In recent years, much political and legal debate has centered on the class action lawsuit. Many lawyers and judges have noted the intense pressure to settle caused by the very filing of a suit. Some contend that the procedure amounts to a form of judicial blackmail. Others counter that it is an effective means of policing corporate behavior and assuring injured victims' fair compensation.
This book represents the first scholarly effort to view the modern class action comprehensively through the lenses of American political and constitutional theory. Redish argues that the modern class action undermines foundational constitutional principles, including procedural due process and separation of powers, and has been improperly transformed from its origins as a complex procedural device into a means for altering controlling substantive law in highly undemocratic ways. Redish proposes an alternative vision of the class action lawsuit, one that is designed to enable the device to serve its valuable procedural purposes without simultaneously contravening core precepts of American constitutional democracy.

This book explores the journey of young people through a Secure Training Centre and, more generally, the criminal justice system in the UK. It examines the extent to which young people have been failed by the system at every stage of their lives, with incarceration used as a means of removing 'the problem' from society. To explore this process, the authors utilise an integrated theoretical framework to develop a new rehabilitative approach focused on developing positive outcomes for young people. The book deploys a social impact measurement methodology to evaluate the experience and outcomes of youth justice interventions at a Secure Training Centre. Such an approach provides a fresh perspective on the youth justice debate which has traditionally utilised outcome data to measure immediate impact relating to recidivism and is therefore not focused on the young person holistically. Using a social impact framework to evaluate youth justice, underpinned by an integrated theoretical framework, allows for assessment to be made which place the young person at the centre of evaluation.

The Devil's Advocate, a best-selling advocacy manual in both the UK and the Commonwealth, brings a fresh approach to the Do's and Don'ts of good advocacy. Written with humour and style, the title explains clear techniques, taking the reader through the practical application of advocacy step-by-step. The Devil's Advocate has quickly become the leading handbook and practical guide to advocacy in any adversarial courtroom, in any country, to be read and carried about by any advocate. Iain Morley QC is twenty years call in well-known London criminal chambers, prosecuting and defending in the Crown Courts, including many high-profile serious crime cases. He has taught advocacy skills pro bono to the Inner Temple juniors, written much of the teaching materials, and taught the teachers - including Silks and Judges. * Presents the leading book on advocacy, bridging the gap between reading about advocacy and how you actually do it* Written in a no-nonsense and engaging style to bring a fresh approach to studying advocacy * Explains the art of persuasiveness, how to make convincing speeches, and effective cross examination * Describes well-established techniques and exercises used in court for constantly improving questioning and witness control * Offers punchy advice and insightful comments on all of the necessary skills and processes involved in advocating * Uses examples throughout to illustrate key points and aids knowledge retention * Includes a new chapter on the International Criminal Tribunals which require an additional set of advocacy skills due to the dynamics thrown up, such as the need for simultaneous translations

The Royal Financial Administration and the Prosecution of Crime in France, 1670-1789 explores the French monarchy's role in financing criminal prosecutions in the royal courts of the realm-the payment of criminal frais de justice in the vocabulary of the ancien regime-between 1670 and 1789 (that is, from the codification of criminal judicial procedure in the early period of Louis XIV's personal rule to the outbreak of the French Revolution). The subject brings together three areas of scholarly inquiry-criminal justice, royal administration, and the management of the crown's finances. A central goal of the study is to provide factual information and interpretive insights on each of these topics and to explain the relationship of each to the others over a long time period. The book contributes to existing scholarship in four ways. First, although each of the major dimensions of the inquiry-the operation of the criminal justice system, the conduct of the royal administration, and the management of the monarchy's finances-has a large and increasingly sophisticated historical literature, this is the first study to combine them in a systematic way. Second, the long time period covered in the book not only enables the historian to distinguish gradual from rapid change, but it also allows the reader to view how the system functioned in different historical contexts. Third, the study is based on archival sources throughout France. This comprehensive approach permits the identification of elements of a common experience without sacrificing attention to important aspects of regional diversity. Finally, with respect to the sources themselves, the range is broad, encompassing regulatory acts and decisions of the king's councils; administrative correspondence at the central, regional, and in some cases local levels; financial accounts and related papers; and court records from the major appellate courts and from several lower courts as well. An appendix of 33 tables lists figures of annual expenditure and other pertinent financial operations for each of the major financial districts of the kingdom.

