An account of a fundamental change in American legal thought, from a conception of law as something found in nature to one in which law is entirely a human creation. Before the late 19th century, natural law played an important role in the American legal system. Lawyers routinely used it in their arguments and judges often relied upon it in their opinions. Today, by contrast, natural law plays virtually no role in the legal system. When natural law was part of a lawyer's toolkit, lawyers thought of judges as finders of the law, but when natural law dropped out of the legal system, lawyers began thinking of judges as makers of the law instead. In The Decline of Natural Law, the eminent legal historian Stuart Banner explores the causes and consequences of this change. To do this, Banner discusses the ways in which lawyers used natural law and why the concept seemed reasonable to them. He further examines several long-term trends in legal thought that weakened the position of natural law, including the use of written constitutions, the gradual separation of the spheres of law and religion, the rapid growth of legal publishing, and the position of natural law in some of the 19th century's most contested legal issues. And finally, he describes both the profession's rejection of natural law in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the ways in which the legal system responded to the absence of natural law. The first book to explain how natural law once worked in the American legal system, The Decline of Natural Law offers a unique look into how and why this major shift in legal thought happened, and focuses, in particular, on the shift from the idea that law is something we find to something we make.

In Constitutional Justice, the concept of the rule of law is explained and defended as an ideal of constitutionalism, and the general principles of public law are set in the broader perspective of legal and political philosophy. Although primarily an essay in constitutional theory, its practical implications are fully explained by reference to case-law examples. Drawing on the experience of a number of common law countries-especially Britain, the United States, and Australia-Allan seeks to identify the common elements of a shared constitutional framework that provides the foundations, in each case, of a liberal democratic legal order. These common foundations include certain constraints on the exercise of state power, challenging the widespread view that the rule of law should be conceived as a purely procedural ideal. The book explains the essential connections between a range of matters critical to the relationship between citizen and state, including freedoms of speech and conscience, civil disobedience, procedural fairness, administrative justice, the right of silence, and equal protection or equality before the law. The limits of parliamentary sovereignty are shown to derive from its status as a common law doctrine, when the common law is interpreted as a deliberative process of moral argument and justification. Legislative supremacy is qualified by a counter-balancing judicial sovereignty, ensuring the protection of fundamental common law rights of procedural fairness and equality.

While the law of evidence has dominated jurisprudential treatment of the subject, evidence is in truth a multi-disciplinary subject. This book is a collection of materials concerned not only with the law of evidence, but also with the logical and rhetorical aspects of proof; the epistemology of evidence as a basis for the proof of disputed facts; and scientific aspects of the subject. The editor raises issues such as the philosophical basis for the use of evidence; whether courtroom proof is essentially mathematical or non-mathematical; and the use of different theories of probability in legal reasoning.

In Defense of Legal Positivism is an uncompromising defence of legal positivism that insists on the separability of law and morality. After distinguishing among three facets of morality, Matthew Kramer explores a variety of ways in which law has been perceived as integrally connected to each of those facets.

This collection of essays by one of America's leading legal theorists is unique in its scope: It shows how traditional problems of philosophy can be understood more clearly when considered in terms of law, economics and political science.

Sarat and Scheingold's book, Cause Lawyering, the first volume of its kind, coined the term for law as practiced by the politically motivated and those devoted to moral activism. The new collection examines cause lawyering in the global context, exploring the ways in which it is influencing and being influenced by the disaggregation of state power associated with democratization, and how democratization empowers lawyers who want to effect change. New configurations of state power create opportunities for altering the political and social status quo. Cause lawyers are developing transnational networks to exploit these global opportunities, and to help strengthen international norms on issues such as human rights. The fifteen essays will focus on different national settings including South Africa, Israel, the U.K. and Latin America.

This book is an original contribution to the field of law and literature. In addition to seeing law as a form of literature, it sees literature as a form of law, and examines the law-making qualities of fiction to explore the fiction-making qualities of law. Its examples range from Greek myth to contemporary writing, film and popular music, and suggest new ways of living with and entering the legal labyrinth. Aristodemou's style is both accessible and entertaining. The book is aimed at undergraduates and postgraduates in law as well as other disciplines concerned with law and literature, jurisprudence, and other options addressing the intersections between law and culture.

In this collection George extends the critiques of liberalism he expounded in `Making Men Moral' and also goes beyond it to show how contemporary natural law theory provides a superior way of thinking about basic problems of justice and political morality. It is written with the same combination of stylistic elegance and analytical rigour that distinguished his critical work. Not content merely to defend natural law from its `cultural despisers', he deftly turns the tables and deploys the idea to mount a stunning attack on regnant liberal beliefs about such issues as abortion, sexuality, and the place of religion in public life.

The authors of this book engage in essay form in a lively debate over the fundamental characteristics of legal and moral rights. They examine whether rights fundamentally protect individuals' interests or whether they instead fundamentally enable individuals to make choices. In the course of this debate the authors address many questions through which they clarify, though not finally resolve, a number of controversial present-day political debates, including those over abortion, euthanasia, and animal rights.

