John Locke's untitled manuscript "Questions Concerning the Law of Nature" (1664) was his only work focused on the subject of natural law, a circumstance that is especially surprising since his published writings touch on the subject frequently, if inconclusively. Containing a substantial apparatus criticus, this new edition of Locke's manuscript is faithful to Locke's original intentions.

For centuries, since the Roman Empire’s adoption of Christianity, the continent of Europe has been perceived as something of a Christian fortress. Today, the increase in the number of Muslims living in Europe and the prominence of Islamic belief pose questions not only for Europe’s religious traditions but also for its constitutional make up. This book examines these challenges within the legal and political framework of Europe. The volume’s contributors range from academics at leading universities to former judges and politicians. Its twenty chapters focus on constitutional challenges, human rights with a focus on religious freedom, and securitisation and Islamophobia, while adopting supranational and comparative approaches. This book will appeal not merely to law students in the United Kingdom and the European Union, but to anyone involved in diplomacy and international relations, including political scientists, lobbyists, and members of NGOs. It explores these contested relationships to open up new spaces in how we think about religious freedom and co-existence in Europe and the crucial role that Islam has had, and continues to have, in its development.

Over two billion people still live under authoritarian rule. Moreover, authoritarian regimes around the world command enormous financial and economic resources, rivaling those controlled by advanced democracies. Yet authoritarian regimes as a whole are facing their greatest challenges in the recent two decades due to rebellions and economic stress. Extended periods of hardship have the potential of introducing instability to regimes because members of the existing ruling coalition suffer welfare losses that force them to consider alternatives, while previously quiescent masses may consider collective uprisings a worthwhile gamble in the face of declining standards of living. Economic Shocks and Authoritarian Stability homes in on the economic challenges facing authoritarian regimes through a set of comparative case studies that include Iran, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Malaysia, Indonesia, Russia, the Eastern bloc countries, China, and Taiwan-authored by the top experts in these countries. Through these comparative case studies, this volume provides readers with the analytical tools for assessing whether the current round of economic shocks will lead to political instability or even regime change among the world's autocracies. This volume identifies the duration of economic shocks, the regime's control over the financial system, and the strength of the ruling party as key variables to explain whether authoritarian regimes would maintain the status quo, adjust their support coalitions, or fall from power after economic shocks.

Rooted in Western classical and medieval philosophies, the natural law movement of the last few decades seeks to rediscover fundamental moral truths. In this book, prominent thinkers demonstrate how natural law can be used to resolve a wide range of complex social, political, and constitutional issues by addressing controversial subjects that include the family, taxation, war, racial discrimination, medical technology, and sexuality. This volume will be of value to those working in philosophy, political science, and legal theory, as well as to policy analysts, legislators, and judges.

With Narrative and the Natural Law Pamela Hall brings Thomistic ethics into conversation with ongoing debates in contemporary moral philosophy, especially virtue theory and moral psychology, and with current trends in narrative theory and the philosophy of history. Pamela M. Hall's study offers a solid, challenging alternative to rigid, legalistic interpretations of the substantial discussion of law in Aquinas's Summa theologiae and defends Aquinas's ethics from charges of excessive legalism. Hall argues that Aquinas's characterization of the content and relationship of natural, human and divine law indicates that his understanding of the quest for the human good is practical, communal, and historical. Hall maintains that natural law, the ongoing inquiry into what is the human good, is narrative both in terms of its internal structure and its being informed by the specific story of Scripture. According to Aquinas the discovery of natural law is enacted historically and progressively within communities and by individuals through a process of practical reasoning. Hall then goes on to show how natural law requires articulation by human law, and how both are connected to divine law (salvation history) as Aquinas understands it. Aquinas represents inquiry into the human good as a kind of historical narrative or story with stages or "chapters"; thus knowledge of natural law requires time and experience, as well as sustained reflection by individuals and by whole communities. Such learning of natural law implies the operation of prudence and the assistance of the moral virtues.