aThe notion . . . that miscarriages of justice are not simply idiosyncratic instances, but are rather part of the ordinary machinery of law, is a crucial insight, one that deserves this kind of book-length treatment.a
--James MaMartell, author of "Subverting the Leviathan: Reading Thomas Hobbes as a Radical Democrat"

Since 1989, there have been over 200 post-conviction DNA exonerations in the United States. On the surface, the release of innocent people from prison could be seen as a victory for the criminal justice system: the wrong person went to jail, but the mistake was fixed and the accused set free. A closer look at miscarriages of justice, however, reveals that such errors are not aberrations but deeply revealing, common features of our legal system.

The ten original essays in When Law Fails view wrongful convictions not as random mistakes but as organic outcomes of a misshaped larger system that is rife with faulty eyewitness identifications, false confessions, biased juries, and racial discrimination. Distinguished legal thinkers Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., and Austin Sarat have assembled a stellar group of contributors who try to make sense of justice gone wrong and to answer urgent questions. Are miscarriages of justice systemic or symptomatic, or are they mostly idiosyncratic? What are the broader implications of justice gone awry for the ways we think about law? Are there ways of reconceptualizing legal missteps that are particularly useful or illuminating? These instructive essays both address the questions and point the way toward further discussion.

When Law Fails reveals the dramatic consequences as well as the daily realities of breakdowns in the lawasability to deliver justice swiftly and fairly, and calls on us to look beyond headline-grabbing exonerations to see how failure is embedded in the legal system itself. Once we are able to recognize miscarriages of justice we will be able to begin to fix our broken legal system.

Contributors: Douglas A. Berman, Markus D. Dubber, Mary L. Dudziak, Patricia Ewick, Daniel Givelber, Linda Ross Meyer, Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., Austin Sarat, Jonathan Simon, and Robert Weisberg.

In 2010, the Arbitration (Scotland) Act 2010 came into force with the aim of modernising Scots law on arbitration. Building on the previous edition, this book reviews the last 10 years: the development of the law in Scotland, the use of the Act and the Rules of Court, and how it all works in practice. The authors draw on their experience in practice to provide useful tips and references, covering all of the topics that practitioners require on a daily basis.

This collection explores the stakes, risks and opportunities invoked in opening and exploring law's archive and re-examining law's evidence. It draws together work exploring how evidence is used or mis-used during the legal process, and re-used after the law's work has concluded by engaging with ethical, aesthetic or emotional dimensions of using law's evidence. Within socio-legal discourse, the move towards 'open justice' has emerged concurrently with a much broader cultural sensibility, one that has been called the "archival turn" (Ann Laura Stoler), the "archival impulse" (Hal Foster) and "archive fever" (Jacques Derrida). Whilst these terms do not describe exactly the same phenomena, they collectively acknowledge the process by which we create a fetish of the stored document. The archive facilitates our material confrontation with history, historicity, order, linearity, time and bureaucracy. For lawyers, artists, journalists, publishers, curators and scholars, the document in the archive has the attributes of authenticity, contemporaneity, and the unique tangibility of a real moment captured in material form. These attributes form the basis for the strict interpretive limits imposed by the rules of evidence and procedure. These rules do not contain the other attributes of the archival document, those that make it irresistible as the basis for creative work: beauty, violence, surprise, shame, volume, and the promise that it contains a tantalising secret. This book was previously published as a special issue of Australian Feminist Law Journal.

This volume takes stock of the rapid changes to the law of unjust enrichment over the last decade. It offers a set of original contributions from leading private law theorists examining the philosophical foundations of the law. The essays consider the central questions raised by demarcating unjust enrichment as a separate area of private law - including how its normative foundations relate to those of other areas of private law, how the concept of enrichment relates to property theory, how the remedy of restitution relates to principles of corrective justice and what role mental elements should play in shaping the law.

