This book reinvigorates the field of socio-legal inquiry examining the relationship between law and demography. Originally conceived as 'population law' in the 1960s following a growth in population and a use of law to temper population growth, this book takes a new approach by examining how population change can affect the legal system, rather than the converse. It analyses the impact of demographic change on the judicial system, with a geographic focus on Australian courts but with global insights and it raises questions about institutional structures. Through four case studies, it examines how demographic change impacts on the judicial system and how should the judicial system adapt to embody a greater preparedness for the demographic changes that lie ahead? It makes recommendations for reform and speaks to applied demographers, socio-legal scholars, and those interested in judicial institutions.

Examining the United States Supreme Court's actual use of legislative history in statutory interpretation, distills the theoretical issues presented by the Court's practices, then analyzes those issues in light of the arguments of several leading theorists. Often, after determining that the statutory text is ambiguous or produces absurd results, the Court looks to legislative history for guidance, saying nothing more than, "The legislative history indicates that Congress intended ..." in order to justify its use of legislative history. This simple statement opens a theoretical thicket of issues about whether a corporate body like a legislature is capable of holding intentions, whether such intentions are actually discoverable, what relation legislative history has to legislative intentions, and what deference must be afforded to either legislative history or legislative intentions. This text separates the utility and usability of legislative history from theories based on legislative intention. Rather than basing an argument for using legislative history on legislative intention, the book argues that legislative history conveys a certain degree of expertise and/or provides certain contextual information about the subject matter of the statute. Legislative history may also be authoritative as a matter of judicial precedent; that is, legislative history may be authoritative because judges have said so in published opinions. In reaching this conclusion, this book follows Joseph Raz and argues that the only legislative intentions that may be identified and deemed legally authoritative as a matter of general theory are minimal intentions relating to the enactment of a particular text as a legally authoritative statute within a particular legal system. This approach - justifying the Court's discretionary use of legislative history without reference to legislative intention - accounts for and undermines most of the major objections to using legislative history, such as objections based on the theoretical problems surrounding legislative intentions, objections based on the perceived unconstitutionality of relying on legislative history, and objections based on its frequent illegality.

The Supreme Court's intervention in the 2000 election will shape American law and democracy long after George W. Bush has left the White House. This vitally important book brings together a broad range of preeminent legal scholars who address the larger questions raised by the Supreme Court's actions. Did the Court's decision violate the rule of law? Did it inaugurate an era of super-politicized jurisprudence? How should Bush v. Gore change the terms of debate over the next round of Supreme Court appointments?

The contributors -- Bruce Ackerman, Jack Balkin, Guido Calabresi, Steven Calabresi, Owen Fiss, Charles Fried, Robert Post, Margaret Jane Radin, Jeffrey Rosen, Jed Rubenreid, Cass Sunstein, Laurence Tribe, and Mark Tushnet -- represent a broad political spectrum. Their reactions to the case are varied and surprising, filled with sparkling argument and spirited debate. This is a must-read book for thoughtful Americans everywhere.

In the first work of its kind, Brazier successfully tackles the Herculean task of describing and evaluating contemporary Ministerial life and how it is affected by the law, constitutional convention, and political practice. Ministers of the Crown provides a detailed and concise description of the legal and political position of Ministers, and of their work within the contemporary British governmental system. It covers the daily work of Ministers in their departments and collectively in government; their benefits and pay; as well as how politicians prepare themselves for office and the legal and other qualifications which are required for appointment. Detailed coverage is given to Ministers as legislators, how Ministers are required to exercise their legal powers, and the position of Ministers as plaintiffs and defendants. Finally, the loss of office, and its consequences, is considered. As a detailed assessment of Ministerial life this book is invaluable, but Brazier's capacity to bring the Ministerial world to life using a wealth of contemporary and fascinating detail, transforms a potentially dry subject.

This book focuses on the interaction and mutual influences between the East and the West in terms of their legal systems and practices. In this regard, it highlights Professor Herbert H.P. Ma's achievements and his efforts to bring Eastern and Western legal concepts and systems closer together. The book shows that, while there have been convergences between different legal regimes in many fields of law, diverse legal practices and approaches rooted in differing cultural, social, political and philosophical backgrounds do remain, and that these differences are not necessarily negative elements in the contemporary legal order. By examining different levels of the legal order, including domestic, regional and multilateral, it goes on to argue that identifying these diversities and addressing the interactions and mutual influences between different regimes is a worthwhile undertaking, not only in terms of mutual enrichment, but also with regard to intensifying the degree of desirable coordination between different legal systems. All chapters were written by leading experts, practitioners and scholars from different jurisdictions with expertise in various fields of law and different levels of the legal order, and discuss a number of issues with particular focus on either "one-way" or mutual influences between the Eastern and the Western legal systems, practices and philosophies.

