Distinguished legal historian Professor Christopher Tomlins, from the Berkeley Law faculty at the University of California, will deliver a staff seminar and participate in a legal history workshop during\u00a0a five-day visit to Kent Law School next week.<\/p>\n
Professor Tomlins<\/a> has been invited to visit the School from Monday 6 June to Friday 10 June by Law and History Research Group CLIO<\/a>, part of the Law School\u2019s Centre for Critical Thought<\/a>. His seminar<\/a>, sponsored by Kent Law School\u2019s Visiting Scholars programme, will be held on Wednesday 8 June from 4pm to 6pm and is entitled: \u2018The Guilt of Fragile Sovereigns:\u00a0Tyranny, Intrigue, and Martyrdom in an Unchanging Regime (Virginia, 1829-32)\u2019.<\/p>\n In the abstract for his seminar, Professor Tomlins says: \u2018\u201dRegime change\u201d has been called \u201ca trendy new term for an old and special kind of intervention,\u201d the toppling of those who displease or worry the United States Government.\u00a0 In an attempt to stretch \u201cregime change\u201d beyond simple coercive removal to encompass an ethics of accountability, and hence a measure of justification, the anthropologist John Borneman has proposed a tri-partite analysis of what regime change entails: government overthrow; military occupation and colonization; and caring for the enemy.<\/p>\n \u2018The question arises whether the term can be stretched even further, or defined differently, to encompass instances of intervention against tyrannical rule beyond the sphere of interstate relations where it is currently lodged.\u00a0 To do so I turn here to a particular event \u2013 the Turner Rebellion, a slave rebellion that took place in Virginia in 1831 \u2013 and to recent work in political theory that dwells on the politics of counter-sovereignty.\u00a0 Rather than debate the ethics of one state\u2019s decision to seek violent ascendancy over the leadership and population of another, therefore, here I attempt to stretch regime change to encompass a failed rebellion of slaves against a tyrannical slaveholding regime, an attempt to confront and lay low a guilty and fragile sovereignty by deploying a revolutionary politics of countersovereignty realized in conspiracy and self-sacrifice.<\/p>\n \u2018I attempt also to analyze how this failed effort at regime change affected the regime itself, how it led fragile sovereigns to war with each other over changing their regime themselves, and how they too failed.\u00a0 Finally, we encounter decisive and successful change, although not in the nature of the regime in question but in the prevailing means of explaining it \u2013 epistemological rather than ontological change, in short, seeking to secure the regime from change by placing it in a realm beyond sovereignty and guilt, beyond politics and law, altogether.\u00a0 This episode of concatenated regime change is presented here to inform our own understanding of the phenomenon known as a regime, and our own attempts to construct schemata of change.\u2019<\/p>\n Professor Tomlins, who is also an Affiliated Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation, will be available on Monday 6 June and Tuesday 7\u00a0June to meet with\u00a0staff and postgraduate research\u00a0students\u00a0wishing to discuss his or their work. A reading group\/workshop on Professor Tomlin\u2019s work (and more general\u200b\u00a0questions of history\/legal history) will take place on Thursday 9 June.<\/p>\n