This fresh edition of Satish Sekar's classic work brings events up to date as at 2017 and includes matters that the author was prevented from publishing sooner. Among other things it deals with the collapse of the 2011 trial of police officers and others concerning the original miscarriage of justice in this case and in a new Epilogue calls for a Truth and Justice Commission. The author shows how this extreme miscarriage of justice destroyed families, divided communities and undermined confidence in the criminal justice system. The book takes the reader from the sadistic killing of Lynette White in Cardiff in 1988, via the subsequent investigation and trial to the aftermath of the folding of the 2011 trial over 'lost' documents that later materialised. But above all it deals with the hard scientific facts of the first vindication case of the DNA-age. Based on a 30-year quest for justice. Scrutinises the case from day one. Rejects moves to 'shelve' this troubling chain of events. Calls for a Truth and Justice Commission.

Winner of the 2017 British Society of Criminology Book Prize The penal voluntary sector and the relationships between punishment and charity are more topical than ever before in countries around the world. In recent years in England and Wales, the sector has featured significantly in both policy rhetoric and academic commentary. Penal voluntary organisations are increasingly delivering prison and probation services under contract, and this role is set to expand. However, the diverse voluntary organisations which comprise the sector, their varied relationships with statutory agencies and the effects of such work remain very poorly understood. This book provides a wide-ranging and rigorous examination of this policy-relevant but complex and little studied area. It explores what voluntary organisations are doing with prisoners and probationers, how they manage to undertake their work, and the effects of charitable work with prisoners and probationers. The author uses original empirical research and an innovative application of actor-network theory to enable a step change in our understanding of this increasingly significant sector, and develops the policy-centric accounts produced in the last decade to illustrate how voluntary organisations can mediate the experiences of imprisonment and probation at the micro and macro levels. Demonstrating how the legacy of philanthropic work and neoliberal policy reforms over the past thirty years have created a complex three-tier penal voluntary sector of diverse organisations, this cutting-edge interdisciplinary text will be of interest to criminologists, sociologists of work and industry, and those engaged in the voluntary sector.

This book systematically and concisely expounds the construction process of China's legal system since China's reform and opening-up. Chapter 1 defines the legal system in China and describes the development of China's legal system from 1949 to 1978. Chapter 2 introduces China's legislative system, including its historical development, division of legislative functions and power, and legislative procedures. Chapter 3 compares the differences between the law systems of other countries and China's law system and how other law systems in the world influences the law system in China. Chapter 4 studies China's constitutional law system, including its historical development, forms of law and enforcement of the constitution. Chapter 5 introduces China's administrative legal system, including main principles, administrative legislation and administrative compensation. Chapters 6, 7, 8, 9 describe China's civil and commercial legal system, China's economic legal system, China's social legal system and China's criminal legal system respectively. Chapter 10 introduces China's legal system in litigation and non-litigation procedure in terms of criminal, civil, administrative and non-litigation procedures. Chapter 11 analyses the legal system of the special administrative regions in China and its relationship with China's legal system. The last chapter, Chapter 12 studies the relationship between the international law and China's domestic law system.

In this book the author gives his views on the workings of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), where he served as a judge for 18 years. The book deals with the author's subsequent successes, defeats and tribulations while attempting to introduce into the case law of the ECHR his previously well thought-out theoretical convictions. These convictions can be found in his essays published in The Owl of Minerva: Essays on Human Rights (2007) and his dissenting opinions which were published in The Owlets of Minerva (2011). Based on his many years of experience in the field, the author examines the dialectic relationship between the rule of law and law and order; between state and individual; judicial power of logic vs executive logic of power. These dynamic contradictions are never resolved. On the contrary, they are the motor of development and inspire judicial reasoning and the balancing of justice vis-a-vis power and arbitrariness. In its almost 60 years of existence, the Court has been at the crossroads of two disparate modes of legal reasoning, the common law and the continental legal formalism. The author argues that the cause of the decline of the Court is its inability to adapt and to adopt reasoning by analogy. This thought-provoking book is of interest to academics in the field of law, human rights and constitutionalism. Click here to read the ECJL interview with Bostjan Zupancic, the longest-serving judge at the European Court of Human Rights from 1998 to 2016.