This book is a cross-national study of lawyers who devote themselves to serving political cuases. The essays collected here bring togehter the work of eighteen scholars, each of whom contributes a valuable portrait of lawyers who sacrifice financial advantage to use their professional skills to promote their vision of a more just society.

This new edition of The Social Organization of Law uses the five-part organization of the First Edition--social stratification, social morphology, culture, organization, and other social control--in presenting a brand new set of readings. These readings represent the great variety of work done in the sociology of law, a field dedicated to the study of the influence of social factors on legal behavior pioneered by Donald Black. Some of the readings look at the operation of the justice systems others at various stages of the legal process. Only two had appeared in print when the First Edition of The Sociology of Law was published, and neither was included in it. This Second Edition, published 25 years after the First, thus testifies to the recently created wealth of ideas while introducing a new generation to the concepts that have already proved so fruitful.
Key Features
* Presents all new essays while retaining the organizational structure of the First Edition
* Illustrates new advances in jurisprudential, moral, and practical applications of legal sociology
* Covers the contemporary U.S. as well as other countries and historical periods
* Embraces a wide variety of research methods and strategies

The first comprehensive treatment of Islamic contract law in the English language, Islamic Contract Law serves as both a reference work and an authoritative statement of the law and the Fiqh underlying it. The book's structure draws from the tradition of western contract law books to enable non-expert readers to easily navigate its structure, sources, and application. It covers the complete spectrum of Islamic contract regulation, and includes chapters on the formation of contracts, the sources of Islamic contract law, the role of intention, legal capacity, the importance of the subject matter, as well as the prohibited elements of contracts. Further chapters discuss validity and defects, contractual terms, bilateral agreements, equity-based partnership contracts, ancillary and unilateral contracts, termination and damages, and the role of third parties. Finally, a chapter is devoted to the application of Islamic law in contemporary Muslim-majority legal systems. This is a key work for understanding the contract underpinnings of Islamic finance instruments and is a must-read for scholars, legal professionals, and students with an interest in contracts governed by Islamic Law.

In the past twenty years Joseph Raz has consolidated his reputation as one of the most acute, inventive, and energetic scholars currently at work in analytic moral and political theory. This new collection of essays - never previously published in one volume - will enhance his standing even more, examining aspects of the common (and ancient) theme of the relations between law and morality, and will be welcomed by scholars and students alike.

Customary laws and traditional institutions in Africa constitute comprehensive legal systems that regulate the entire spectrum of activities from birth to death. Once the sole source of law, customary rules now exist in the context of pluralist legal systems with competing bodies of domestic constitutional law, statutory law, common law, and international human rights treaties. The Future of African Customary Law is intended to promote discussion and understanding of customary law and to explore its continued relevance in sub-Saharan Africa. This volume considers the characteristics of customary law and efforts to ascertain and codify customary law, and how this body of law differs in content, form, and status from legislation and common law. It also addresses a number of substantive areas of customary law including the role and power of traditional authorities; customary criminal law; customary land tenure, property rights, and intestate succession; and the relationship between customary law, human rights, and gender equality.

Law Making and The Scottish Parliament: The Early Years offers the first wide-ranging critical analysis of legislative developments in those areas of law and policy devolved to the Scottish Parliament under the devolution settlement. It begins with a brief account of the devolution settlement and summarises the themes emerging from the subsequent chapters. Thereafter, sixteen themed chapters, each dedicated to a discrete area of the law and written by an acknowledged expert in the field, provide critical evaluation of the Scottish Parliament's contribution, highlighting what it has achieved, what it has failed to do and what might be done in the future. In a single volume, Law Making and The Scottish Parliament: The Early Years provides a scholarly evaluation of a number of legislative achievements of Scotland's devolved parliament in its first decade. It will appeal to legal and other scholars and students, lawyers and anyone with an interest in Scottish politics, policy-making and law.

This book is a philosophical inquiry into indigenous African legal ethics, asking what is African about African legal ethics? Taking us beyond a geographical understanding of Africa, the author argues for an African legal ethics that is distinct from non-African African legal ethics which are rooted in Euro-Western constructions. De-silencing African voices on African legal ethics this book decolonizes the prevailing wisdom on legal ethics and broadens our understanding of how law in Africa bears on ethics in Africa or, conversely, on how ethics bears on law in Africa. This book will be of interest to scholars of African philosophy, philosophy of law, and legal ethics.

The 1993 and 1996 Constitutions introduced a new set of norms for the South African legal system: equality, freedom and human dignity have replaced racism, caprice and arbitrariness as guiding principles.;This work analyzes the fundamental values upon which the new democratic legal order in South Africa is based. It examines the challenges posed by these developments to legal practice and scholarship and concludes that lawyers have adopted an approach of "business as usual" to the new order.