When an economic collapse, natural disaster, epidemic outbreak, terrorist attack, or internal crisis puts a country in dire need, governments must rise to the occasion to protect their citizens, sometimes employing the full scope of their powers. How do political systems that limit government control under normal circumstances allow for the discretionary and potentially unlimited power that such emergencies sometimes seem to require? Constitutional systems aim to regulate government behavior through stable and predictable laws, but when their citizens' freedom, security, and stability are threatened by exigencies, often the government must take extraordinary action regardless of whether it has the legal authority to do so. In Extra-Legal Power and Legitimacy: Perspectives on Prerogative, Clement Fatovic and Benjamin A. Kleinerman examine the costs and benefits associated with different ways that governments have wielded extra-legal powers in times of emergency. They survey distinct models of emergency governments and draw diverse and conflicting approaches by joining influential thinkers into conversation with one another. Chapters by eminent scholars illustrate the earliest frameworks of prerogative, analyze American perspectives on executive discretion and extraordinary power, and explore the implications and importance of deliberating over the limitations and proportionality of prerogative power in contemporary liberal democracy. In doing so, they re-introduce into public debate key questions surrounding executive power in contemporary politics.

Effective governance is a crucial aspect of all modern nations. Through various collaborative efforts and processes, nations can enhance their current governance systems. The Handbook of Research on Sub-National Governance and Development is a pivotal reference source for the latest scholarly material on the intersection between local and national politics, analyzing how this relationship affects nations' economy and administration. Highlighting theoretical foundations and real-world applications, this book is ideally designed for professionals, academics, students, and practitioners actively involved in the fields of public policy and governance.

'The fields of comparative administrative law and its close cousin, regulatory law, are now experiencing the explosion that occurred a while ago in comparative constitutional law. This Bignami and Zaring volume provides both excellent introduction into these newest developments and a record of substantial research achievements.' - Martin Shapiro, University of California, Berkeley, School of Law Regulation today is global. It affects everything from e-commerce to product safety to air quality and much more. How is regulation made and enforced in the multiple domestic and international jurisdictions called upon to address the problems of international markets and global society? To understand the global regulatory process, it is necessary to move beyond conventional sub-fields of law like administrative law and international law. Drawing on contributions from an international team of leading scholars with diverse subject and country expertise, Comparative Law and Regulation introduces a new field of legal research geared at understanding the operation of the regulatory process across the world. The volume affords cutting-edge analysis of the entire gamut of regulatory law: rulemaking by bureaucracies, legislatures, and private bodies; oversight by public and private actors; civil and criminal enforcement; and judicial review. The chapters cover over thirty different domestic and international jurisdictions, including the United States, Germany, the European Union, India, China, South Korea, Colombia, the World Trade Organization, and private investor-state arbitral tribunals. The theoretical and methodological innovations introduced in this book will make it compulsory reading for scholars of public law, comparative law, and international law as well as those working in public policy, political science, and economics. For legal professionals in government agencies and the private sector, it affords both a useful theoretical framing of the complex issues involved in international and comparative regulation and an up-to-date overview of the legal and technical aspects. Contributors include: J. Baert Wiener, F. Bignami, A.R. Chapman, C. Coglianese, E.A. Feldman, C. Fish, L. Forman, J. Fowkes, D.A. Hensler, H.C.H. Hofmann, C.-Y. Huang, R.D. Kelemen, E. Lamprea, D.S. Law, D. Lima Ribeiro, J. Ohnesorge, L. Peter, S. Rose-Ackerman, G. Shaffer, J.L. Short, S. Smismans, B. Van Rooij, W. Wagner, B. Worthy, J. Yackee, D. Zaring

Writing of the France of the 1930s, the late Simone Weil declared, The state has morally killed everything smaller than itself. Liebmann asserts that a comparable development has recently taken place in the United States, fostering civic apathy and an inability to address serious social problems, and that, not for the first time, abuse of judicial review has caused the Constitution to be used as a tool of class interests. After a general survey of these consequences, Liebmann discusses the original constitutional debates and understanding. He then assesses First Amendment doctrine, through a discussion of the views of Harry Kalven, the most influential modern commentator on free speech issues, and then discusses the appropriate relationship of constitutional restraints to governmental fostering of public policy, on zoning, education, law enforcement, urban renewal, day care, traffic regulation, and care of the elderly, and illustrates the hopeful developments that are possible if judicial restraint is restored. A significant analysis for all scholars and researchers in the areas of constitutional law and current American public policy and politics.