Bangladesh, one of the most densely populated countries in the world and second in South Asia, is known for its natural disasters, floods and political violence. However, the country plans to become a middle-income country by 2020 due to rapid economic growth led by strong and vibrant garments and pharmaceutical sectors. A developing country, Bangladesh cannot reach its true potential if there is a weak legal system and the executive have no regard for the rule of law. This book discusses and analyses the legal system of Bangladesh. It studies the various weaknesses and whether the judiciary of the country is really independent. International experts, scholars and lawyers with significant experience of working in Bangladesh and at international agencies and universities examine the role of the judiciary in maintaining the rule of law in the country and the critical role it can play in strengthening democracy. The chapters show the various roles played by the judiciary in promoting its independence and thereby strengthening democracy in the country. The first book to analyse the role of the judiciary and the various weaknesses in the legal system of Bangladesh, it is a relevant case study in the context of developing countries. The problems found in the legal system of Bangladesh prevail in most of the developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The book will be of interest to academics in the field of development studies, South Asian Studies and Asian Law.

Public recognition of religion has been a part of American political life from the beginning of our country, and that is not going to change. But in recent years, the effort by some to challenge the long held separation of church and state by imposing religion in the public sphere has caused more harm than good. Along the lines of other incredulous "neo-Enlightenment" books, Bleached Faith makes a forceful case that the gravest threat to real faith comes from those who would water down religion in order to win the dubious honor of forcing it into public buildings and classrooms. The freedom of religion we enjoy in the United States, both as a matter of law and practice, is extraordinary by any measure. However, when American courts allow the government to insert religious symbolism in public spaces, real religion is the loser. Goldberg argues that people on both sides of this debate should resist this corruption of religion. The book provides a survey of the legal and political environment in which battles over the public display of the Ten Commandments, the teaching of intelligent design in our schools, and the celebration of religious holidays take place. Goldberg firmly maintains that, "if American religion becomes a watered-down broth that is indistinguishable from consumerism and science, we will have no one to blame but ourselves. My opposition to pushing religion into the courthouse and the biology classroom does not stem from hostility to religion. I am opposed to bleached faith-the empty symbolism that diminishes the power of real belief."

This book includes guiding cases of the Supreme People's Court, cases deliberated at the Adjudication Committee of the Supreme People's Court, and cases discussed at the Joint Meetings of Presiding Judges from various tribunals. This book is divided into three sections, including Cases by Justices, Cases at the Adjudication Committee and Typical Cases, which will introduce readers to Chinese legal process, legal methodology and ideology in an intuitive, clear and accurate manner. This volume presents cases selected by the trial departments of the Supreme People's Court of China from their concluded cases. In order to give full weight to the legal value and social function of cases from the Supreme People's Court, and to achieve the goal of serving trial practices, serving economic and social development, serving legal education and legal scholarship, serving the rule of law in China, the China Applied Jurisprudence Institute, with the approval of the Supreme People's Court, opts to publish Selected Cases from the Supreme People's Court of the People's Republic of China in both Chinese and English, for domestic and overseas distribution.

Virtually every constitutional order in the common law world contains a provision for executive clemency or pardon in criminal cases. This facility for legal mercy is not limited to a single place in modern legal systems, but is instead realized through various practices such as a law enforcement officer's decision to arrest, a prosecutor's decision to prosecute, and a judge's decision to convict and sentence. Doubts about legal mercy in any form as unfair, unguided, or arbitrary are as ubiquitous as the exercise of mercy itself. This book presents a comparative analysis of the clemency and pardon power in the common law world. Andrew Novak compares the modern development, organization, and practice of constitutional and statutory schemes of clemency and pardon in the United Kingdom, United States, and Commonwealth jurisdictions. He asks whether the bureaucratization of the clemency power is in line with global trends, and explores how innovations in legislative involvement, judicial review, and executive consultation have made the mercy and pardon procedure more transparent. The book concludes with a discussion on the future of the clemency and pardon power given the decline of the death penalty in the Commonwealth and the rise of the modern institution of parole. As a work concerned with the practice of mercy in the common law world, this book will be of great interest to researchers and students of international and comparative criminal justice and international human rights law.

