All posts by admin

Our 2011 special issue

 

On Friday, 4th March 2011 a conference was held at the National Museum of Iceland entitled “Law and Justice in Community” (you can see the conference programme here). It was devoted to the discussion of themes and issues arising from a homonymous volume published in August 2010 by Oxford University Press (you can see the publisher’s leaflet about the book here) and authored by Professors Timothy Murphy and Garrett Barden of the University of Akureyri. The conference hosted the authors of the book as well as leading Icelandic legal experts and scholars. It is an honour for our journal to be able to publish: papers and a statement resulting from the speeches  held at the conference; a book review by Icelandic ethicist and political philosopher Guðmundur Heiðar Frímansson; and a response to some of these texts penned by Prof. Garrett Barden himself.

 

The editors of this journal believe that the themes and issues discussed at the conference and in the volume by Professors Murphy and Barden will prove of interest to our readers at large, not only for the patent Nordic origin of the conference, but also and above all for the universal appeal of the questions addressed, such as the aims and nature of justice, authority, legitimacy, and the common good. Moreover, the book’s rootedness within classical jurisprudence and the references to Francophone sources as well as to our journal should make this special issue of Nordicum-Mediterraneum appealing to readers steeped in Mediterranean legal and political cultures.

 

Moreover, the editors of this journal wish to join Professor Róbert R. Spanó, Dean of the Faculty of Law of the University of Iceland, in welcoming the conference and, we shall add, this journal, as instances of fruitful cooperation between the public universities of Iceland.

 

Our 2011 regular issue

As the contents of this issue are concerned, we must highlight first of all two language-specific contributions, authored respectively by Egill Arnarson and Fabio Quartino. The former is an introduction to the thought of Giambattista Vico for the Icelandic readership of our journal. The latter is a complete degree thesis outlining the constitutional history of Iceland for our Italian readers. Together, these two contributions fulfill our journal’s goal of facilitating cultural exchanges between Italy and Iceland. The remaining new articles selected for publication deal with legal (Adriana Di Stefano [delayed for technical reasons], Giovanni Damele), political (Monica Quirico) and ethical topics (Øjvind Larsen, Matthias Kettner), thus furthering our previous publications in these areas of inquiry.

It should be noted that the contributions by Larsen and Kettner stem from papers presented last January at the first meeting of the new study group established under the aegis of a longtime partner of our journal, i.e. the Nordic Summer University. Four conference papers (Siipi & Ahteensuu; Rendtorff; Räikkä & Weyermann; Peterková) delivered upon the same occasion are also included in this issue of Nordicum-Mediterraneum. An introduction to the group itself and the materials published in our journal is provided on the front page of this issue by the group’s coordinator, Dr Jacob Dahl Rendtorff, whom we congratulate and to whom we express our gratitude.

As customary for Nordicum-Mediterraneum, the current issue carries a review essay and several reviews of volumes that were submitted by various publishers to our journal. Please make sure that you check regularly the “news” on our homepage in order to be informed about any new books that become available for review.

This issue concludes with a follow-up to the special section on the international economic crisis that was included in last year’s regular issue. Specifically, Nordicum-Mediterraneum interviewed Huginn Freyr Þorsteinsson, Political Advisor to the current Icelandic Minister of Finance, so as to assess the ways in which Iceland has responded to the crash of 2008, to which pundits and analysts have recently begun to refer as the “Icelandic model” of economic recovery.

The Editors’ note on the 2010 regular issue

Several new articles open the 2010 regular issue, dealing with those Nordic and Mediterranean areas of inquiry that have characterised our journal since its inception: philology (D. Ferioli and V. Miglio), history (G. Hamza), geography (M.S. Campanini) and philosophy (G. Sigurðsson). Additionally, this issue comprises a number of contributions dealing with economics and economic affairs (e.g. H.Þ. Hilmarsson), most of which are contained in a special section devoted to freer, personal reflections on the current economic crisis.

Former contributors, members of the editorial board, and scholars registered in our mailing list were invited to express their views and experiences vis-à-vis the current crisis, as it continues to unfold in the Nordic countries and all around the Mediterranean Sea. We wish to thank the experts that took part in this attempt to promote a deeper and more nuanced understanding of a worrying, financial-speculation-born crisis that many commentators have compared to the Great Depression of the 1930s. Eighty years ago, that crisis led to dramatic outcomes, material as well as ideological, including the one discussed by Professor Gábor Hamza in his article on the German Third Reich. The outcomes of the current crisis are yet to be fully witnessed and comprehended.

We also wish to thank the scholars who allowed us to enrich the 2010 issue with critical essays, book reviews and interviews, and we welcome their interest in future forms of collaboration with our journal.

The Editors

2010 – Nordicum-Mediterraneum migration

As announced in the Webmaster’s Note of Volume 4, issue n.1, Nordicum-Mediterraneum was finally migrated to a new platform which will provide better performance for the future. While some tasks are still in progress, we are confident that this new configuration will be favourably received by both our readers and authors. Due to database incompatibility, old issues are on the old platform and can be found here.