Guilherme Vasconcelos Vilaça

Is legal theory relevant to legal practice? Should legal theory be part of the academic legal curriculum? This article outlines three propositions in relation to these longstanding contentious questions. First, it argues that existing literature has pursued an inadequate argumentative strategy by (1) assuming that there is a single yes or no answer to the questions surrounding the relevance of legal theory; and (2) treating legal theory and legal practice as discrete, unrelated entities. This article distinguishes between different styles of doing legal theory and legal practice, and argues that the role of legal theory needs to factor in changes in the substance of law, legal reasoning, and legal careers. Second, focusing on European civil law countries, this article concludes that most legal theory is irrelevant for conventional legal practice. Concomitantly, it suggests that the constitutionalization, transnationalization, and Europeanization of legal systems are changing the practice of law in a way that is more congenial to theory than hitherto. It also contends that legal roles embodying a legislative standpoint within law are creating a demand for increased theoretical sophistication. Third, this article suggests what a course in legal theory, sketched along the lines of the analysis carried out, might look like.

The chapter articulates two narratives that are key to identifying and justifying the power of virtue ethics to attract, agglutinate and deploy a number of disciplines and approaches that have so far remained disparate and yet can reshape and revitalize the study of ethics in international organizations. The first narrative focuses on ethics. It maps the use of deontologism and consequentialism in global ethics debates and shows how they legitimated highly abstract accounts of international responsibility (sections 2 and 3). It then describes how concentrating on virtues radically changes the questions being asked (and the knowledge we need, making pragmatism a surprising ally), highlights the role of persons and characters, can be fashioned to apply to organizations, puts into stark relief different salient features of moral scenarios, emphasizes judgment and moral imagination, fits some basic common moral intuitions and allows us to engage in ethical analysis with greater complexity and detail (sections 4 and 5). The second narrative traces a recent convergence towards virtue ethics in fields such as leadership, psychology, organization and business studies all emphasising the importance of practical wisdom and ethical leadership (section 7). This is important because these disciplines offer lessons and resources that impact research on ethical – virtuous – leadership in international organizations. Notably regarding the following questions: “What is virtuous leadership in organizations?”, “How is it exercised?” and “What is its impact?” Throughout these two narratives, I forge an innovative account linking, from a virtues perspective, ethics and narrative since ethical analysis (and criticism) requires considering concrete normative and factual materials from agents, organizations, environments and situations. To carry out this task, it is claimed, we need to mobilize resources from a plethora of disciplinary traditions, e.g. narrative studies, anthropology, biographical research and casuistry, not to mention those invoked above that deal specifically with organizations (section 6). I close the chapter by tackling the challenge of thinking about ethical leadership and virtues in postmodern times (section 8) and providing a breakdown of the contributions of the edited volume (section 9).

In the public sphere, the language of virtues is often mobilized to assess the character and doings of (international) leaders. Academic commentary has also turned to virtue ethics in the last decades attempting to overcome the stalemate between deontologism and consequentialism in analytic ethical theory. This chapter argues that despite the potential of this turn, proponents of virtue ethics have remained highly abstract in their accounts both contradicting some of the distinctive features of this ethical framework and failing to provide solid reasons for the appeal and normative adequacy of their ethical claims. Against the existing literature, the chapter argues that virtue ethics assessments of characters and actions have to be concrete producing a holistic ethical evaluation of a given person, role, situation and scenario. As such, I examine critically the turn to virtue ethics by focusing on the neglected ethical dimension of the character and actions of international leaders of one specific international organization, i.e. the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Director-Generals. First, I provide an overview of the ethical mechanisms in place at the WHO as well as its mission. This is necessary to understand the institutional and normative framework that surrounds and guides the selection and mission of Director-Generals. Then, I contrast former Director-Generals Brock Chisholm’s and Hiroshi Nakajima’s characters, visions and actions showing how contextual and organizational factors together with the cultural nature of virtues make virtue ethics’ assessments much more complex than usually recognized. I then examine decisions, such as that of Marcolino Candau or those taken during the SARS outbreak, that went against the WHO’s constitution and existing legal rules being carried out in the name of human welfare. If on the one hand, these are decisions that seem to express courage, humanness, among other virtues, I claim that a robust ethical analysis has to subject them to standards of rival ethical traditions, complicating the picture in the absence of procedures to weigh them together in a holistic assessment. I argue that breaking the impasse requires adopting a form of narrative ethics that produces thick accounts and that the potential of virtue ethics lies in its power to highlight salient features that are morally important and remained invisible under other ethical frameworks. Finally, I conclude by discussing some difficulties within a virtue-based moral education given that moral exemplarity and the “skills model” of virtues adopted by the literature further rely on an ideal, non-practical, conception of virtue.

