Judges & Virtues

On December 2nd 2021 Professor Iris van Domselaar (Director of the Amsterdam Centre on the Legal Professions and Access to Justice) will deliver a keynote lecture at the “Judicial Character in Hard Times” Seminar titled: “Courage as a Judicial Virtue: A Realistic Approach”.

Iris van Domselaar is an associate professor in legal ethics and legal philosophy and founding director of the Amsterdam Center on the Legal Professions and Access to Justice. She has studied both philosophy and law and was a visiting fellow at the Department of Philosophy of Harvard University and at the Department of Philosophy of Chicago University. 

Van Domselaar’s research focuses on the question of how to account for ethics in legal practice. She especially addresses this question in relation to the classic legal institutions and legal roles relevant for securing values of political morality and the rule of law. Drawing on neo-Aristotelian/neo-Wittgensteinian strands within practical philosophy and on social-empirical research, she seeks to come to grips with ethics as ‘lived experience’ on the part of legal professionals and of citizens who are directly involved in legal procedures. 

In her PhD thesis ‘The Fragility of Rightness. Adjudication and the primacy of practice’  van Domselaar developed a virtue-ethical approach to legal decision-making in which a ‘six pack’ of judicial virtues, the concept of civic friendship and that of tragic legal choice play a key role. In 2015 she won the departmental prize for best article of the year with her article Moral Quality in Adjudication: On Judicial Virtues and Civic Friendship. She has published extensively in professional and international top journals. Most recently, she has published on the topic of moral perception in legal practice, moral remainders and legal reasoning, and legal ethics for (corporate) lawyers. 

Van Domselaar is frequently invited as keynote/guest speaker on the topic of lawyers’ ethics, judicial ethics, tragic legal choice, professional courage, moral perception and law. 

Van Domselaar has vast experience as a teacher in legal ethics. She is the coordinator of the bachelor ‘minor’ ‘The Legal Professions’ and teaches courses such as ‘legal ethics and integrity for legal professionals’, ‘legal ethics for lawyers’, ‘legal philosophy’ and ‘legal ethics for corporate lawyers’. 

Since September 2021 Van Domselaar is editor-in-chief of the Netherlands Journal of Legal Philosophy. 

Research interests/Expertise

Virtue ethics and law, moral perception in legal practice, ethics for corporate lawyers, tragedy and moral dilemma’s in law, legal and professional ethics, digital justice, professional courage, legal reasoning, theories of justice, theories of adjudication, law and emotions, law and film, neo-Aristotelian/neo-Wittgensteinian accounts of justice/professional ethics, civic friendship. 

(source: https://www.uva.nl/profiel/d/o/i.vandomselaar/i.vandomselaar.html)

The keynote speaker for the fourth meeting of the Seminar “Judicial Character in Hard Times” will be Prof. Amalia Amaya Navarro, Research Professor at the Institute for Philosophical Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and British Academy Global Professor at the Edinburgh Law School.

The lecture titled Virtue, legal reasoning and judicial ethics takes place on the 27th of May 2021 at 4 p.m. (16.00) CEST.

Amalia Amaya joined the School of Law at Edinburgh University in 2019 with a British Academy Global Professorship Award. Professor Amaya completed a B.A. in Law at the University of Alicante and a B.A. in Linguistics at the University of Barcelone. She obtained an LLM and a PhD from the European University Institute and an LLM and a SJD from Harvard Law School. In 2007 she joined the Institute for Philosophical Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where she has a position as Research Professor. She has also held visiting appointments at the University of Texas at Austin, University College at Oxford University, and Queen Mary University of London.

Professor Amaya works primarily in philosophy of law, with a particular focus on legal reasoning and epistemology, theories of justice, and international normative theory. Her prior work has aimed at analyzing the role of coherence in legal reasoning. The main outcome of this research is the book The Tapestry of Reason (2015). Professor Amaya’s current research project is on law, virtue and character. On this topic, she has co-edited Law, Virtue and Justice (with Ho Hock Lai, 2012), The Faces of Virtue in Law (with Claudio Michelon, 2020) and Virtue, Emotion and Imagination in Legal Reasoning (with Maksymilian del Mar, 2020). She is now working on a book manuscript that seeks to develop a virtue approach to legal reasoning and judicial ethics. She is also interested in exploring the role of exemplarity in contemporary legal and political culture and, especially, its implications for problems concerning the nature of authority at both the domestic and the global level. In addition, she is engaged in research on fraternity as a legal and political ideal, which addresses the conceptual, practical, and institutional dimensions of the idea of fraternity.

Professor Hans Petter Graver – professor of law at the Faculty of Law, University of Oslo. He is president of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. He was awarded an honorary doctorate at the University of Helsinki in 2010, at the University of Heidelberg in 2017 and at the University of Uppsala in 2020. He is an honorary member of the Law Society of Finland. Among his numerous publications is the book Judges Against Justice On Judges When the Rule of Law is Under Attack (Springer, 2015).

Time and date: 22nd April (Thursday) at 16.00 (4 p.m.) CEST.

Title: Heroes of the Law – What makes a legal hero and why are they important

Platform: MS Teams. To receive the link send email to: seminar@virtuejurisprudence.pl

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