(Go On! is an occasional item on events of interest) While many of us in the United States have sought to expose the 
devils in the details of post-9/11 policies, an esteemed Paris colleague has taken on the valuable task of drawing the big picture.The work of Mireille Delmas-Marty (above), Professor of Comparative Legal Studies and the Internationalization of Law at the Collège de France (below lelft), 1st reminds us that there is a big picture – that contemporary issues of liberty and security, even when manifested at the national level, cannot be contained within the frame of law of any single nation-state. 2d, she illustrates the complex analysis – not only of national, regional, international, and supranational legal regimes, but also of social science disciplines – that must be undertaken in order properly to identify and understand the myriad concerns at stake in any moves to suppress liberty in the name of safety.
Delmas-Marty will refine this study in Libertés et sureté dans un monde dangereux (Liberty and Security in a Dangerous World), the public course she will deliver weekly this winter at the Collége. The description:
Details on specific lectures here.By a law enacted on February 25, 2008, France instituted a “retention of security,” which permits the state to continue to detain a prisoner who has completed his sentence for a year, a period that is renewable indefinitely by reason of “dangerousness.” The way for this measure having been prepared by a succession of laws on recidivism, this law thus established a rupture in the relation of guilt, resp
onsibility, and sanction. It is a rupture that risks dehumanizing criminal justice.
How did this come about? The answer cannot be reduced to a discussion within France itself (that is, that the right wing is repressive, the left wing permissive). Keeping in mind the convergence of other systems, such as the European and international systems, we hypothesize an indirect effect from the attacks of September 11, 2001, which in symbolic and legal ways freed policymakers from the duty to respect the proper limits of the rule of law, and thus unleashed shock waves that rendered issues less controllable matters that previously had been confined to the domestic legal framework.
Besides its purely national aspects, the question in fact relates to the interdependencies that lie at the heart of law’s internationalization. Confronted by genuine threats to persons, states, and even the planet, the entanglement of national, European, and global normative spaces doubtless contributes to incertitude in response. Whether it is a matter of transformation of social control, of mutation in the rule of law, or in fluctuation in the global order, it favors all at once results and reactions to them, problems and the solution to problems.
The course will lay the groundwork for a June 8, 2009, conference entitled Les politiques sécuritaires à la lumière de la doctrine pénale des 19ème et 20ème siècles (Security Policy in Light of 19th and 20th Century Criminal Law Jurisprudence), organized along with Professors Geneviève Giudicelli-Delage, Université de Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne), and Jean Louis Halpérin, École Normale Supérieure, Ulm.