Although congressional investigations have provided some of the most dramatic moments in American political history, they have often been dismissed as mere political theater. But these investigations are far more than grandstanding. Investigating the President shows that congressional investigations are a powerful tool for members of Congress to counter presidential aggrandizement. By shining a light on alleged executive wrongdoing, investigations can exert significant pressure on the president and materially affect policy outcomes. Douglas Kriner and Eric Schickler construct the most comprehensive overview of congressional investigative oversight to date, analyzing nearly thirteen thousand days of hearings, spanning more than a century, from 1898 through 2014. The authors examine the forces driving investigative power over time and across chambers, identify how hearings might influence the president's strategic calculations through the erosion of the president's public approval rating, and uncover the pathways through which investigations have shaped public policy. Put simply, by bringing significant political pressure to bear on the president, investigations often afford Congress a blunt, but effective check on presidential power--without the need to worry about veto threats or other hurdles such as Senate filibusters. In an era of intense partisan polarization and institutional dysfunction, Investigating the President delves into the dynamics of congressional investigations and how Congress leverages this tool to counterbalance presidential power.

An all-inclusive, exhaustive evaluation of the foreign policy of the European Union.Ten years ago the 2009 Lisbon Treaty put into place the legal and structural foundations for the European Union to play a role as a global actor. In the decade since, the EU itself has undergone intense political and economic stress, from debt crises to the rise of nationalist parties and the strains of Brexit. What effect have these changes had on the EU's foreign policy and its role in the world? This new edition of The Foreign Policy of the European Union offers an up-to-date and comprehensive examination of that question. The globe-spanning contributions to the book include a look at relations between Brussels and its regional neighbors, including Russia; the tensions that have arisen with the United States during the Trump administration; and the burgeoning relationship with China. How the EU is dealing with issues such as migration, terrorism, trade, and security round out the volume.

Spanning two centuries and five Nordic countries, this book questions the view that political lawyers are required for the development of a liberal political regime. It combines cross-disciplinary theory and careful empirical case studies by country experts whose regional insights are brought to bear on wider global contexts. The theory of the legal complex posits that lawyers will not simply mobilize collectively for material self-interest; instead they will organize and struggle for the limited goal of political liberalism. Constituted by a moderate state, core civil rights, and civil society freedoms, political liberalism is presented as a discrete but professionally valued good to which all lawyers can lend their support. Leading scholars claim that when one finds struggles against political repression, politics of the Legal Complex are frequently part of that struggle. One glaring omission in this research program is the Nordic region. This insightful volume provides a comprehensive account of the history and politics of lawyers of the last 200 years in the Nordic countries: Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland. Topping most global indexes of core civil rights, these states have been found to contain few to no visible legal complexes. Where previous studies have characterized lawyers as stewards and guardians of the law that seek to preserve its semi-autonomous nature, these legal complexes have emerged in a manner that challenges the standard narrative. This book offers rational choice and structuralist explanations for why and when lawyers mobilise collectively for political liberalism. In each country analysis, authors place lawyers in nineteenth century state transformation and emerging constitutionalism, followed by expanding democracy and the welfare state, the challenge of fascism and world war, the tensions of the Cold War, and the latter-day rights revolutions. These analyses are complemented by a comprehensive comparative introduction, and a concluding reflection on how the theory of the legal complex might be recast, making The Limits of the Legal Complex an invaluable resource for scholars and practitioners alike.

This volume provides an introduction to the United Kingdom's constitution that recognises and embraces its historical, social, political, and legal dimensions. It critically examines the radical changes to the UK constitution that have occurred over the last thirty years, paying particular attention to the revival of the constituent territories of the UK - Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and England - and to the increasing role played by the judges in constitutional disputes. The UK constitution is presented as being shaped by a set of constitutional principles, including state sovereignty, separation of powers, democracy, subsidiarity, and the rule of law, principles which set the overall structure of the constitution and inform statutes and the decisions of judges. Adopting a principled approach to the UK constitution allows us to see both the clarity of the constitution's structure and also helps explain its complexities.

Enacted for historical reasons on 26 January 1950, the Constitution of India provided that the Supreme Court of India, situated in New Delhi, was to have one Chief Justice of India, and not more than seven judges. Today, the Court has 33 judges in addition to the Chief Justice of India. But who are these judges, and where did they come from? Its central thesis is that despite all established formal constitutional requirements, there are three informal criteria which are used for appointing judges to the Supreme Court: age, seniority, and diversity. The author examines debates surrounding the Indian judicial system since the institution of the federal court during the British Raj. This leads to a study of the political developments that resulted in the present 'collegium system' of appointing judges to the Supreme Court of India. Based on more than two dozen interviews personally conducted by the author with former judges of the Supreme Court of India, this book uniquely brings to the fore the unwritten criteria that have determined the selection of judges to the highest court of law in this country for over six decades.

This new scholarly edition of Samuel Pufendorf's seminal The Whole Duty of Man According to the Law of Nature is among the first to suggest a purely conventional basis for natural law. Pufendorf wrote this work to make his insights accessible to a wide range of readers, especially university students, who were struggling with issues of church and state. Although indebted to Hobbes and Grotius, the work outlines a new understanding of ethics and politics, one suited to states that were emerging from the aftermath of religious civil war.