Open talk: "Law based on reciprocity: How can we recognize legal otherness in terms of modernity?"

Tomas Ledvinka (Residence grant recipient) will give this talk at Antia palace, 5:00 pm.

Along with what belongings they can carry, migrants and refugees bring their laws, cultures and contextually specific experiences with them to their host countries. As a result, the increased mobility of persons and their social and legal relationships represents a specific context for encounters between legal cultures, which, apart from the interactions between different ways of legal thinking, also elucidates the representations of law as culture in the Western legal framework. Various migrants' identities include law as a dimension that belongs to their specific collectives (tribes, religious communities) beneath, beside and beyond the nation-state, rather than to the State. Do host countries' authorities have cognitive capacity to handle such legal otherness which unsettles their notion of the Law/State? Can the debate about reciprocity in the anthropology of law contribute anyhow to this complicated cognitive task?

Tomas Ledvinka is staying at the Institute from 12 January until 4 February. His postdoctoral research in legal anthropology is based at the Faculty of Social Sciences of Charles University, Prague, and focuses on negotiating legal otherness like multiple legal systems from post-war Afghanistan in asylum and international civil trials in Europe. He received his PhD in Anthropology from Charles University, where he has also taught anthropology of law at the Faculty of Humanities since 2011. As assistent professor, he teaches law at the University of Hradec Králové nowadays. Before fully converting to the academia, Tomas was an expert consultant for the Czech Ministry of Justice, where he analyzed foreign law issues with a special focus on non-European legal systems. He was also a guest researcher in the Department of Law & Anthropology of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in 2016.