Adam Gearey – Towards A Critique of the Pension Trust

Event Date: 18 January 2013

KS14(45)
Keynes College
Canterbury Campus
The University of Kent,
Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NZ

The Kent Law School presents:
The Public Life of Private Law

An ESRC Seminar Series

The first seminar begins to think through some of the terms, the strategies and the theoretical frameworks that we will rely upon and develop throughout the series. To begin with, we will pose three sets of questions:

On a theoretical level, what can be revealed in the various relations between private law and the political? Is private law opened up by framing it through the political, or is the political juridified and diminished in this process? Are there possibilities of alternative legalities or ways of being political that such a framing could open?

To what extent does private law theory make space for political concerns? Silences here are perhaps more interesting even than express statements. What alternative concepts does it deploy in framing the political? What clashes of perspective and understanding are evident between theories of private law and theories of the political?

On a strategic level, what opportunities for political action are present in the conflictual spaces between political endeavour and private legality? What does it mean to resort to, or to be subject to private law in the context of political action? What frustrations, inhibitions or violences are produced in such a turn, and is private law open to unruly subjects, or only to rational strategists?

Adam Gearey (Birkbeck)– Towards A Critique of the Pension Trust