Igor Shoikhedbrod (St. Francis Xavier University): The Legal Thought of E.B. Pashukanis

DISCUSSANT: Mariana Dias Paes, Assistant Professor of History, Law and Society (AUP)

ABSTRACT:
The year 2024 marked the centenary anniversary for the publication of E.B. Pashukanis' General Theory of Law and Marxism, which has long been considered *the* text on Marxist jurisprudence. Pashukanis' book provoked the interest of Roscoe Pound, Lon Fuller, Friedrich Hayek, Karl Korsch, and more recently, G.A. Cohen, Arthur Ripstein, Jeremy Waldron, and Katharina Pistor, not to mention Richard Nixon! The talk will critically re-examine E.B. Pashukanis' understanding of the liberal legal form in light of new archival findings and the ongoing crisis of liberal jurisprudence.

BIO:
Igor Shoikhedbrod is an Assistant Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at St. Francis Xavier University. He obtained his PhD at the University of Toronto in 2018, his M.A in Political Science from York University in 2011. His doctoral dissertation was awarded the Stephen E. Bronner Dissertation award in 2019 "for an outstanding Political Science dissertation finished within the previous year of the American Political Science Association Meeting which exemplifies the commitment to use scholarship in the struggle for a better world." In 2021, Igor won the Domenico Losurdo International Prize for his essay, "From Hegel to Nietzsche: Domenico Losurdo's Complex Relationship with Liberalism."

Igor is currently working on three different book projects. The first book project is an edited collection of essays on Kojève and Law, which is forthcoming in Routledge's "Nomikoi" series. The second book project is a jointly edited and translated anthology, The Revolution of Law: Developments in Soviet Legal Theory, 1917-1931, forthcoming with Brill. The final book project is an edited volume (jointly edited with Terrell Carver), Marx, Engels, and Marxisms: A 21st Century Companion, currently under contract with Oxford University Press. 

Professor Dias Paes' research focuses on race, citizenship, colonialism, and the law in former Portuguese colonies in Africa and the Americas (mostly what are now Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, and Guinea Bissau) between 1750 and 1930. Her work demonstrates that colonial courts were a key arena in which Africans contested colonialism and asserted their rights to freedom, landed property, and improved working conditions. These judicial disputes have wide-ranging implications for how we think about histories of emancipation, citizenship, decolonization, and race. Her studies are unearthing information regarding the participation of Africans in multiple legal systems, not only in Portuguese courts, but also in African courts that functioned outside Portuguese control. She is also interested in public outreach and digital humanities projects. Having worked in various archives, she came to the conclusion that extremely important historical records are currently almost inaccessible due to storage conditions, and there is insufficient information regarding what these records include. To address some of these issues, she led the digitization of circa 10,000 colonial court records housed in the Cape Verde National Archives; and the organization and preservation of the endangered colonial judicial collections of the National Archives of Guinea Bissau and the Portuguese National Archives.