Kent Law School Senior Lecturer Dr Simone Glanert has been awarded a full Marbach scholarship to spend one month undertaking research for her book on Gadamer and Foreign Law at the German Literature Archive Marbach.
The award has been made by the Deutsche Schillergesellschaft (DSG), one of the largest literary societies in Germany and home to the German Literature Archive. The Archive in Marbach collects, catalogues and processes documents connected with modern German literature from 1750 up to the present day and the Marbach Scholarship Program supports ambitious research projects that are based on the collections of the Archive.
In describing the context for her research, Dr Glanert says: ‘Globalization processes attest to foreign law’s increasing relevance. For example, the US Supreme Court has quoted foreign law in high-profile constitutional decisions while German judges have referred to foreign law in assessing whether a defendant’s cultural background should impact a decision of guilt or civil responsibility. Also, New York University has established the Hauser Global Law School and King’s College London, the Dickson Poon Transnational Law Institute. And reviews like the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law and Transnational Legal Theory have emerged, not to mention a host of programmes, summer schools, courses, colloquia and books. In sum, intercultural legal understanding must be deemed inevitable. But the intensified interaction between foreign and local legal knowledge makes crucial interpretive demands on lawyers. Law’s traditional interpretive tools were developed over the past centuries with national legal systems and local problems in mind. Predictably, these instruments now prove of limited use in the face of complex intercultural issues. Additional legal interpretive equipment is therefore urgently required.’
Dr Glanert’s book on Gadamer and Foreign Law will demonstrate the specific relevance of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics for the understanding of foreign law and of intercultural interpretive challenges facing contemporary courts and lawyers. During her time at the Archive in Marbach, Dr Glanert will examine Gadamer’s manuscripts, studies, notebooks and correspondence. She will explore in greater depth Gadamer’s thoughts on the decisive role of language and tradition in all understanding and will study at length Gadamer’s approach to law and legal interpretation. Dr Glanert plans to approach Gadamer’s work critically and, in particular, to probe at length the matter of its intercultural validity.
Earlier this year, Dr Glanert secured a Brown Foundation Residency Fellowship for one month at the Dora Maar House in Menerbes in the South of France. Dr Glanert used the time to complete editorial work on papers that were presented at an interdisciplinary workshop on hermeneutics held in Oxford in June 2015.
Dr Glanert is Director of the Kent Centre for European and Comparative Law and Director of the English and French Law Programme at Kent Law School. She teaches in the fields of French law, comparative law and legal interpretation and has acted as visiting professor at various European universities and at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Doha, Qatar. She also regularly lectures in the US and Canada. Her research focuses on theoretical issues arising from the comparison of laws in the context of globalization and Europeanization.
Amongst Dr Glanert’s most recent publications are two edited books, published by Routledge, Comparative Law: Engaging Translation (2014) and Law’s Hermeneutics: Other Investigations (2017; with Fabien Girard). She is a member of the Executive Editorial Board of the American Journal of Comparative Law and is President of the International Scientific Committee, Maison des Sciences de l’Homme Alpes, Grenoble, France.