[OPE-L:5109] Howard Engelskirchen

["Gerald_A_Levy" <Gerald_A_Levy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Howard Engelskirchen has joined OPE-L.

Howard is a lawyer (!) and a pioneer of sorts in the
field of law and value.  His addition will broaden some
of our discussions (e.g. the one from Feb/March, 2000
on "the employment contract and capitalism"  -- which
we can revisit if he wants to).

Here is his introduction:
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From: "lynne engelskirchen" <lhengels@xxxxxxx>
> Jerry --
>
> I've been a law professor for 20 years at the University of Santa Clara
and
> Western State University, both in California, primarily in the fields of
> contracts and constitutional law, and I am now working independently in
> Ithaca, New York.  My law degree is from UC Berkeley and I have a masters
> in literature from Columbia University and a masters in political economy
> from UC Riverside.  I also studied economics in France for a year with
> Charles Bettelheim.  My work takes seriously the Preface of 1857: I'm
> interested in how legal rules are generated by value and capital.  So far
> value theory has been my primary focus.  I've published "Locating the
> Analysis of Legal Form" on Pashukanis in Rethinking Marxism and
> "Consideration as a Commitment to Relinquish Autonomy" in the Seton Hall
> Law Review.  The latter piece provides the technical foundation for a
> paper, "Value and Contract Formation," presented to the recent IWGVT
> mini-conference in NYC.  I've also presented papers on negligence and
> value, on the problem of legality (how can law be determined by economic
> relations if economic relations presuppose ownership?), and on the
> materialist semiotics of F. Rossi-Landi.  In general, in working out the
> relation of base and legal superstructure I've found the work on semiotics
> of Volosinov indispensable.  I'm deeply interested in questions of
> philosophy, methodology and social theory -- what makes law a social
> science, for one -- and approach Marx as a scientific realist.  Among my
> abiding obsessions is the transformation problem.  I've presented a paper
> on worker ownership to the Industrial Cooperative Association and
> co-authored a paper for the Midwest Center for Labor Research called
> "Towards A New Vision of Community Economic Development."  I've been a
> special editor of the National Lawyers Guild's Guild Practitioner and have
> been a member of the the NLG's Labor and Media Committees.
>
> Howard
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Howard: welcome aboard!

In solidarity, Jerry