In the public sphere, the language of virtues is often mobilized to assess the character and doings of (international) leaders. Academic commentary has also turned to virtue ethics in the last decades attempting to overcome the stalemate between deontologism and consequentialism in analytic ethical theory. This chapter argues that despite the potential of this turn, proponents of virtue ethics have remained highly abstract in their accounts both contradicting some of the distinctive features of this ethical framework and failing to provide solid reasons for the appeal and normative adequacy of their ethical claims. Against the existing literature, the chapter argues that virtue ethics assessments of characters and actions have to be concrete producing a holistic ethical evaluation of a given person, role, situation and scenario. As such, I examine critically the turn to virtue ethics by focusing on the neglected ethical dimension of the character and actions of international leaders of one specific international organization, i.e. the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Director-Generals. First, I provide an overview of the ethical mechanisms in place at the WHO as well as its mission. This is necessary to understand the institutional and normative framework that surrounds and guides the selection and mission of Director-Generals. Then, I contrast former Director-Generals Brock Chisholm’s and Hiroshi Nakajima’s characters, visions and actions showing how contextual and organizational factors together with the cultural nature of virtues make virtue ethics’ assessments much more complex than usually recognized. I then examine decisions, such as that of Marcolino Candau or those taken during the SARS outbreak, that went against the WHO’s constitution and existing legal rules being carried out in the name of human welfare. If on the one hand, these are decisions that seem to express courage, humanness, among other virtues, I claim that a robust ethical analysis has to subject them to standards of rival ethical traditions, complicating the picture in the absence of procedures to weigh them together in a holistic assessment. I argue that breaking the impasse requires adopting a form of narrative ethics that produces thick accounts and that the potential of virtue ethics lies in its power to highlight salient features that are morally important and remained invisible under other ethical frameworks. Finally, I conclude by discussing some difficulties within a virtue-based moral education given that moral exemplarity and the “skills model” of virtues adopted by the literature further rely on an ideal, non-practical, conception of virtue.

The label “transnational law” is deployed to address a pressing problem in international and domestic lives: in a different number of arenas, citizens have to abide by standards and rules which they have neither voted for, contributed to nor can easily change or dispute. To address the legitimacy gap of transnational legal practices academics have proposed two main strategies: (i) creation of global political institutions and principles; and, (ii) self-regulation. This article argues that the global constitutionalism/self-regulation set of alternatives is premised on too strong theoretical assumptions about the nature of world society and functional differentiation. Focusing primarily on a detailed analysis of Teubner’s societal constitutionalism and its systems theory’s assumptions, the article claims that the functional differentiation thesis at the core of autonomous transnational law is unconvincing and that there are resources at the domestic and regional (e.g. European Union) levels to address some of the challenges of transnational law.

What counts as a human and as a proper human life has been a lifelong preoccupation of our species. Today it is digitalism, technology, and AI triggering renewed nightmares and hopeful dreams around being human. Through an examination of Samanta Schweblin’s novel “Little Eyes” (Kentukis in the original), I show how humanities are crucial to (i) keep track of what is new and old in these shifts and (ii) maintain a vigorous public sphere that is qualitatively different from gamified individual and social relations. The result is the defense of an idea of public life that stands beyond our individual private desires, marking a stark contrast with a vision of society in which we relate to others and the public as we would to toys we play with.

In her new book, The Law’s Ultimate Frontier: Towards an Ecological Jurisprudence—A Global Horizon in Private International Law, Horatia Muir Watt proclaims a new vision of legality: an ecological jurisprudence. Its originality lies in the role played by private international law as a tool for legal and political imagination in the Anthropocene. I first present carefully the whole argument as Muir Watt offers it. Then I turn to a critical examination of the work and show how the book fits a much broader intellectual landscape that aims to do justice to the natural and cultural ‘Other’ and how, despite all its sophistication and erudition, the Levinasian grounds, conflict of law’s genealogy, planetary ontology and amateur bricolage she builds upon to establish a novel jurisprudence raise as many complications as achievements. Ultimately, and as a general lesson for holistic and multidisciplinary theorising about law, this article identifies some crucial choices any future model of legality combining both a theory of justice and a vision of law as a linking device needs to overcome in order to ensure we can deal simultaneously with the divergent local and planetary dimensions summoned by the threat of extinction without hastily replacing morality for law and politics.

This article delves into the intersection of literature and legal normativity through the lens of Ismail Kadare’s novel Broken April. It explores how literary theory enhances philosophical analysis of law by examining the novel’s portrayal of the Kanun, a set of customary laws in Albania, highlighting the complexity of legal normativity and the impact of law on individual subjectivity and social order. The core argument posits that Broken April serves not only as a reimagined narrative of Albanian customary law, but also as a device to question and reflect on the broader implications of law’s normative force, and its reliance on a plethora of aesthetically effective symbols, in constituting both human behavior and the social imaginary. Through the literariness of Broken April, this article explains how law infiltrates and molds the social and psychological dimensions of life, ultimately shaping legal experience. It argues that literature offers a unique vantage point to reassess our understanding of law’s role in society, challenging conventional and nonconventional legal theories that overlook the cultural and emotional dimensions of law.

This article argues that to disrupt legal education in a radical sense, students need to become acquainted with the art of worldmaking and the view that law is a “way of worldmaking”. First, I show that law is a cultural semiotic practice that requires decoding and, for that reason, demands a creative intervention by those that want to know, understand, and do things with law. Altogether this amounts to recognizing the different modes in which law creates, and is part of, worlds. Second, I propose that due to different features of their aesthetic form, comics are a particularly effective medium to place students before the myriad ways in which law and lawyers make and reproduce worlds. Third, I illustrate the argument by exploring how the Saga comic series, through its formal multimodality and narrative and cultural complexity, can make good on that challenge.

Existing theoretical literature on justice, law, and community typically treats them as ideas studying them through an analytical and rational approach. In this article, I propose to investigate these concepts through aesthetic experience as an attempt to both sharpen our imagination of such concepts and demonstrate they are inseparable. I do this by painstakingly examining the movies Shoplifters by Kore-eda and The House That Jack Built by Von Trier. Rather than focusing on thematic analysis, I claim and show that film form is crucial for aesthetic and affective experience. Furthermore, and against the conventional view, I argue that both movies articulate a spatialized vision of justice defined by its materiality. Together these aspects help us to keep (re)imagining law, justice, and community, and grasp better their worldmaking properties and powers.