A behind-the-scenes examination of the special court dedicated to claims that vaccines have caused harm The so-called vaccine court is a small special court in the United States Court of Federal Claims that handles controversial claims that a vaccine has harmed someone. While vaccines in general are extremely safe and effective, some people still suffer severe vaccine reactions and bring their claims to vaccine court. In this court, lawyers, activists, judges, doctors, and scientists come together, sometimes arguing bitterly, trying to figure out whether a vaccine really caused a person's medical problem. In Vaccine Court, Anna Kirkland draws on the trials of the vaccine court to explore how legal institutions resolve complex scientific questions. What are vaccine injuries, and how do we come to recognize them? What does it mean to transform these questions into a legal problem and funnel them through a special national vaccine court, as we do in the US? What does justice require for vaccine injury claims, and how can we deliver it? These are highly contested questions, and the terms in which they have been debated over the last forty years are highly revealing of deeper fissures in our society over motherhood, community, health, harm, and trust in authority. While many scholars argue that it's foolish to let judges and lawyers decide medical claims about vaccines, Kirkland argues that our political and legal response to vaccine injury claims shows how well legal institutions can handle specialized scientific matters. Vaccine Court is an accessible and thorough account of what the vaccine court is, why we have it, and what it does.

This pioneering study explores the problems of politics and law that lie behind the growing phenomenon of NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard), a stance taken by residential property owners attempting to keep various types of facilities out of their neighborhoods. Denis J. Brion argues that the pejorative connotation that NIMBY carries is both unfortunate and unwarranted and seeks to expose the underlying problems for which NIMBY is a symptom. In particular, Brion examines the impact of siting decisions on those who will be the neighbors of a potential project and the political gridlock that so often results when they become aware of the nature of this impact. The discussion is illuminated by a review of the journalistic accounts of particular episodes chosen to demonstrate the pervasiveness and complexity of the NIMBY phenomenon.

Divided into three sections, the study begins by analyzing how a system of public decisionmaking, founded on the ideal of participatory democracy and built on the structure of representative government, is peculiarly subject to capture by small groups intent on pursuing their own narrow agendas. The result, Brion shows, is often allocational choices which yield benefits to few and harm to many. In Part II, he demonstrates the failure of the public remedial process to provide traditional common-law remedies to those harmed by Locally Unwanted Land Uses (LULUs). Brion then looks at the consequences of this remedial failure from both traditional and non-traditional points of view in order to provide a basis for devising an approach to the problems that underly the NIMBY syndrome. The concluding section proposes a solution that involves both expanding the focus of political and constitutional debate to include the notion of communality and narrowing the traditional conception of right to property. As a unique full-length treatment of the subject, this study makes a significant contribution to the ongoing debate over the NIMBY phenomenon and its consequences.

Nowhere today is constitutional law more avidly debated and studied than in the 12 post-Soviet republics known as the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Drawing on past experience as well as on European, American and Asian models, the constitutions of these countries have a great deal to tell the legal scholar about how the independent states of the post-Cold-War world understand the transition to a market economy. This text contains English translations which accurately present the current (1999) constitutional laws of all 12 CIS countries. The author and translator - himself active as an adviser on constitutional reform in several of these states - has taken care to establish the most authentic sources through an investigation of the existing documents and through personal interviews. From a great mass of confusing and often contradictory material in a dozen languages, he has assembled a coherent collection of documents that allows us to see the lineaments of constitutional law at a crucial stage of development in this fast-changing region of great economic significance.

