Reviving Bentham’s Theory of Evidence | An Anglo-French Symposium

The Bentham Project are hosting an event entitled 'Reviving Bentham’s Theory of Evidence | An Anglo-French Symposium' at Bentham House on 12 - 13 April 2018.

The event is funded by University College London and by the French Embassy, and its aim is to bring together students and academics from the UK and France, and indeed from farther afield, in order to discuss Jeremy Bentham's extensive writings on judicial evidence and procedure.

A keynote speech by Emeritus Quain Professor of Jurisprudence William Twining will be delivered from 6 pm on 12 April at the Denys Holland Lecture Theatre. His plenary lecture will be chaired by Professor Philip Schofield, Professor of the History of Legal and Political Thought, Director of the Bentham Project, and General Editor of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham.

If you would like solely to register for Professor Twining's plenary lecture, please click here.

The main symposium will be composed of five ninety-minute sessions over the two days in the Moot Court at Bentham House, with each session consisting of papers from scholars from legal, philosophical, or historical backgrounds.

As well as a plenary lecture by Professor Twining, the symposium will feature papers from Professor Paul Roberts, Professor of Criminal Jurisprudence, University of Nottingham, by Professor Guillaume Tusseau, Professor of Public Law, Sciences Po, Paris, and by several other academics and doctoral students from the UK, France, and the United States. 

Further details concerning the speakers of the symposium, and concerning the themes of each session, will be made available from early February.

A breakdown of the agenda for the symposium is as follows:

Thursday 12 April 2018

Welcome - 1:30 pm.

Session I - 2 pm - 3:30 pm.

• Paul Roberts (University of Nottingham) - 'Thinking about Thinking about Evidence'
• Malik Bozzo-Rey (Université Catholique de Lille/UCL) - 'Philosophical challenges from Bentham's Theory of Evidence'

Intermission

Session II - 4 pm - 5:30 pm.

• Guillaume Tusseau & Nefeli Lefkopoulou (Sciences Po, Paris) - 'Of the Limits of the Constitutional Branch of Evidence: Towards a Benthamian Rationale of Constitutional Evidence?'
• Jan-Melissa Schramm (University of Cambridge) - 'Jeremy Bentham and the Politics of Prose Style'
• Keynote speech by Professor William Twining - 6 pm

Friday 13 April 2018

Session III - 9:30 am - 11:00 am

• Chris Riley (UCL) - 'Jeremy Bentham and the Equity Dispatch Courts: the Proving Grounds of his Theory of Judicial Evidence and Procedure'
• Yann-Arzel Durelle-Marc (Université Paris XIII) - 'Evidence and Procedure in Bentham's Legal System'

Intermission

Session IV - 11:30 am - 1:00 pm

• Peter Lythe: 'The Evidence of Things Not Seen: Jeremy Bentham on the Edifice and Artifice of the Established Church' (UCL)

Roundtable

Lunch - 1 pm

Session V - 2 pm - 3:45 pm

• Peter J. Aschenbrenner (Pudue University, Indiana) - 'Evidence Lost in a "False Geography": How Variable Management Enabled Bentham to Avoid Transplanting "English Mischiefs upon French Ground" in his Draught of a Code'

Close - 4 pm

Professor Twining's plenary lecture, and the symposium of which it is a part, are both public and free to attend.

If you have any additional queries or if you require any additional information, please contact: c.riley@ucl.ac.uk, p.schofield@ucl.ac.uk, or m.bozzo-rey@ucl.ac.uk.