Environmental mediation continues to develop and evolve in different jurisdictions across the world in order to prevent potential environmental conflicts or to resolve the conflicts while avoiding the inherent drawbacks of an adjudicated solution. This book takes a comparative approach to explore the legal framework of environmental mediation with a focus on the judicial, administrative and private procedures and the criteria for accrediting mediators in a range of jurisdictions across the world. It also examines practical considerations for environmental mediators while analysing the effectiveness of different mediation processes.

This book provides a systematic and interdisciplinary examination of law and legal institutions in Malaysia. It examines legal issues from historical, social, and political perspectives, and discusses the role of law in relation to Malaysian multiculturalism, religion, politics, and society. It shows how the Malaysian legal system is at the heart of debates about how to deal with the country's problems, which include ethnic and religious divisions, uneven and unsustainable development, and political authoritarianism; and it argues that the Malaysian legal system has much to teach other plural polities, nations within the common law tradition, and federal states.

Accusing someone of committing a crime arrests everyday social relations and unfurls processes that decide on who to admit to criminal justice networks. Accusation demarcates specific subjects as the criminally accused, who then face courtroom trials, and possible punishment. It inaugurates a crime's historical journey into being with sanctioned accusers successfully making criminal allegations against accused persons in the presence of authorized juridical agents. Given this decisive role in the production of criminal identities, it is surprising that criminal accusation has received relatively short shrift in sociological, socio-legal and criminological discourses. In this book, George Pavlich redresses this oversight by framing a socio-legal field directed to political rationales and practices of criminal accusation. The focus of its interrogation is the truth-telling powers of an accusatory lore that creates subjects within the confines of socially authorized spaces. And, in this respect, the book has two overarching aims in mind. First, it names and analyses powers of criminal accusation - its history, rationales, rites and effects - as an enduring gateway to criminal justice. Second, the book evaluates the prospects for limiting and/or changing apparatuses of criminal accusation. By understanding their powers, might it be possible to decrease the number who enter criminal justice's gates? This question opens debate on the subject of the book's final section: the prospects for more inclusive accusative grammars that do not, as a reflex, turn to exclusionary visions of crime and vengeful, segregated, corrective or risk-orientated punishment. Highlighting how expansive criminal justice systems are populated by accusatorial powers, and how it might be possible to recalibrate the lore that feeds them, this ground-breaking analysis will be of considerable interest to scholars working in socio-legal research studies, critical criminology, social theory, postcolonial studies and critical legal theory.

The lawyer-dominated adversary system of criminal trial, which now typifies practice in Anglo-American legal systems, developed in England in the eighteenth century. Using hitherto unexplored sources from London's Old Bailey Court, Professor Langbein shows how and why lawyers were able to capture the trial, and he supplies a path-breaking account of the formation of the law of criminal evidence.

This groundbreaking book analyzes the decisions made by the United States circuit courts over the past half century. These courts have a profound impact on the law - they issue many more decisions in many more areas of law than the Supreme Court. Cross demonstrates that while the courts' judges are influenced by ideology and by the appointing president, legal requirements exercise a much stronger influence on their decisions. He also shows that these courts are independent of the other branches of government and free from undue influence of various parties. The book further introduces new research on the precedent-setting power of decisions.

