Dancing With Strangers: Young Legal Scholars and Their Disciplinary Predicament

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to offer the author's view about some of the challenges young Iberoamerican scholars face in order to build a successful research record.Design/methodology/approachThis is an individual account of some of the most common barriers Iberoamerican scholars face when starting their academic career.FindingsThe paper presents some of the difficulties encountered by young scholars, such as motivation, lack of feedback, teaching load, and lack of resources and addresses these challenges in an almost intimate fashion.Originality/valueThe paper uses an idiosyncratic approach to the practical career obstacles faced by a young scholar outside the mainstream academic environment.

Legal Doctrinal Scholarship and Interdisciplinary Engagement The paper offers a legal theoretical analysis of the disciplinary character of the contemporary practice of legal scholarship. It is assumed that the challenges of interdisciplinary engagement are particularly revealing about the nature of legal scholarship. The paper argues for an understanding of legal scholarship that revolves around cultivating doctrinal knowledge about law. Legal scholarship is characterised as a normative and interpretive discipline that offers an internalist and non-instrumentalist perspective on law. The paper also argues that interdisciplinary engagement is sometimes necessary for legal scholars because some concepts and ideas built into the doctrinal structures of law cannot be made fully intelligible by way of pure normative legal analysis. This point is developed with the help of an epistemological clarification of doctrinal knowledge and anchored in an account of the practice of legal scholarship. The paper explores the implications of this account by way of analysing three paradigms of interdisciplinary engagement that respond to distinctive challenges facing legal scholarship: (1) understanding better the extra-legal origins of legal ideas, (2) managing discursive encounters that can generate frictions between disciplinary perspectives, and (3) building the knowledge base to handle challenge of validating policy initiatives that aim at changing the law. In different ways, all three challenges may require legal scholars to build competence in other disciplines. The third paradigm has particular relevance for understanding the methodological profile of legal scholarship. Legal scholarship is the only discipline with specific focus on how the social environment affects the doctrinal structures of law.

For the purpose of this paper we conducted an empirical survey of academic staff at two German law schools (Heinrich-Heine University Dusseldorf; Bucerius Law School), two UK ones (University of East Anglia; University of Edinburgh) and one Irish one (Trinity College, Dublin). We asked the legal scholars to indicate to what extent they identify with legal research as part of humanities, as part of social sciences, and as akin to the analysis of law in legal practice. In this paper we present and discuss our results, using tools of both classical and compositional statistics. We also relate our data to contextual information about these legal scholars (e.g., training, career stage) as well as institutional and country differences. Our main general finding is that scholars of the German law schools have a relatively strong preference for practical legal research and scholars of the UK and Irish law schools a relatively strong preference for law as humanities. Some of our specific findings are that international legal scholars tend to be closer to the social sciences and that younger scholars and private lawyers tend to be closer to practical legal research. We also observe some signs of convergence since, across the five law schools, scholars told us that they tend to use practical legal research methods less often, and social sciences methods more often, than ten years ago.

This piece is a response to Geoffrey Samuel’s review article that deals with my 2021 monograph, Legal Doctrinal Scholarship. I aim to correct misrepresentations of my position, but I also seek possibilities of a more constructive engagement between Samuel’s diachronic analysis of the development of legal thought and my synchronic account of the character of legal scholarship. The first substantive section aims to set the record straight by explaining my account of legal doctrinal scholarship (as a normative and hermeneutic discipline) against the background of my thoroughly interpretive methodology. Then, I move on to addressing some of Samuel’s specific objections to my account—related to the idea of the rational reconstruction of the law, the scope of interdisciplinary engagement in academic research into law, and the ideological profile of legal doctrinal scholarship. Finally, I address why Samuel’s own account does not fit into the parameters of my own theoretical project. My methodology leaves room for a range of different approaches to legal scholarship—including Samuel’s historical jurisprudence. However, Samuel’s approach lacks the argumentative force he would need to exclude the possibility of providing legal doctrinal scholarship with a plausible epistemological justification within the methodological parameters of my account. I argue that, ultimately, our debate is about the implications of methodological pluralism: the conditions under which theoretical accounts with very different methodological assumptions may have a correcting influence on one another.
 Keywords: Samuel (Geoffrey); interpretivism; science; scholarship; normativity; rational reconstruction; interdisciplinary engagement; ideology; methodological pluralism.

