Keeping this
question in mind, in this paper, I will analyze the novel, 'Buzdan Kiliclar' by
Latife Tekin. Tekin narrates the magical world of the poor who incessantly
murmur with a specific system of silent signs and a hidden language that is
unknown to non-poor, that exposes the limits of dominant language, that resists
the so-called public use of reason. How is justice possible, then? As a
political responsibility, the murmurs, Tekin mentions, representing the
particularity of the life, existence, and struggle of the poor need to be
'translated'. This is also a responsibility to justice that is claimed in more
than one language, the claims for justice to be heard, to be read, to be
interpreted wherever they come from as Derrida argues. To put it briefly, this
paper presents a modest search for the limits of formal, universalist, and
proceduralist postulations of the rule of law as oppose to the singularity of
justice.
Tutuncu, Koray (Yale Law School, USA;
Middle East Technical University, Turkey) AN ETHNOGRAPHIC AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL
INQUIRY INTO THE PRACTICE OF THE RULE OF LAW IN TURKEY
In this study, I aim at exposing and discussing the results of an ethnographic
study on the responses of two different groups of men to a discourse of the rule
of law which dominates the social, political and intellectual climate of Turkey
during 1990s. It is a well-known belief that, at a time of global mobilization
of the rule of law, as claimed by many Kantian liberals, universal adoption of
the rule of law creates a common and similar experience all over the world. But
again, as claimed by some others, universal adoption of the rule of law would
not necessarily lead to the production of the same culture of legal meanings in
societies that lack Western traditions and institutions. As a matter of fact,
the meaning making process is so complex that different conceptualisations of
authority, time, space and state should compel us to view phenomena of the rule
of law in a more context-bounded manner. Having in my mind this consideration
that emphasizes the importance of the phenomenological inquiry that offers the
investigation of the conceptual conditions of the 'rule of law', this study
proceeded with an ethnographic analysis including a simple questionnaire, some
participatory observation and indepth-interview with two different groups of men
in Turkey. Interpretative elaboration of their imaginative relation with
authority, time and space will demonstrate the possibility of a different
structure of conceptual conditions that affects the practice of the rule of law
in Turkey. The real issue here is not to take the idea of universal rule of law
as taken for granted but to take into consideration the existence of different
conceptual conditions in which different social meanings of the rule of law
appear.
Winger, Stewart (The American University
in Cairo, Egypt) LINCOLN, CULTURE, AND THE RULE OF LAW
Most legal theorists assume that American Law has always operated within a
liberal paradigm. The U.S. Constitution and especially the Bill of Rights has
led most to the immediate assumption that Americans have always thought of the
law as morally, religiously, and culturally neutral. Law in the United States
has been thought to take its legitimacy from the consent of the governed
strictly, while the Bill of Rights, divided government, and an independent
judiciary protected minorities from majority tyranny. In fact, recent scholars
of American law point out that law in the antebellum period cannot be described
as "liberal" at all. There was almost no Bill of Rights jurisprudence
in the U.S. prior to the Civil War and the 14th Amendment, and at the state
level where virtually all actual lawmaking took place, the Common Law dominated.
Under the Common Law, all law was thought to be the expression of community
moral standards. Recent scholarship has also revealed that Abraham Lincoln was
one of the most important lawyers in Illinois during this Common Law period. In
fact Lincoln took for granted a non-liberal, non-Jeffersonian conception of the
law in which the moral aspirations of the community were the giver as well as
interpreter of all law. All law was rooted in what we now call
"culture." Lincoln's thinking on law as it related to slavery, his
acceptance of relatively pro-slavery community moral standards during his early
career, as well as his attempts both to change public opinion and to make sure
that the law enshrined the new antislavery public opinion, reveals this
non-liberal, common law conception at work. Modern legal thinkers skeptical of
liberal legal theory will find in Lincoln's common law conception of the rule of
law an intriguing intellectual resource.
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