National identity and liberal democracy are recurrent themes in debates about Muslim minorities in the West. Britain is no exception, with politicians responding to claims about Muslims' lack of integration by mandating the promotion of 'fundamental British values' including 'democracy' and 'individual liberty'. This book engages with both these themes, addressing the lack of understanding about the character of British Islam and its relationship to the liberal state. It charts a gradual but decisive shift in British institutions concerned with Islamic education, Islamic law and Muslim representation since Muslims settled in the UK in large numbers in the 1950s. Based on empirical research including interviews undertaken over a ten-year period with Muslims, and analysis of public events organized by Islamic institutions, Stephen Jones challenges claims about the isolation of British Islamic organizations and shows that they have decisively shaped themselves around British public and institutional norms. He argues that this amounts to the building of a distinctive 'British Islam'. Using this narrative, the book makes the case for a variety of liberalism that is open to the expression of religious arguments in public and to associations between religious groups and the state. It also offers a powerful challenge to claims about the insularity of British Islamic institutions by showing how the national orientation of Islam called for by British policymakers is, in fact, already happening.

For centuries, most people believed the criminal justice system worked - that only guilty defendants were convicted. DNA technology shattered that belief. DNA has now freed more than three hundred innocent prisoners in the United States. This book examines the lessons learned from twenty-five years of DNA exonerations and identifies lingering challenges. By studying the dataset of DNA exonerations, we know that precise factors lead to wrongful convictions. These include eyewitness misidentifications, false confessions, dishonest informants, poor defense lawyering, weak forensic evidence, and prosecutorial misconduct. In Part I, scholars discuss the efforts of the Innocence Movement over the past quarter century to expose the phenomenon of wrongful convictions and to implement lasting reforms. In Part II, another set of researchers looks ahead and evaluates what still needs to be done to realize the ideal of a more accurate system.

After overthrowing the Mongol Yuan dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang, the founder of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), proclaimed that he had obtained the Mandate of Heaven (Tianming), enabling establishment of a spiritual orientation and social agenda for China. Zhu, emperor during the Ming’s Hongwu reign period, launched a series of social programs to rebuild the empire and define Chinese cultural identity. To promote its reform programs, the Ming imperial court issued a series of legal documents, culminating in The Great Ming Code (Da Ming lu), which supported China’s legal system until the Ming was overthrown and also served as the basis of the legal code of the following dynasty, the Qing (1644-1911). This companion volume to Jiang Yonglin’s translation of The Great Ming Code (2005) analyzes the thought underlying the imperial legal code. Was the concept of the Mandate of Heaven merely a tool manipulated by the ruling elite to justify state power, or was it essential to their belief system and to the intellectual foundation of legal culture? What role did law play in the imperial effort to carry out the social reform programs? Jiang addresses these questions by examining the transformative role of the Code in educating the people about the Mandate of Heaven. The Code served as a cosmic instrument and moral textbook to ensure “all under Heaven” were aligned with the cosmic order. By promoting, regulating, and prohibiting categories of ritual behavior, the intent of the Code was to provide spiritual guidance to Chinese subjects, as well as to acquire political legitimacy. The Code also obligated officials to obey the supreme authority of the emperor, to observe filial behavior toward parents, to care for the welfare of the masses, and to maintain harmonious relationships with deities. This set of regulations made officials the representatives of the Son of Heaven in mediating between the spiritual and mundane worlds and in governing the human realm. This study challenges the conventional assumption that law in premodern China was used merely as an arm of the state to maintain social control and as a secular tool to exercise naked power. Based on a holistic approach, Jiang argues that the Ming ruling elite envisioned the cosmos as an integrated unit; they saw law, religion, and political power as intertwined, remarkably different from the “modern” compartmentalized worldview. In serving as a cosmic instrument to manifest the Mandate of Heaven, The Great Ming Code represented a powerful religious effort to educate the masses and transform society. The open access publication of this book was made possible by a grant from the James P. Geiss and Margaret Y. Hsu Foundation.

Manual sobre la jurisprudencia, derechos y prerrogativas especiales de las personas de edad avanzada en el ordenamiento juridico de Puerto Rico. Contiene un capitulo sobre andragogia y la legislacion dedicada a la educacion de adultos a partir del reconocimiento constitucional de la misma como derecho fundamental de la persona.