Traditionally, there have been two important media of academic publishing: scholarly journals and scholarly books. The first scholarly journal, the Journal des Sçavans, was founded by Denis de Sallo, appeared already in January 1665 in Paris, reappeared after the French Revolution as the Journal des Savants, and still exists as a leading journal in the humanities. Only a few weeks later, Henry Oldenbourg, the first secretary of the Royal Society of London, established a second scholarly journal, the Philosophical Transactions, with a focus on science. The purpose of these journals was to formalize the extensive correspondence between philosophers and scientists.1 In the 18th and the 19th century, more specialized journals gained in importance, most of which were published by learned societies. At the end of the 19th century, university presses too began to publish scholarly journals. Another traditional means of academic publishing are the various types of scholarly books, in particular monographs, edited volumes, reference works (specialist dictionaries, encyclopedias, and specialty reference manuals), and technical handbooks.2 A narrow definition of academic works would exclude textbooks and books for the broader public. Shavell (2010, 337–39) employs four criteria to determine whether a journal or book is academic in nature: (1) the authors and/or the publisher are usually academics; (2) the readers are mainly academics; (3) the content is academic in character; (4) only low royalties are paid, if any. As of today, scholarly journals are the preferred mode of academic publishing in particular in the sciences and some social sciences (e.g., economics), whereas scholarly books still play an important role in the arts, the humanities, and part of the social sciences. Whereas scholarly books are published by a large number of small national publishers in a multitude of languages, the most important scholarly journals are typically in English language and published by a few large commercial publishers. Until the mid-20th century, the most important journals were published by learned societies, before commercial publishers began to enter the academic publishing market in the 1960s and 1970s by launching new titles or acquiring existing ones. This development has led to a significant concentration of (commercial) publishers in the academic journal market.3 It is difficult to say for sure how many scholarly journals are available around the world. Some sources speak of more than 100,000, others of 87,000 or 73,000.4 In August 2018, Ulrich's Web Directory listed 33,119 active scholarly peer-reviewed English-language journals with about 3 million articles a year, complemented by an additional 9,372 journals in other languages. As an important subset, 11,655 journals with 2.2 million articles were included in the Clarivate Analytics' Journal Citation Reports (STM, 2018, 25–26). The Web of Science (WoS) database counted almost 12,500 journals in 2019 (see below, Section 2.2.1). With the mass expansion of academic education and the increasing size of faculty after World War II, publications in peer-reviewed, highly ranked journals have become an important precondition for academic careers in many disciplines, in particular in the sciences, economics, and partly in the other social sciences. In 1964, Eugene Garfield launched the Science Citation Index to calculate the impact factors of journals in science, medicine, and technology. This index was later followed by the Social Sciences Citation Index in 1973, the Arts & Humanities Citation Index in 1978 (Regazzi, 2015, 86–88), and the Emerging Sources Citation Index in 2015. These indices led to the development of the Journal Impact Factor (JIF), a metric that serves to rank a scholarly journal based on the number of citations to articles in that journal by articles in other indexed journals within a certain time period. During the same time, commercial publishers have increased their market shares to the detriment of non-for-profit publishers, such as learned societies and universities, becoming the dominant players in the market for scholarly journals. Today, the "big five" commercial academic publishers—Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and Sage—cover more than half of the market for scholarly journals. Since the 1980s, we have seen a sharp increase not just in the number of journals but in particular also in journal subscription prices, forcing many academic libraries to cancel serials subscriptions and to cut back on new monographs (the so-called serials crisis, cf. Eger & Scheufen, 2018, 23–29). These developments induced an increasing number of scholars, initially in the United States, to promote open access (OA) to scholarly articles as a replacement of or an addendum to the subscription model. After some individual initiatives in the late 1980s, the early 2000s saw the emergence of a global movement by scholars, librarians, and research sponsors, resulting in the "Budapest Open Access Initiative" (February 2002), the "Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing" (June 2003) and the "Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities" (October 2003).7 Two roads to OA can be distinguished8: First, gold OA refers to electronic journals with OA for all readers, often based on creative commons licenses. The publishers' costs are covered not by subscription fees but from other sources, such as article-processing charges (APCs)9 paid by authors, libraries, learned societies, or research sponsors, or subsidies from learned societies and other sources. Hybrid OA journals, whose numbers are rising fast, allow the authors to choose between paying an APC, thereby granting the reader OA, or not paying an APC and requiring the reader to pay for access to the article.10 A special branch of gold OA is mega-journals, the first one of which, PLOS One, was first published in 2006. In these journals, the peer review is restricted to examining only the soundness of the submitted articles but not their broader interest or impact. Also, mega-journals are not oriented towards a specific subject matter. The second road, green OA, refers to authors self-archiving pre-prints or post-prints of their papers on so-called OA repositories, potentially in addition to publication in traditional subscription-based journals. OpenDOAR listed 5,713 repositories in July 2021, of which 5,073 were classified as institutional repositories managed by universities, faculties, or other academic institutions, 364 as disciplinary (subject) repositories which aggregate research papers in specific disciplines (e.g., PubMed Central, arXiv, SSRN, and RepEc), 138 as aggregating repositories (including Academia and Scielo), and 139 as governmental repositories.11 Whereas institutional and disciplinary repositories generally respect the authors' or publishers' copyright, so-called Robin Hood or Pirate OA repositories do not. The most prominent example is Sci-Hub, founded in 2011 by Alexandra Elbakyan, a young scholar from Kazakhstan, which made over 60 million journal articles publicly available. Due to complaints by academic publishers, Sci-Hub had to switch domains several times.12 Recent years have seen the emergence of academic social networks such as Research Gate and Mendeley, as well as a stream of new forms of disseminating scientific content, including blogs, podcasts, and Facebook posts by prominent scholars. Regarding OA books, the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) in June 2021 listed 43,036 academic peer-reviewed books from 621 publishers.13 The number of academic journals, as listed in the WoS database, has been growing steadily over the past two decades, from around 5,000 in 2000 to almost 12,500 in 2019 (Figure 1).14 Source: Author's calculations based on data from Web of Science (2021) The academic journal market is dominated by a few large commercial publishers, with the "big five" accounting for more than half of the academic journals listed by the WoS in 2019: Elsevier (1,754 journals), Springer (1,406), Wiley Blackwell (1,242), Taylor & Francis (1,199), and Sage (642).15 However, due to a downturn by Elsevier that began around 2006, this dominance has declined from around 60% in 2000 to around 51.7% in 2019 (Figure 2). Source: Author's calculations based on data from Web of Science (2021) Coupled with the advent of the internet and the concurrent increasing digitization of academic works, which through the bundling of different journals and/or formats ("big deals") facilitated second-degree price discrimination, this dominance has led to a drastic increase in subscription prices since the early 1990s (Bergstrom, 2013; Eger & Scheufen, 2018; Ramello, 2010). The resulting serials crisis—with academic libraries having to cut their journal portfolio—gave rise to a new publishing regime that offers OA to journal content. The share of pure (i.e., non-hybrid) OA journals as listed by the Directory of Open Access Journals (2021) has been increasing steadily, from around 3% of all WoS-listed journals in 2000 to more than 10% in 2019 (Figure 3). Source: Author's calculations based on data from Web of Science (2021) and DOAJ (2021) Interestingly, pure OA journals also gained ground in terms of quality. Figure 4 shows boxplots of the impact factors16 of closed access (CA) versus OA journals over time. While CA journals enjoyed an impact factor advantage over OA journals for a long time—all location scales of the impact factor for CA journals being above the ones for OA journals—OA journals are nowadays of the same quality, notwithstanding considerable differences between disciplines (see the contribution by Eger et al. to this issue). In 2019, impact factor distributions of both OA and CA journals are at the same level. Thus, advancing both in quantity and in quality, OA journals are becoming ever more relevant. The literature has identified the following advantages of an OA regime for academic works: (1) OA publications are likely read and therefore (2) cited more widely,17 which in turn (3) raises the incentives for academic authors to publish their research results as citations increase their reputation. These observations led to a broad discussion in academia as to whether the copyright regime may impede the evolution towards a universal OA regime, with very different conclusions being drawn regarding the impact of OA from a social welfare perspective (Scheufen, 2015; Shavell, 2010). Source: Author's calculations based on data from Web of Science (2021) and DOAJ (2021) The growing relevance of academic OA publishing warrants a closer look at the development of pure OA journals as the gold road towards OA. Figure 5 shows the number of newly launched OA journals from 2002 to 2020. Following relatively slow growth from 2002 to 2014, with fewer than 500 new OA journals per year (except 2013), the number has exceeded 1,000 in every year since, peaking in 2017, when more than 2,000 new OA journals were added to the DOAJ database. Today, the DOAJ database counts more than 16,000 OA journals in many different fields of research, published in 80 languages by publishers from 126 countries.18 Source: Author's calculations based on data from DOAJ (2021) Notwithstanding this impressive development, the relevance of OA journals varies substantially across academic disciplines (Figure 6).19 The research field with the largest attributed number of OA journals is Social Sciences (3,817), followed by Health Sciences (2,785), Technology and Engineering (1,416), and Language and Literature (1,153). By contrast, the natural science fields of Mathematics & Statistics (341), Physics & Astronomy (274), and Chemistry (181) feature only few OA journals.20 Source: Author's calculations based on data from DOAJ (2021) Remarkable differences also exist regarding a variety of OA journal characteristics (Table 1).21 Most (52%) OA journals leave the copyright of published works with the author, whereas the traditional CA regime demands that the exploitation rights are transferred to the publisher. Moreover, only around 28% of all OA journals charge APCs—a remarkable finding, as the OA regime implies the transition from a "reader pays" to an "author pays" model. Other fees (e.g., a submission fee to cover the review process) are charged by only around 2% of all OA journals. Nevertheless, author fees may constitute a significant obstacle for authors to publish in an OA venue, especially for non-tenured researchers seeking to publish in highly ranked journals, which are most likely to charge APCs (Budzinski et al., 2020). This obstacle also applies in particular to many researchers from developing countries, whose institutions rarely cover such costs. Yet 18% of OA journals provide for the possibility to waive such author fees. OA publishing may indeed be considered a form of development aid, for two reasons: First, few institutions in the developing world have so far been able to subscribe to academic journals. The OA regime can thus promote scientific participation and thereby foster the global evolution of science as a "trial and error" process. Free or cheaper access to literature for researchers in the developing world tends to increase both their output (number of publications) and input (number of references) (Mueller-Langer et al., 2020). Second, an OA regime grants access to the latest results in science for groups who were previously excluded because they are not "club" members of a university library. This includes, e.g., corporate researchers, physicians, or farmers. Notwithstanding all the changes discussed above, scholarly journals remain the most important medium of communication in many disciplines. For more than 300 years, they have been fulfilling the four key functions of registration (attribution), certification of articles (peer review), dissemination (distribution, access), and preservation (scholarly memory and permanent archiving). In recent decades, a fifth function must be added: the evaluation of researchers and their institutions.22 The increasing importance of OA articles in scholarly journals has triggered some controversial discussions, in particular regarding the questions as to whether OA negatively affects the quality of journal articles, whether OA improves the dissemination of research results, and how OA affects the competition between academic publishers as well as the distribution between academics and non-academics, between poor and rich universities, and between poor and rich countries. We shall discuss each of these questions and some related points in more detail below. In times when "alternative facts" tend to trump sound research results, academia must provide the public with reliable information. The users of this information should be sufficiently certain that the results are based on proper methods, reflect the state of science in the specific field, and were obtained independently, e.g., of any political or commercial interests.23 For that reason, strict and continuous quality control of research results is a "conditio sine qua non" for academic publishing. Facilitating the communication of content from authors to readers, the academic journal market may be characterized as a two-sided market (Rochet & Tirole, 2003). While readers look for the most important research results in their fields by top authors, the latter are interested in the journal's reputation, in wide readership, and in citations. Thus, journals with high impact factors hold the greatest attraction to both sides. With this in mind, the crucial question arises what effect, if any, OA is likely to have on the quality of academic articles. Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado in Denver, is very skeptical regarding the quality of OA articles, especially those that are financed by APCs: "By adding a financial component to the front end of the scholarly publishing process, the open-access movement will ultimately corrupt scholarly publishing and hurt the communication and sharing of novel knowledge" (Beall, 2013, 590). A weak form of "corruption" would to OA publishers' incentives to peer review and to more submitted papers in to increase from However, the commercial publishers' incentives to increase the number of articles to the detriment of the journal's quality at the the quality the APCs that the journal is able to as well as A form of "corruption" refers to the of some OA journal publishers have been to in particular young and who on publications for their or to allow authors to publish articles in OA journals, by articles with or peer academics on their the or of journals, and so In established a of publishers, which was in January in to not only from the publishers but also from OA who that the to to OA. this quality to be a one which exists only in some disciplines (e.g., economics), whereas in other disciplines, such as some OA journals are the ranked journals and there is of a quality researchers their and if academic institutions and research to the APCs for articles by journals, this is to A by is that OA may new and will new and of their will remain (Beall, 2013, 590). However, this is a of the process, of whether the was submitted to a traditional or an OA and many prominent which that articles are generally more likely to the review than and creative but ones. In their contribution to this special & in a two-sided that OA can be a feature of journals. The have seen an increasing both of data on any subject and of that serves to that data almost there has been a of articles in every For such articles, the peer for quality A can be made between pure the same data and the same are as in the and scientific which (1) different data but the same (2) the same data but new methods, or (3) new data and new A to a on (1) the of an or in previously published (2) the impact of the (3) the of and (4) the of to publish Whereas some years when data were on the of mainly of technical copyright and data are the of Regarding the first journals in have already been including an OA journal by University with a focus on Technology and and the Journal for in by Springer the years or a number of in several disciplines have that the results of many when published in highly ranked journals, not be many academics to speak of a The is to the quality of research by access to data so as to be able to results of and or the incentives to the in the first Another important question is whether digitization and the internet have facilitated the quality of of their scholarly and and of their the quality of academic researchers and of is based on which were to provide a metric for journals with each 2019, being a of the citations to all articles in a journal but not of the citations to the individual articles. In a few articles are cited and many articles are not cited at Moreover, an may also many citations for being and citations are 2018, For some journals the authors of submitted papers to related papers that were previously published in the same journal have this by the of several journals this focus on and their to their and the of to these and to with for the quality of research & in with a a to be a (STM, 2018, are induced to the but the The on research which from the on Science and Technology in 2014, is of the existing to research output and to research evaluation in the et al., the question whether the new and the and (OA) of academic publishing to and their Some authors the in OA publishing with a broader of readers and open For of the in the focus on a small number of highly ranked journals, for a all articles that a journal's criteria should be published and made financed by APCs or other This is the of mega-journals such as PLOS a who the 2000 in and & the between of publications in the top journals in and of in a of the top which over the the crucial question is how to articles at low especially in a OA the of available articles to choose journal of costs to some However, the of the as a of quality has been Thus, an important to academic publishing is to provide reliable on the quality of journal articles that are of the journal that published the the internet and for research evaluation also how research results are Regarding scholarly by other researchers, there is an discussion as to whether OA articles more or fewer citations than those with a to that is in the by & and by Eger et al. to this special Regarding by the broader the mainly is being complemented with which on or in the social reference such as and Mendeley, scholarly blogs, and In the transition from traditional subscription journals to OA, the crucial question is how to the between two the one high subscription fees may be with high journal publishers have to their to the or research the other low APCs may not for publishers to cover their and to a to publish journals. The is to competition to journal publishers to articles of quality at and and to the interested public. The of competition not on the and of OA publishing. there were only pure OA journals, publishers would for all authors had to cover the APCs from their the APCs would tend towards a that the publishers to However, in the publishers of pure OA journals, OA journals and CA journals with OA repositories, and APCs may be by or research these different to foster OA will have specific on the of are some (1) green OA is or an to as has been the in since January 2014, publishers of subscription journals difficult to increase their fees. This also the publishers of OA journals from increasing their In any a must be is too will the publishers' to publish the journal in the first if is too the on subscription fees will be A for gold OA by research the of the publishers of OA journals and thereby increase (2) the of new OA journals, this foster competition publishers of OA journals for Yet this the that many years to a and to Until the new journal will have on the fees of the journals. (3) of academic libraries can constitute a to the journal publishers, potentially the of example is the in which so far two between a of most academic libraries in on the one and Wiley and Springer as publishers of scholarly journals in all disciplines on the other is a controversial discussion whether such impede competition on the journal market to the detriment of small publishers or indeed In any such to promote the of traditional CA journals OA OA publishing may several and the from "reader pays" to "author pays" can for researchers, for in developing countries. As we have 18% of OA journals APC for such Second, or to foster OA, such as the above, may to the of researchers who to the detriment of those who do not. Moreover, publishers may be to papers from researchers from that author fees specific e.g., by authors an of gold and/or green OA may due to that from incentives such as the in science or especially for non-tenured researchers, gold OA may their careers in fields OA with and CA example for due to may be the e.g., in the field of In this a green OA publication may with a publication of a in a journal since the that a journal works that have been published In the transition to OA journals implies that authors or their pay for the of readers from all over the world to access the articles. This may be poor authors for rich the global that is available to academic articles is in which the transition to OA may the number of articles The is when many of the readers are of we can that whose faculty publish many articles also for a large share of the readership, in which any between authors and readers their as a of the transition to OA should be A number of and developments since the second half of the have the academic publishing market and triggered about the very of academic publishing. journals, which in most disciplines to be the most important medium of academic are by commercial publishers, with the top publishers more than of all journals. and the advent of the internet have these publishers to in "big with academic libraries, of which the libraries to access a wide of journals at a price per As a journal subscription prices and academic on academic journals have been increasing to the detriment of publishers and on books with these a number of national and initiatives triggered the development towards OA, a new of academic publishing. Today, a growing number of pure and OA journals are financed by subscription fees but by publication fees paid by the authors or their Moreover, institutional and disciplinary OA repositories have been established and the traditional of academic communication have been with social blogs, Another of digitization and the internet has been the facilitated and of research in many disciplines. The of this development is an increasing number of the results of be this would with copyright and and academic authors to in The discussion as to how these developments the quality control of academic journal articles, the evaluation of and their institutions, and the size and of financial means for academic publishing. This special to the discussion a of articles with some of including the evaluation of by indices & welfare of open access & the impact of OA & & access to research data & to OA in and the to OA in & We would to for The authors also open access by

