The Sociology of Law offers a distinctive view of contemporary law in Western societies and provides a clear analytical framework for the study of the diverse literature relating to its field. This new edition has been enlarged and re-written to take account of recent theoretical literature, changes of emphasis in interpretation and new research on legal practice, dispute processing and law enforcement since the last edition appeared in 1984.

When the law of a foreign country is selected or pleaded by a claimant or defendant, a question arises as to whether the issue pertains to substance, in which case it may be resolved by foreign law, or procedure, in which case it will be governed by the law of forum. This book examines the distinction between substance and procedure questions in private international law, and analyses where and whether each is appropriate. To do so, it examines previous attempts to define the scope of procedure in private international law, considers alternative choice of law methods for referring matters to the law of forum, and examines the influence of the doctrine of characterization on procedure. Substance and Procedure in Private International Law also provides detailed analysis of the decisional law in which the substance-procedure distinction has been employed, creating a clear assessment of its application in various practical situations and providing valuable guidance for practitioners on how the distinction should be applied. The book also considers 'procedural' topics such as service of process and the taking of evidence abroad, in order to show how the application of forum law may further be limited by foreign laws. With a foreword by the Hon Sir Anthony Mason.

This new translation of the Treatise on Law offers fidelity to the Latin in a readable new version that will prove useful to students of the natural law tradition in ethics, political theory, and jurisprudence, as well as to students of Western intellectual history.

A liberal state is a representative democracy constrained by the rule of law. Richard Posner argues for a conception of the liberal state based on pragmatic theories of government. He views the actions of elected officials as guided by interests rather than by reason and the decisions of judges by discretion rather than by rules. He emphasizes the institutional and material, rather than moral and deliberative, factors in democratic decision making.

Posner argues that democracy is best viewed as a competition for power by means of regular elections. Citizens should not be expected to play a significant role in making complex public policy regarding, say, taxes or missile defense. The great advantage of democracy is not that it is the rule of the wise or the good but that it enables stability and orderly succession in government and limits the tendency of rulers to enrich or empower themselves to the disadvantage of the public. Posner's theory steers between political theorists' concept of deliberative democracy on the left and economists' public-choice theory on the right. It makes a significant contribution to the theory of democracy--and to the theory of law as well, by showing that the principles that inform Schumpeterian democratic theory also inform the theory and practice of adjudication. The book argues for law and democracy as twin halves of a pragmatic theory of American government.

Why do some people take a neighbor to court over a barking dog or some other nuisance while others accept the pains and losses associated with defective products or discrimination without seeking legal recourse? Patricia Ewick and Susan S. Silbey collected accounts of the law from more than four hundred people of diverse backgrounds in order to explore the different ways that people use and experience it. Their fascinating and original study identifies three narratives of law common to the stories people tell. One is based on the perception that the law is magisterial and remote. Another views the law as a game with rules that can be manipulated to one's advantage. A third describes the law as an arbitrary power that can be actively resisted. Drawing on these extensive case studies, Ewick and Silbey interweave individual experiences with an analysis that constructs a coherent and compelling theory of legality. A groundbreaking study of law and narrative, The Common Place of Law shows an institution as it is lived: strange and familiar, imperfect and ordinary, and at the center of daily life.

The Great Christian Jurists series comprises a library of national volumes of detailed biographies of leading jurists, judges and practitioners, assessing the impact of their Christian faith on the professional output of the individuals studied. Little has previously been written about the faith of the great judges who framed and developed the English common law over centuries, but this unique volume explores how their beliefs were reflected in their judicial functions. This comparative study, embracing ten centuries of English law, draws some remarkable conclusions as to how Christianity shaped the views of lawyers and judges. Adopting a long historical perspective, this volume also explores the lives of judges whose practice in or conception of law helped to shape the Church, its law or the articulation of its doctrine.

In today's highly globalized and regulated economy, private and public organizations face myriad complex laws and regulations. A process designed to detect and prevent regulatory compliance failures is vital. However, such an effective process cannot succeed without development and maintenance of a strong compliance and legal risk management culture. This wide-ranging handbook pulls together work from experts across universities and industries around the world in a variety of key disciplines such as law, management, and business ethics. It provides an all-inclusive resource, specifying what needs to be known and what needs to be further pursued in these developing areas. With no such single text currently available, the book fills a gap in our current understanding of legal risk management, regulatory compliance, and ethics, offering the potential to advance research efforts and enhance our approaches to effective legal risk management practices. Edited by an expert on legal risk management, this book is an essential reference for students, researchers, and professionals with an interest in business law, risk management, strategic management, and business ethics.

This important collection of essays by a leading legal theorist seeks to re-locate the relationship between the traditional concerns of legal theory and the sociology of law, by establishing a consistent theoretical approach to the analysis of law in contemporary Western societies. This book is based upon previously published essays which have been extensively revised and updated, and offers an important contribution to the study of law and social theory.

Das Werk bietet eine kritische Gesamtschau zum Thema "Digitalisierung und Recht". Grundlegend unterschieden wird dabei zwischen dem Recht der Digitalisierung und der Digitalisierung des Rechts. Während bei dem Recht der Digitalisierung dargestellt wird, wie Rechtsprechung und Gesetzgebung auf Phänomene der Digitalisierung reagieren, umfasst die Darstellung der Digitalisierung des Rechts Veränderungen juristischer Arbeit und rechtlicher Abläufe durch Instrumente der Digitalisierung. Ergänzend werden historische Hintergründe und Vorläufer und sich abzeichnende künftige Entwicklungslinien aufgezeigt. In einen größeren Rahmen eingepasst wird die Thematik durch die Erörterung rechtstheoretischer Problemstellungen, rechtsstaatlicher und verfassungsrechtlicher Fragen sowie gesellschaftspolitischer Aspekte. Zahlreiche praktische Beispiele, Grafiken und Übersichten runden das Werk ab.

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.

Uwe Kischel's comprehensive treatise on comparative law offers a critical introduction to the central tenets of comparative legal scholarship. The first part of the book is dedicated to general aspects of comparative law. The controversial question of methods, in particular, is addressed by explaining and discussing different approaches, and by developing a contextual approach that seeks to engage with real-world issues and takes a practical perspective on contemporary comparative legal scholarship. The second part of the book offers a detailed treatment of the major legal contexts across the globe, including common law, civil law systems (based on Germany and France, and extended to Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, and Latin America, among others), the African context (with an emphasis on customary law), different contexts in Asia, Islamic law and law in Islamic countries (plus a brief treatment of Jewish law and canon law), and transnational contexts (public international law, European Union law, and lex mercatoria). The book offers a coherent treatment of global legal systems that aims not only to describe their varying norms and legal institutions but to propose a better way of seeking to understand how the overall context of legal systems influences legal thinking and legal practice.

Contemporary liberal thinkers commonly suppose that there is something in principle unjust about the legal prohibition of putatively victimless immoralities. Against the prevailing liberal view, Robert P. George defends the proposition that `moral laws' can play a legitimate, if subsidiary, role in preserving the `moral ecology' of the cultural environment in which people make the morally significant choices by which they form their characters and influence, for good or ill, the moral lives of others. George shows that a defence of morals legislation is fully compatible with a `pluralistic perfectionist' political theory of civil liberties and public morality.