This book analyses and compares how the USA's liberal allies responded to the use of torture against their citizens after 9/11. Did they resist, tolerate or support the Bush Administration's policies concerning the mistreatment of detainees when their own citizens were implicated and what were the reasons for their actions? Australia, the UK and Canada are liberal democracies sharing similar political cultures, values and alliances with America; yet they behaved differently when their citizens, caught up in the War on Terror, were tortured. How states responded to citizens' human rights claims and predicaments was shaped, in part, by demands for accountability placed on the executive government by domestic actors. This book argues that civil society actors, in particular, were influenced by nuanced differences in their national political and legal contexts that enabled or constrained human rights activism. It maps the conditions under which individuals and groups were more or less likely to become engaged when fellow citizens were tortured, focusing on national rights culture, the domestic legal and political human rights framework, and political opportunities.

Precedent is an important tool of judicial decision making and reasoning in common law systems such as the United States. Instead of having each court decide cases anew, the rule of precedent or stares decisis dictates that similar cases should be decided similarly. Adherence to precedent promotes several values, including stability, reliability, and uniformity, and it also serves to constrain judicial discretion. Yet while adherence to precedent is important, there are some cases where the United States Supreme Court does not follow it when it comes to constitutional reasoning. Over time the US Supreme Court under its different Chief Justices has approached rejection of its own precedent in different ways and at varying rates of reversal. This book examines the role of constitutional precedent in US Supreme Court reasoning. The author surveys the entire history of the US Supreme Court up until 2020, keying in on decisions regarding when it chose to overturn its own constitutional precedent and why. He explores how the US Supreme Court under its different Chief Justices has approached constitutional precedents and justified its reversal and quantifies which Courts have reversed the most constitutional precedents and why. Constitutional Precedent in US Supreme Court Reasoning is essential reading for law professors and students interested in precedent and its role in legal reasoning. Law libraries which will find this book of importance to their collections on legal reasoning and analysis.

This book covers several areas of economic theory and political philosophy from the perspective of Austrian Economics and libertarianism. As such, it deals with Epistemology and Methodology, Microeconomics, Macroeconomics, Labor Economics, International Economics, Political Philosophy, Law and Public Policy, all from the Austro-libertarian perspective. Hence, this book offers an integrated view of libertarianism and Austrian economics in the light of recent debates in the areas of economic science and political philosophy. Moreover, it builds from the foundations of the Austrian approach (epistemology and methodology), while the latter material deals with its application to the individual from the microeconomic perspective, which in turn allows an exploration of subjects in macroeconomics. Additionally, this work applies Austro-libertarianism to law, politics, and public policy. Thus, it offers a unified view of the entire approach, in a logical progression, allowing the readers to judge this perspective in full. Futerman and Block say that their book is not a manual, which I suppose it is not. But it is a collection of highly pertinent essays, from which you can understand what is mistaken in the orthodoxy of economics, law, and politics. The central term of art in Austrian economics is that phrase "human action." It is the exercise of human will, not the blind bumping of one molecule against another or one organism against another, as in the physical sciences... Futerman and Block distinguish Austrian economics as a scientific enterprise based on liberty of the will from "libertarianism" as an advocacy based on policies implied by such liberty. "Although Austrian economics is positive and libertarianism is normative," they write, "this book shows how both are related; how each can support the other." Indeed they do. Deirdre N. McCloskey, PhD UIC Distinguished Professor of Economics and of History Emerita, Professor of English Emerita, Professor of Communication Emerita, University of Illinois at Chicago

"No state . . . shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." So says the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution, a document held dear by Carl Cohen, a professor of philosophy and longtime champion of civil liberties who has devoted most of his adult life to the University of Michigan. So when Cohen discovered, after encountering some resistance, how his school, in its admirable wish to increase minority enrollment, was actually practicing a form of racial discrimination--calling it "affirmative action"--he found himself at odds with his longtime allies and colleagues in an effort to defend the equal treatment of the races at his university. In "A Conflict of Principles" Cohen tells the story of what happened at Michigan, how racial preferences were devised and implemented there, and what was at stake in the heated and divisive controversy that ensued. He gives voice to the judicious and seldom heard liberal argument against affirmative action in college admission policies.

In the early 1970s, as a member of the Board of Directors of the American Civil Liberties Union, Cohen vigorously supported programs devised to encourage the recruitment of minorities in colleges, and in private employment. But some of these efforts gave deliberate preference to blacks and Hispanics seeking university admission, and this Cohen recognized as a form of racism, however well-meaning. In his book he recounts the fortunes of contested affirmative action programs as they made their way through the legal system to the Supreme Court, beginning with "DeFunis v. Odegaard" (1974) at the University of Washington Law School, then "Bakke v. Regents of the University of California" (1978) at the Medical School on the UC Davis campus, and culminating at the University of Michigan in the landmark cases of "Grutter v. Bollinger" and "Gratz v. Bollinger" (2003). He recounts his role in the initiation of the Michigan cases, explaining the many arguments against racial preferences in college admissions. He presents a principled case for the resultant amendment to the Michigan constitution, of which he was a prominent advocate, which prohibited preference by race in public employment and public contracting, as well as in public education.

An eminently readable personal, consistently fair-minded account of the principles and politics that come into play in the struggles over affirmative action, "A Conflict of Principles" is a deeply thoughtful and thought-provoking contribution to our national conversation about race.

This book considers the phenomenon of soft law employed by domestic public authorities. Lawyers have long understood that public authorities are able to issue certain communications in a way that causes them to be treated like law, even though these are neither legislation nor subordinate legislation. Importantly for soft law as a regulatory tool, people tend to treat soft law as binding even though public authorities know that it is not. It follows that soft law's 'binding' effects do not apply equally between the public authority and those to whom it is directed. Consequently, soft law is both highly effective as a means of regulation, and inherently risky for those who are regulated by it. Rather than considering soft law as a form of regulation, this book examines the possible remedies when a public authority breaches its own soft law upon which people have relied, thereby suffering loss. It considers judicial review remedies, modes of compensation which are not based upon a finding of invalidity, namely tort and equity, and 'soft' challenges outside the scope of the courts, such as through the Ombudsman or by seeking an ex gratia payment.

Globalisation, Law and the State begins - as is customary in globalisation literature - with an acknowledgement of the definitional difficulties associated with globalisation. Rather than labour the point, the book identifies some economic, political and cultural dimensions to the phenomenon and uses these to analyse existing and emerging challenges to State-centric and territorial models of law and governance. It surveys three areas that are typically associated with globalisation - financial markets, the internet, and public contracts - as well as trade more generally, the environment, human rights, and national governance. On this basis it considers how global legal norms are formed, how they enmesh with the norms of other legal orders, and how they create pressure for legal harmonisation. This, in turn, leads to an analysis of the corresponding challenges that globalisation presents to traditional notions of sovereignty and the models of public law that have grown from them. While some of the themes addressed here will be familiar to students of the European process (there are prominent references to the European experience throughout the book), Globalisation, Law and the State provides a clear insight into how the sovereign space of States and their legal orders are diminishing and being replaced by an altogether more fluid system of intersecting orders and norms. This is followed by an analysis of the theory and practice of the globalisation of law, and a suggestion that the workings of law in the global era can best be conceived of in terms of networks that link together a range of actors that exist above, below and within the State, as well as on either side of the public-private divide. This book is an immensely valuable, innovative and concise study of globalisation and its effect on law and the state.