The current issue is dedicated to women scientists that work closely with us. These are highly qualified individuals in food systems, while the young scholars have a promising journey ahead. I wish to appreciate them for their support and afford them visibility, to be invited for collaboration, talks at conferences, consultancies, or scholarship support. I value them and appreciate them for their unrelenting support to the journal and propagation of food systems knowledge. Although the whole idea of women’s history month was started in the USA, United Kingdom and Australia, with eased communication, it rubs on all of us. For me, every day is woman's day. No problem, it is good to pick a month, a day to focus. Over the years I have focused on widows in my development work, because I became aware of their vulnerability once widowed at the hands of those who once embraced them before. It is bad in certain cultures; all of a sudden, you are no one. Then I started to advocate for smallholder women farmers in Africa, who toil away, with few resources, to feed their families. Over the years, I have supported the girl child with school fees, school uniform and sanitary pads, especially those that show promise but come from impoverished backgrounds. Being a woman myself, who made it despite many challenges, I do understand. And now even as I cut down on professional work, I mentor young scholars, especially women. One told me recently that socially for her as a young married scholar, it is easier to have a mature woman who has been through so much, as a mentor. I agree. I find mentoring is two ways. There is so much for me to learn in this fast-growing AI world. So, to try and keep up, my mentees teach me what my head can absorb. On my part I introduce them to what else they can do beyond their profession, that as women we need to show empathy and support those most vulnerable in the society. The ones I wish to pay special attention to today are the women scientists close to me because either they review for this journal or I mentor them. Being a woman scholar is quite a journey and being a woman scientist is even more challenging but also quite fulfilling. There are tens of thousands more out there. Be proud of yourselves. It is about being inquisitive and seeking answers to the world's most pressing problems. Feel valued and value yourselves as well.

