Sovereignty, Emergency, and Legality – Tuscaloosa, AL

As part of a series on Law, Knowledge & Imagination, the University of Alabama School of Law hosts Sovereignty, Emergency, and Legality, Oct. 17, 2008.

The purpose of this symposium is to chart the complex interplay of sovereignty, emergency, and legality and to ask what we can learn about each by examining their juxtaposition. For some scholars, sovereignty is only truly knowable in times of emergency, moments when the law is suspended, put on hold. Others believe that sovereign power is more malleable, less absolute, adaptable to constitutional democracy. For these scholars, sovereign power can and does operate in and through law and law, in turn, can be used to domesticate and direct that power.

While in the United States today many have turned their attention to sovereignty, emergency, and legality, we want to use this symposium not just to take up today’s pressing issues, but also to revisit moments in our past–e.g…. the internment of Japanese- Americans and the Supreme Court’s Korematsu decision, the civil rights movement and the decisions in Cooper v. Aaron and Walker v. Birmingham–and to use these moments to frame the history of the present. We also want to turn our attention to the experience of other nations–e.g…. the British in Northern Ireland, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, etc.