In the first Supreme Court history told primarily through eyewitness accounts from Court insiders, Clare Cushman provides readers with a behind-the-scenes look at the people, practices, and traditions that have shaped an American institution for more than 200 years. Each chapter covers one general thematic topic and weaves a narrative from memoirs, letters, diaries, and newspaper accounts by the Justices, their spouses and children, court reporters, clerks, oral advocates, court staff, journalists, and other eyewitnesses. These accounts allow readers to feel as if they are squeezed into the packed courtroom in 1844 as silver-tongued orator Daniel Webster addresses the court; eavesdropping on an exasperated Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in 1930 as he snaps at a clerk's critique of his draft opinion; or sharing a taxi with future Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., in 2005 as he rushes home from the airport in anticipation of a phone call from President Bush offering him the nomination to the Supreme Court. This entertaining and enlightening tour of the Supreme Court's colorful personalities and inner workings will be of interest to all readers of American political and legal history.

Focusing on the relationship between the micro level of perpetrator motivation and the macro level normative discourse, this book offers an in-depth explanation for the perpetration of genocide. It is the first comparative criminological treatment of genocide drawn from original field research, based substantially on the author's interviews with perpetrators and victims of genocide and mass atrocities, combined with wide-ranging secondary and archival sources. Topics covered include: perpetration in organizations, genocidal propaganda, the characteristics of perpetrators, decision-making in genocide, genocidal mobilization, coping with killing, perpetrator memory and trauma, moral rationalization, and transitional justice. An interdisciplinary and comparative analysis, this book utilizes scientific methods with the objective of gaining some degree of insight into the causes of genocide and genocide perpetration. It is argued that genocide is more than a mere intellectual abstraction - it is a crime with real consequences and real victims. Abstraction and objectivity may be intellectual ideals but they are not ideally humane; genocide is ultimately about the destruction of humanity. Thus, this book avoids presenting an overly abstract image of genocide, but rather grounds its analysis in interviews with victims and perpetrators of genocide in Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Bosnia, Cambodia, Bangladesh, and Iraq. This book will be highly useful to students and scholars with an interest in genocide and the causes of mass violence. It will also be of interest to policy-makers engaged with the issues of genocide and conflict prevention.

This ground-breaking collection dares to take the next step in the advancement of an autonomous, inter-disciplinary restorative justice field of study. It brings together criminology, social psychology, legal theory, neuroscience, affect-script psychology, sociology, forensic mental health, political sciences, psychology and positive psychology to articulate for the first time a psychological concept of restorative justice. To this end, the book studies the power structures of the restorative justice movement, the very psychology, motivations and emotions of the practitioners who implement it as well as the drivers of its theoreticians and researchers. Furthermore, it examines the strengths and weakness of our own societies and the communities that are called to participate as parties in restorative justice. Their own biases, hunger for power and control, fears and hopes are investigated. The psychology and dynamics between those it aims to reach as well as those who are funding it, including policy makers and politicians, are looked into. All these questions lead to creating an understanding of the psychology of restorative justice. The book is essential reading for academics, researchers, policymakers, practitioners and campaigners.

In 2007, the Corston Report recommended a far-reaching, radical, 'women-centred' approach to women's imprisonment in England and Wales. It suggested a 'fundamental re-thinking' about how services to support women in conflict with the law are delivered in custody and in the community, recommending the development and implementation of a decarceration strategy. This argued for appropriate treatment programmes in the community, reserving prison for only those women who commit serious and violent offences. Ten years on, what progress has been made? What is the relationship between Corston's vision and a more radical abolitionist agenda? Drawing on a range of international scholarship, this book contributes to the critical discourse on the penal system, human rights, and social injustice, revealing the consequences of imprisonment on the lives of women and their families. A decade on from Corston's publication, it critically reviews her report, revealing the slow progress in meeting the reforms it proposed. Identifying the significant barriers to change, it questions the failure to reverse the unrelenting growth of the women's prison population or to transform state responses to women's offending. Reflecting the global expansion of women's imprisonment, particularly marked in advanced democratic societies, the chapters include comparative contributions from jurisdictions where Corston's recommendations have relevance. It concludes with a critical appraisal of reformism and the case for penal abolition. Essential for applied and theory courses on prisons, punishment, and penology; social justice and the criminology of human rights; gender and crime; and feminist criminology.