Intorno a Locatelli: Studi in occasione del tricentenario della nascita di Pietro Antonio Locatelli (1695-1764). Edited by Albert Dunning. (Speculum musicae, I. 1.) Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana, 1995. [2 vols. (xiv, 1250 p.) ISBN 88-7096-143-5. L250.000.00.] This massive two-volume collection of twenty substantial essays on subjects concerned directly or obliquely with Pietro Antonio Locatelli constitutes the proceedings of a congress held in 1995, presumably at Cremona, to commemorate the three-hundredth anniversary of the composer's birth. Most of the contributors were young Italian scholars. Many were students of the volume's editor, Albert Dunning, at the University of Pavia. Three of the essays by non-Italians have been translated into Italian in order to create a unified work. The boxed set has been lavishly produced under the sponsorship of the Fondazione Pietro Antonio Locatelli of Amsterdam and Cremona, which is also underwriting the Locatelli complete works edition beaded by Dunning, the leading Locatelli specialist of our time. Among the essays tangential to Locatelli is the very long one (128 pages) that opens the collection, on musical patronage in Venice during the early eighteenth century, by Alessandra Bernardi, essentially a revision of her 1990 dissertation at the University of Pavia completed under Dunning's direction. It includes a comprehensive overview of musical activity in that city, set within the context of its political, social, cultural, religious, and economic institutions. It draws upon unpublished diaries, travelers' accounts, administrative records, archives of public bodies, and literary and musical sources. Much of it is organized according to category of patron, and contains new information relating to the careers of Antonio Vivaldi, Tomaso Albinoni, Francesco and Michele Gasparini, Giovanni De Porta, Giuseppe Boniventi, Carlo Tessarini, Giorgio Gentili, and Alessandro and Benedetto Marcello. Similar to this essay in originality and scope is Franco Piperno's account of musical events, patronage, and institutions during the first half of the eighteenth century. Piperno, an associate professor of musicology at the University of Florence, concludes with a precise chronological table listing known performances of operas, oratorios, cantatas, serenades, and other items of musical spectacle in Rome from 1710 to 1725, with citations of primary and secondary sources. Likewise tangential to Locatelli but of undoubted value are Margherita Canale Degrassi's essay on the purposes and performance practices of Giuseppe Tartini's violin concertos, Galliano Ciliberti's study of the Christmas concerto in the eighteenth century, Stefano La Via's exposition of new documents relating to the musical patronage of Cardinal Ottoboni in Rome (1700-1740), Paola Pozzi's catalogue of Italian concertos from the first half of the eighteenth century preserved in the elector's library in Dresden, and Giovanni Sgaria's life and works of the estimable Roman composer Giovanni Mossi (ca. 1680-1742), this one, too, a Pavia dissertation supervised by Dunning. Giacomo Fornari's discussion of the decline of instrumental music in Italy during the eighteenth century confronts a very large and fascinating problem, probably beyond the reach of such a young scholar. His essay relies heavily on quotations from travel accounts, treatises, and music journals of the eighteenth century to establish, basically, that opera overwhelmed Italian musical culture of that period and that, given the abysmal condition of the Italian economy under foreign domination, many aspiring musicians migrated to Northern Europe, where there was a market for instrumental music that did not exist in their homeland. Consequently. Italian instrumental music, although extremely influential during the first half of the century, was essentially an aspect of emigrant culture. as Carl Dablhaus called it. Left unexplored is exactly why economic hardship in Italy favored opera production over instrumental music and why, in some parts of the peninsula, instrumental music flourished nonetheless. …