Political communities are defined - and often contested - through stories and storytelling. Scholars have long recognized that two foundational sets of stories - narratives of contact and narratives of arrival - helped to define settler societies. We are only beginning to understand how ongoing issues of migration and settlement are linked to issues of indigenous-settler contact. In Storied Communities, scholars from multiple disciplines disrupt the assumption in many works that indigenous and immigrant identities fall into two separate streams of analysis. The authors do not attempt to build a new master narrative - they instead juxtapose narratives of contact and arrival as they explore key themes: the nature and hazards of telling stories in the political realm; the literary, ceremonial, and identity-forming dimensions of the narrative form; actual narratives of contact and arrival in Canada, Australia, the Americas, New Zealand, and Europe; and the institutional and theoretical implications of foundation narratives and storytelling. In the process, they deepen our understanding of the role of narrative in community and nation building. By bringing to light the links between narratives of contact and narratives arrival, this innovative volume opens up new ways to imagine, sustain, and transform political communities.

This book is intended to provide a basic outline of the numerous steps of our federal lawmaking process from the source of an idea for a legislative proposal through its publication as a statute. It is hoped that this book will enable readers to gain a greater understanding of the federal legislative process and its role as one of the foundations of our representative system. One of the most practical safeguards of the American democratic way of life is this legislative process with its emphasis on the protection of the minority, allowing ample opportunity to all sides to be heard and make their views known. The fact that a proposal cannot become a law without consideration and approval by both Houses of Congress is an outstanding virtue of our bicameral legislative system. The open and full discussion provided under the Constitution often results in the notable improvement of a bill by amendment before it becomes law or in the eventual defeat of an inadvisable proposal. As the majority of laws originate in the House of Representatives, this discussion will focus principally on the procedure in that body.

This book surveys and analyzes Twelver Shiite relations with the Sunni legal establishment, comprising the four recognized Sunni legal schools, which the author defines as "Islamic Legal Orthdoxy.

"Rule of law"-the idea that the law is the nation's sovereign authority-has served as a cornerstone for constitutional theory and the jurisprudence of liberty. When law reigns over governors and the governed alike, a citizen need not fear capricious monarchs, arbitrary judges, or calculating bureaucrats. When a citizen obeys the law, life, liberty, and property are safe; when a citizen disobeys, the law alone will determine the appropriate punishment. While the rule of law's English roots can be found in the Middle Ages, its governing doctrine rose to power during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. John Phillip Reid traces the concept's progress through a series of landmark events in Great Britain and North America: the trial of Charles I, the creation of the Mayflower Compact, the demand for a codification of the laws in John Winthrop's Massachusetts Bay Colony, and an attempt to harness the Puritan Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell to the rule of law by crowning him king. The American Revolution, the culmination of two centuries of political foment, marked the greatest victory for rule of law. Even as Reid tells this triumphal story, he argues that we must not take for granted what the expression "rule of law" meant. Rather, if we are to understand its nuances, we must closely examine the historical context as well as the intentions of those who invoked it as a doctrine. He makes a convincing case; along the way, he employs generous quotations from key documents to fortify his sometimes startling insights. This combination of solid scholarship and intellectual agility is nothing less than what readers have come to expect from this eminent legal historian.

The collection represents a rich array of interdisciplinary expertise,with authors who are law professors, historians, sociologists andcriminologists. Their essays include studies into the lives of judgesand lawyers, rape victims, prostitutes, religious sect leaders, andcommon criminals. The geographic scope touches Canada, the UnitedStates and Australia. The essays explore how one individual, or smallself-identified groups, were able to make a difference in how law wasunderstood, applied, and interpreted. They also probe the degree towhich locale and location influenced legal culture history.

What is the role of law in a society in which order is maintained mostly through social norms, trust, and nonlegal sanctions? Eric Posner argues that social norms are sometimes desirable yet sometimes odious, and that the law is critical to enhancing good social norms and undermining bad ones. But he also argues that the proper regulation of social norms is a delicate and complex task, and that current understanding of social norms is inadequate for guiding judges and lawmakers. What is needed, and what this book offers, is a model of the relationship between law and social norms. The model shows that people's concern with establishing cooperative relationships leads them to engage in certain kinds of imitative behavior. The resulting behavioral patterns are called social norms.

Posner applies the model to several areas of law that involve the regulation of social norms, including laws governing gift-giving and nonprofit organizations; family law; criminal law; laws governing speech, voting, and discrimination; and contract law. Among the engaging questions posed are: Would the legalization of gay marriage harm traditional married couples? Is it beneficial to shame criminals? Why should the law reward those who make charitable contributions? Would people vote more if non-voters were penalized? The author approaches these questions using the tools of game theory, but his arguments are simply stated and make no technical demands on the reader.