It came as a sadness but not a surprise that two weeks ago we lost Dr. Gerald R. Miller. Professor Miller, who was also lovingly known as G. R. or Gerry to his friends and family died May 20, 1993 after a long battle with cancer. Professor Miller was a visible member of our network. I am sure that we all miss his hearty laughter at this conference. It is fitting that our young scholar's award bears Gerald R. Miller's name because G. R. very much believed that it is the young scholars who are the future of our combined areas of interest. Professor Miller was both a Fellow of the International Communication Association and a Fellow of the American Psychological Association. He was a University Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University and was also a recipient of that university's distinguished faculty award for excellence in teaching and research. Professor Miller was one of the first and foremost scholars that can be attributed with bringing the study of Interpersonal Communication to the field of Communication. At a time when people were looking at Interpersonal Communication as face to face communication between two people, Miller advocated looking beyond the mere number of participants and looking instead at the unique information that the interactants shared with one another, and their usage of this information in communicating with one another. In this way he distinguished interpersonal relationships from broader more sociologically based relationships. Professor Miller contributed broadly across many areas of interpersonal concern. Perhaps two of the areas where he had the most impact are in the study of deceptive communication and in the study of compliance-gaining and influence. He received numerous awards for his study in these areas and his deception research was supported in part by grants from the National Science Foundation. However, if you asked Professor Miller what he felt his greatest contribution was, he would tell you it was his students. Miller felt that producing a core of well trained scholars would do more to advance our understanding of interpersonal relationships than he alone could do in a lifetime. I am honored to have been one of Professor Miller's students. Although, I am but one of many. While Professor Miller influenced each of our lives, his influence continues through our students, and in the case of my older academic siblings, their student's students. …

This issue brings together the best of the SCLA, with contributors representing long standing members and former officers, junior newcomers to the organization, mid-career newcomers to our conferences, students (some as early in their career as masters students), and junior scholars. No less significant, it shows the extent to which the SCLA has fostered a diverse membership--senior scholars whose attendance at our conferences serves to mentor younger scholars, young scholars who travel great distances to participate within a constructive ambiance, and students who come to the SCLA in order to learn how to present a conference paper as well as (at times) bring them to the point of publication. SCLA conferences are enhanced by regional, national, and international scholars; students, independent scholars, and professors. Although I have had considerable experience in both national and international comparative literature associations, I am always astounded by how the SCLA serves such a varied population. I began my publishing career with The Comparatist. The editor at that time, John Burt Foster, carefully nursed my initial work into publishable form. I presented one of my first papers at the SCLA (even though I was based in the North at the time) because it was an environment in which a young scholar could actually receive constructive feedback. It has been a great pleasure to give back to this organization during these last four years. This issue is the last that I will produce as Editor. I wish to take this opportunity to thank the Advisory Board for all the support they have given me during my tenure, and especially for their letters of support for continued funding of this journal during these difficult economic times. It has been a genuine pleasure to work with my book review and managing editors as well as the production team from the University of North Carolina Press. In addition to its book reviews, this issue includes a series of articles dealing with the interrelated themes of intertextuality and cosmopolitanism. Essays span the cross-cultural and inter-arts influences in Cuban, French, Belgian, Turkish, American, British, Spanish, Russian, and German works. The volume also includes two clusters of conference papers. One cluster, dealing specifically with intertextuality, was organized by SCLA members and presented at the 2009 ACLA Conference in New Orleans. The other cluster, in keeping with The Comparatists commitment to publish graduate students and junior scholars, focuses on the international reception of the work on Edgar Allan Poe. This cluster also originated in a panel presented at the ACLA 2009. The organizers of these panels introduce these clusters and their contributors in separate introductions. The issue opens with an article written by Alfred Lopez who examines Jose Marti's reading of Walt Whitman. Lopez brings Marti and Whitman together at Madison Square Theater in 1887, where the Cuban author went to hear the iconic American poet speak on Abraham Lincoln. He juxtaposes the international and interdisciplinary breadth of Marti's learning with the monolingual Whitman as a backdrop for a larger discussion of Marti's posthumous reception as a political and ideological writer, first at the hands of Battista and Castro and later by postcolonial and New American Studies scholars, who tend to view him as anti-nationalist and as a Pan-Caribbean revolutionary--an odd persona, Lopez notes, for Cuba's most famous nationalist revolutionary. Lopez examines the paradox of how Marti admired Whitman, a writer who celebrated what he feared and hated most about America: its status as a rising empire. The author questions whether Marti's praise of Whitman is really the critique of the American poet's imperialistic rhetoric, as many recent scholars claim, or an effort to build a Marti to fit critical agendas. John Pizer investigates the use of Haiti as a trope in German literature from the early eighteenth century to the present day. …

ABSTRACTGraduate students and young scholars with a passion for making a difference in the real world through research are often advised to put those dreams to rest until after tenure. This contributes to the enduring frustration on both sides of the “theory–policy gap” but it is sound advice—as of right now tenure decisions tend not to take into account publications appearing in policy outlets. However, the job market—and some of the most important mechanisms used for making promotion decisions in academia—suggest good strategic reasons for trying to have your research influence policy as early in your career as possible.

When I was hired as an assistant professor in 1969, mandatory retirement at age 65 was the law of the land for tenured faculty members. I was 26 years old at the time, so that seemed impossibly far away. But by the time I was 50, two amendments to federal law had removed all age limits. I could stay in my tenured position forever! That's how, in 2011, I found myself still an active professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge at age 68. I might still be in my tenured job today, if not for a meeting that year with the official who administered my federal research funding. ![Figure][1] ILLUSTRATION: ROBERT NEUBECKER > “Professors older than 65 were blocking the way of many young scholars.” The official asked me to investigate how eliminating mandatory retirement had affected the availability of positions for new assistant professors. The question struck me as important but not personally relevant—until my colleagues and I got our results. Our initial intuition was that there would be no substantial long-term effect. We expected to find that the number of open positions dipped just after the law's two changes. After all, the number of available tenure-track faculty slots is essentially fixed—at MIT, there are approximately 1000. To create room for a new faculty member, an existing one has to leave. But after a brief dip, we thought, retirements should return to normal, creating room for new recruits. One word for such intuition: wrong! Through modeling, we discovered that eliminating the retirement age had reduced the number of new slots for MIT assistant professors by 19%, from 57 to 46 per year. Put simply, without a mandatory retirement age, senior faculty members are much slower to leave. When our paper was published, I viewed it as just another finding. But eventually, I had serious reflections about what the results really meant. Around that time, I had hired a postdoc named Navid Ghaffarzadegan. He was a superlative young scholar. Yet he worried that, like many postdocs, he might not be able to get the tenure-track position he sought. There are simply too many applicants seeking too few positions. And I began to realize that I and other professors older than 65 were blocking the way of many young scholars who seek academic careers. I started to wonder whether it was time for me to step aside, but the idea of leaving the job I had been tied to for so long was hard to swallow. (In the meantime, Navid secured that tenure-track position and is now an associate professor with tenure.) Then, the dean of the engineering school heard about our paper and asked me to go over the details with him. It must have resonated with him, because he briefed the department heads about the need for a flexible after-tenure option that would vacate a position and open the way for a new hire. They soon invented “professor, post-tenure,” tossing out an earlier option with the horrendous name “professor without tenure, retired,” or PWOTR, pronounced “pee-water.” Once “professor, post-tenure” was announced in 2016, I found it increasingly attractive. It wasn't the same as “emeritus”—not full retirement. I could retain my office, teach and supervise students, and be a principal investigator on research grants—all with great flexibility. I would get to choose which projects I wanted to do and be paid accordingly, up to 49% of my previous salary. I could also access retirement and pension funds. My wife and I would be able to spend more time together and with our children and grandchildren. Decision made! I submitted my tenure resignation in 2017. I've enjoyed every minute since, busy as ever but only on activities I select—such as MIT BLOSSOMS, a project I co-founded to create interactive video lessons for high school math and science classes. I feel lucky to have this option. Too few institutions offer these types of transitional positions to ease the challenge for us senior professors. At 74, I in essence removed 9 years from someone else's career. I should have stepped aside sooner. [1]: pending:yes

Bali, as a province with strong roots in local cultural traditions and significant economic importance for Indonesia, is striving to balance modernity and tradition, economics, especially mass tourism, and cultural identity. This is why Universitas Warmadewa, one of the largest Balinese universities, chooses the theme ‘Local Wisdom and Business Law’ for its international conferences each year.As a non-Indonesian legal scholar, this theme presents two challenges for me. Firstly, I am not an expert in tourism economics and can only approach the topic from a traditional market law perspective, theoretically. Secondly, the terms used in Indonesian legal discussions may seem vague and unclear from a German perspective, as the legal discussion in Indonesia integrates traditional legal phenomena pragmatically into the applicable legal system. This may also be historically conditioned because since independence Indonesia has to handle a legal pluralism in law, which also finds its cause in the legacy of the colonial era.When speaking on the legal perspective of ‘local wisdom’, several questions are unclear to me:What exactly is local wisdom and how can it be defined?Where does it fit into the Indonesian legal system?What role can local wisdom play in contemporary law?Local wisdom may be understood as part of traditional customary law or Adat, at least in terms of its influence on legal issues, as the conference theme suggests. The terminology around ‘customary law’, ‘Adat’, ‘indigenous law’, or ‘living law’ is still a problematic issue in Indonesian scientific discussion and should only be briefly mentioned in this presentation. The term ‘Adat law’ was originally not used in Indonesian society and was first systematically used by the Dutch. Van Vollenhoven, considered the ‘father of Indonesian Adat law’ by Indonesian scholars, defined Adat law as law that is not based on codified legal rules from the legislator. This definition is still used by contemporary Indonesian scholars. Adat law in this sense contains sanctions, making the character of ‘law’. It was characterized by Van Vollenhoven as dynamic and flexible folk law, which combines the term with the often-used term of ‘living law’. There are numerous discussions in Indonesian literature about Indonesian customary law, its functions, and significance, but the terminology has not been clearly defined and the role of religious law is also subject to numerous publications.Therefore, having read various contributions on the topic, I am left confused because some of them discuss the existence of legal principles of living customary law and describe them as “national Indonesian principles,” which can replace parts of the post-colonial Indonesian law, but they do not clearly identify these principles. The topic seems to be of almost patriotic importance to Indonesia, making it particularly difficult for foreign scholars to approach the subject in presentations before Indonesian colleagues. My contribution should be seen in light of this difficulty, as a first observation of the phenomenon from a foreign perspective.The term Adat is already difficult to comprehend, and this is even more true for the term “local wisdom” in a legal context. So, what is the “Local Wisdom” that I am asked to talk about? The Terms of Reference of our conference describe the meaning of “local wisdom” mainly as the clash of market actors in local Balinese tourism that can lead to conflicts, which the law should resolve. These conflicts are said to occur because local communities and institutions, based on a kind of traditionally grown trust, seek to build and maintain their business relationships in the tourism industry. This trust, which one could call “traditional good faith,” meets the need to regulate contractual arrangements more formally in terms of contract law (“more official...instead of just relying on promises or good faith”).In this sense, local wisdom is an aspect of good faith. Based on this understanding of the term, I have no systematic issues with the term “local wisdom.” However, it should be noted that good faith and contract, as a predictable shaping of legal relationships between market actors, should not be seen as opposites. It is possible and necessary to resolve disruptions in contractual relationships in light of good faith and, if necessary, adapt contractual regulations. Here, “local wisdom” should not be understood as a unique source of good faith, but as a general aspect that can influence the expectations of the contracting parties and their trust in shaping the law. This raises the question of which factors should be taken into account by the non-local contracting party in good faith, and which should not. It is a question of the concrete assessment of the structure of interests and the balance of the contract, how to allocate risk and assign external aspects to the contracting parties and which aspects should be considered subsequently.This is a theoretical matter, and it is unlikely to play a significant role in practice since local market actors and communities have the freedom, within the framework of private autonomy, to incorporate their traditional interests into the contract negotiations. This allows for traditional interests to participate in the “equivalence justice” of the contract. However, if the traditional interests of the local community result in unacceptable consequences for the contract’s execution, the question of whether these reasons can lead to a change in the contract’s basis may arise. In civil law systems, the clausula rebus sic stantibus is regulated as a limitation of the pacta sunt servanda principle and falls under the principle of good faith (bona fides). If the invocation of “local wisdom” by one party leads to the other party having to agree to an adjustment, it would have to be examined.I would like to give you an example of this, which seems credible even if no prove about the issue can be delivered due to the ‘popular’ source: A person without Indonesian citizenship acquired the right to use a plot of land with a house in Bali ten years ago. Since foreigners cannot acquire land ownership in Indonesia themselves, the foreigner had agreed on a legal arrangement with an Indonesian citizen resident in Bali, in which the Indonesian acquired ownership (hak milik) of the land with the foreigner’s money and agreed on right to use for the foreign partner. After ten years, the foreigner wanted to sell the property again to move to his country of origin. The agreement with the Indonesian partner stipulated that the Indonesian partner must agree to the sale of the plot on the wish of the foreign partner and would receive 10% of the sale amount in the event of a sale. In the case described, however, the Indonesian partner seems to have refused to sell the property on the agreed terms. He was not satisfied with the 10% share and demanded a 70% share instead. As justification for this, he argued that the contract terms should be changed because he had spiritually enhanced the property over the years through certain religious rituals and this required a revaluation of his shareholding.It is not known whether the case was heard in an Indonesian court and how it was finally settled. Assuming the case had occurred as described, from the perspective of Indonesian civil law, it is clear that no change in the business basis of the contract occurred as a result of the Indonesian partner’s spiritual acts, which can lead to an adjustment of the agreement between him and the foreign contractual partner. Just as local communities depend on their interests in cultural identity being taken into account even in legal relations with partners coming from outside, foreign investors must be able to rely on certain standards of contractual obligation. The principle of good faith would be grotesquely overstretched if local contracting partners could use fuzzy notions of ‘local wisdom’ to make contractual arrangements more flexible in their favour.Another example of the clash between traditional legal customs and supra-regional legal ideas in highly traditional markets with supra-regional economic importance, such as Bali, is the handling of legal disputes and methods of dispute resolution. The trust of traditional communities in supra-legal ties of interest in business relationships, as mentioned in the Terms of Reference to this Conference, meets a systemic trust in formal contractual regulations of non-local actors. The reference points of trust of the respective groups of market actors thus differ. This also affects dispute resolution. According to Sulastriyono, the voluntary character of traditional customary law has the advantage over civil law methods of litigation and dispute resolution of a ‘win-win’ solution, which leads to greater acceptance of the solution by the parties to the conflict. In theory, this is undeniable. However, it is questionable whether this acceptance can also be achieved among contract participants who do not originate from the respective culture, because the existence of sufficient advantages for a party may well depend on the integration of the party in the respective local society. Moreover, the indisputable advantages of consensual dispute resolution can also be well integrated in state procedural law via mediation mechanisms.Cases such as the one outlined one above would in principle be likely to erode the confidence of foreign investors in Indonesian law in general if courts do not rule clearly and draw clear boundaries here. The example seems to be a particularly extreme case, but it shows how important it is to clearly determine the meaning and possible role of terms such as ‘local wisdom’ and ‘tradition’ for use in law. Culturally related aspects are prone to serve as a tool for discrimination against individuals and companies that do not belong to the respective cultural environment. The difficulty, for example, of establishing an intellectual property right on cultural heritage follows not only from the contrast between individual subjective rights and collective subjective rights. It follows above all from the problem of determining the collective rights holders who are to benefit from ‘their’ cultural heritage. Who is a member of a certain culture? Is there a generational link or does it depend on the integration of the individual into his or her living environment? If the legal system does not want to fall back to abstruse considerations of ‘blood identity’, what remains is the assignment of such claims to territorial authorities or the state itself, whose task it is to protect cultural diversity on its territory. This is the path that the Indonesian legislature had taken in Art 38 Law No 28/2014 on copyright law.The misuse of cultural aspects carried into the application of law is also visible in another aspect: In another paper I have pointed out the problem that the concept of traditional customary law in Indonesian law and the position of Adat law in the hierarchy of norms seems in need of clarification. Shidarta notes that there is no sufficient clarity about the relationship between Adat law and state law and thus no consistent system of Indonesian law as a whole. Accordingly, the maturation of an independent Indonesian legal system suffers to this day from the internal conflict with the colonial legacy of existing state law based on Dutch civil law and the lack of a consistent overarching pluralistic concept of law. This is seen by Shidarta as a major reason why the systematic positions of customary law, Islamic law and western law within national law are not clearly defined and why a clear hierarchical determination of the various sources of law in relation to national law is lacking. The doubts about the systematic location and certainly also the failure to establish the principles of traditional customary law as original Indonesian law after the attainment of independence instead of the sources of law inherited from the colonial period are probably due - in addition to the idea of the state founders of an Indonesian unitary state (‘eenheidstaat’) - above all to the disagreement about the concept of customary law, which is formally understood in the sense of a binding source of law defined during the colonial period, or as post-colonial Adat law in the sense of traditional customary rights of various Indonesian ethnic groups either with a binding character or as norms of social order based on voluntariness. In this respect, too, different definitions of the term can be found in the literature:There is thus generally a more philosophical recognition of the importance of traditional customary law in the sense that customary law reflects the actual sense of law of the people and the Indonesian people as a nation. The latter statement seems problematic to me because the statement only applies with regard to the significance of customary law as a source of law, but not to the content of the individual customary laws of the various ethnic groups, in which different legal customs apply in each case. It therefore seems questionable to me whether Adat law can be understood in the sense of an alternative to Indonesian state law. In my opinion, Adat as a source of concrete legal norms has a supplementary development perspective in the communal area. Here it can certainly have an influence on economic life in the regions if it is applied consistently and transparently, and its importance would grow especially if the autonomy of municipal territorial units were strengthened, and a strong federalism were developed. However, a scientific inventory of norms and principles of local customary law is then required, and a clear formulation of such norms is needed, because it must be ruled out that the invocation of undefined, non-transparent or arbitrarily formulated Adat rules unduly restricts the freedom of market actors and are used as protectionist instruments in the provinces.In this sense, I believe that the postulate that Indonesian law must simply recognise Adat law as it has grown and as it is applied alive within the Indonesian local societies falls short, because the compatibility of social rules based on voluntariness and constantly changing with the overall legal system based on the rule of law is at least debatable. In other words: either one renounces the legal certainty and predictability of legal norms in the area of traditional customary law. This could then constitute a breach of the constitutionally enshrined principle of the Rule of Law. Or one formulates clear norms based on traditional legal principles, which have the character of binding legal norms and applies them in the sense of subsidiarity in the local environment with priority over central state law in certain predefined aspects. Then the rules of the hierarchy of norms must be correspondingly clear. However, the question of the hierarchy of norms then no longer presents itself as a problem of the nature of Adat or customary law because the latter would have lost its character as actual customary law. The advocates of a strong recognition of Adat by state law will, however, reject this path because they see the advantage of traditional customary law over state law precisely in its flexibility and ability to change. This flexibility would no longer be readily available through an integration of traditional principles into a local classical law in the sense of imperative norms.A clear hierarchy of norms defined by constitutional law seems indispensable, because such local customary law cannot displace state law without further ado, but only if the principle of subsidiarity and the better regulation of local circumstances by local law indicates otherwise. This would also be in line with the philosophical assessment of local customary law as the law that best captures the living conditions of the people in its cultural area of application. The importance of the principle of subsidiarity should generally be given more attention in the discussion on legal pluralism in Indonesia. This can not only ensure greater recognition of traditional customary law, but also enable the transparency necessary for the predictability of the law.Insofar as Adat is to be understood as the source of ‘abstract normative’ aspects, as certain common Indonesian legal values and principles in the sense of a ‘pan-Indonesian’ legal order and, as such, is to find its way into an independent state Indonesian civil law, legal scholarship in Indonesia will also have to identify and clearly define these principles. In doing so, it will be necessary to determine which principles of traditional customary law in the various regions of the archipelago are suitable as overarching legal principles, so that they can possibly have an identity-forming effect in a national private law. This difficult process might lead to reform of the Indonesian Civil Law which meets the special requirements of a socially and culturally integrated legal system.Indonesia as a state with a unified internal market needs a cross-cultural private law and commercial law. Consideration of the interests of local communities and traditions is of importance in a multicultural state. The Indonesian constitution therefore emphasises the specifics of traditional rights and thus guarantees Adat its own status in the legal system. However, there seems to be a lack of a clear hierarchy of norms in the legal system and a clear definition of the nature of Adat. A hint of a certain hierarchy between Adat and state law is indeed found in agricultural law (Art. 5 Law No. 5/1960 on the Basic Regulations of Agrarian Principles) and in forestry law (Law No. 41/1999 on Forestry). Adat is recognised here but must harmonise with state law. It is therefore likely to be in a relationship of subsidiarity to state law. The fundamental assertion of the primacy of state law over other co-existing legal systems is also in line with the view of Indonesian legal scholars such as Sunaryati Hartono. Referring to Griffiths’ formulation of “weak legal pluralism”, where co-existing legal systems are subordinated to a dominant formalistic national law, it can be stated that the Indonesian legal system follows this model.In my opinion, the integration of traditional customary law into the legal system should not be done as a mere tolerance of state law towards deviating regulations of facts in certain regions. From my perspective as a foreign observer, this seems to lead to significant problems for the development of the Indonesian economy and for investment. In particular, this seems to me to be the case for Bali. Local Wisdom can be incorporated into the contractual relations of the parties within the framework of private autonomous arrangements. A ‘creative’ qualification of protectionist measures against outside market actors or the justification of the failure to sanction breaches of contract or violations of law against outsiders as ‘Adat’ or ‘protection of local traditions’ should be consistently avoided.Incidentally, it seems to me that in contract law there is no real opposition between state law and traditional customary law. Either the parties trust each other, in which case state law does not prevent an agreement based on good faith. Or they do not, in which case only state contract law can lead to proper solutions. The same applies to traditional dispute resolution methods, to which the parties to the conflict can easily submit. In contrast, the integration of customary law as independent Indonesian legal principles or as legal norms at the local or municipal level into Indonesian law would require considerable academic effort. For this, the principles concerned would have to be clearly identified, systematised, and formulated to be able to substantiate a claim to validity beyond the respective local communities. The mere reference to historically evolved convictions of local communities is too vague. The term ‘local wisdom’ seems to me to be problematic in this sense to accurately describe the question of the collision of traditional customs and expectations of outside market actors, especially since it is already conceptually positively evaluative. Finally, it should not be forgotten, that the continental European codifications are culturally neutral and in big parts based on the Roman law. Roman law itself was not developed under the cultural framework of northern and middle European regions, however it served well as source for the modern European codifications. These codifications are working fine until these days in different nations without obvious incompatibilities with local traditions. The amount of a ‘Volksgeist’ after the idea of Friedrich Carl von Savigny within the Private Law does not play a big role in the contemporary discussion as law should be seen in a pragmatic way as a viable tool to organize the modern society. Indonesia is an important economically emerging nation. As such it might be a good idea to keep an internationally compatible private law, which might be carefully adapted to certain peculiarities of the Indonesian society. The use of general clauses as entrance doors for local legal convictions seems to be a good way for that and a clearly defined legal hierarchy with a constitutionally based legal subsidiarity principle seems important. In contrast, the foundation of modern law on nationalistic, local, or indigenous traditional customs should only be done with extreme caution, if at all. The contemporary discussion on the role of Adat in Indonesian law shows the great difficulty of determining viable legal rules that can enter a future reformed Indonesian private law as ‘originally Indonesian’. The criticism against Von Savigny’s ‘Volksgeist’ idea also applies here: Defining who the ‘people’ are and what constitutes their common identity is already hardly rationally possible in a non-multi-ethnic state, even more in a multi-ethnic state. National identity-forming circumstances are hardly suitable as common principles for pluralistic societies.

As with the progress of social sciences in which the notion of turn has gradually taken a central position in academic discourse, we have often seen the blended application of “paradigm shift talk” and “turn talk” to delineate the construction of progress in legal scholarship. Unlike “paradigm shift talk” that is based on the sufficient intellectual accumulation of understanding Kuhn’s paradigm theory, the connotations, as well as implications, of the notion of turn have been radically ignored in legal scholarship. Therefore, questions tackling turn’s underlying teleology, epistemology, methodology, and ethics are especially significant and indispensable. As a response, this article delves into the notion of turn in legal scholarship by mainly embedding it in a general context of the knowledge production of social sciences. It primarily argues that the notion of turn is more compatible with the construction of socio-legal knowledge than that of paradigm due to its interdisciplinary disposition. Accordingly, rather than maintaining the taken-for-granted status quo, legal scholars should pay heed to this compatibility in question and employ the notion of turn consciously and seriously.

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

We investigate the mechanical and microstructural changes of the densified silica glass under uniaxial loading-unloading via atomistic simulations with a modified BKS potential. The stress–strain relationship is found to include three respective stages: elastic, plastic and hardening regions. The bulk modulus increases with the initial densification and will undergo a rapid increase after complete densification. The yield pressure varies from 5 to 12 GPa for different densified samples. In addition, the Si–O–Si bond angle reduces during elastic deformation under compression, and 5-fold Si will increase linearly in the plastic deformation. In the hardening region, the peak splitting and the new peak are both found on the Si–Si and O–O pair radial distribution functions, where the 6-fold Si is increased. Instead, the lateral displacement of the atoms always varies linearly with strain, without evident periodic characteristic. As is expected, the samples are permanently densified after release from the plastic region, and the maximum density of recovered samples is about 2.64 g/cm3, which contains 15 % 5-fold Si, and the Si–O–Si bond angle is less than the ordinary silica glass. All these findings are of great significance for understanding the deformation process of densified silica glass.