Classicists and lawyers alike will find this a fascinating study that shows how certain principles of Athenian maritime law are still imbedded in the modern international law of maritime commerce. Cohen has made a unique and substantial contribution to our understanding of the Athens of Plato, Aristotle and Demosthenes. Athens was the dominant maritime power in the West from the eighth to fourth centuries BCE. Athenian preeminence insured that its maritime law was accepted throughout the Mediterranean world. Indeed, its influence outlasted Athens and is the only area of classical Greek law that wasn't replaced entirely by Roman models. Codified during the Roman period in the Rhodian Sea laws, it went on to influence the subsequent development of European commercial and maritime law. Using both ancient and secondary sources, Cohen explores the development of Athenian maritime law, the jurisdiction and procedure of the courts and the Athenian principles that have endured to the present day. He successfully treats the much-discussed problem of why they were termed "monthly" and describes how "supranationality" was a feature of all Hellenic maritime law. He goes on to show how their jurisdiction was limited ratione rerum, not ratione personarum, because a legally defined "commercial class" did not exist in Athens at this time. Edward E. Cohen, an attorney with a Ph.D. in Classics, is both distinguished historian of Classical Greece, Professor of Ancient History (adjunct) at the University of Pennsylvania and the Chief Executive Officer of Atlas America, a producer and processor of natural gas. His other books include Athenian Economy and Society: A Banking Perspective (1992) and The Athenian Nation (2000). "Cohen's competence in the history of law, his own experience as a practicising lawyer with a Ph.D. in Classics, and his belief that in the principles of Greek maritime commerce reside "the germinal cells of the complex modern international law of maritime commerce" (p. 5), ought to have won for this book a much wider audience than it is likely to have. (...) As the most detailed treatment of Athenian maritime law Cohen's valuable book must be given a place beside the important contributions of his predecessors, Paoli, Calhoun, and Gernet.": Ronald S. Stroud, American Journal of Legal History 19 (1975) 71. " A] learned and precise examination of certain terms and procedures associated in the fourth century B.C. with lawsuits that arose out of Athenian maritime commerce. (...) Argumentation throughout is responsible. Cohen knows the sources and has read critically in a wide range of secondary material. The book is a valuable addition to our understanding of a comparatively little known area of Athenian law.": Alan L. Boegehold, The Classical World 69, No. 3 (Nov., 1975) 214.

This volume deals with questions of political party funding and campaign financing, issues which arouse controversy in many parts of the world. How are the central actors in the political arena supposed to gather the funds necessary to operate effectively on behalf of their chosen political ends? And, how may they spend money in furtherance of their political objectives? The aim of this volume, the first in a new series of Columbia University/London University collaborative projects, is to explore these issues in the specific context of a number of national settings.The studies presented here show that financing questions cannot be addressed independent of the constitutional conventions of the country, the nature of the political parties in the country, and the means of access to publication and the media in any given nation. The national studies in this volume reveal a rich diversity in the approach to regulation in Australia, Canada, the European Union, Japan, New Zealand, Quebec, the United Kingdom and the United States. The topicality of the issues considered is reflected in the fact that since the book was first mooted there have been major decisions of the US Supreme Court and the Supreme Court of Canada, as well as an investigation and report by the Electoral Commission in the United Kingdom, all of which have a direct bearing on the legal and policy issues discussed in this book.

Attitudes Aren't Free: Thinking Deeply about Diversity in the US Armed Forces emerged from a vision to collect essays from the brightest voices of experts across the range of contentious social issues to catalyze productive discussions between military members of all ranks and services. Forty-nine experts contributed to the following 29 chapters writing on the primary themes of religious expression, homosexuality, gender, race, and ethics. Chapters appearing in this volume passed the scrutiny of a double-blind peer-review by one or more referees from the board of reviewers. The chapters are largely written in a colloquial, intellectual op-ed fashion and capture a "snapshot" of the current discussions regarding a particular topic of interest to uniformed personnel, policy makers, and senior leaders. Each section seeks to frame the spectrum of perspectives captured within the current debates and lines of argument. Authors were specifically asked not to address all sides of the issue, but rather to produce a well-reasoned argument explaining why they believe their well-known position on an issue is in the best interests of the military members and make specific recommendations about how best to address the policy issues from their perspective. The volume is arranged in four primary sections by theme: Religious Expression, Homosexuality, Race and Gender, and Social Policy Perspectives. Within each section, readers will find multiple chapters-each embracing a different perspective surrounding the section's theme. Thus, because of the unbalanced nature of many of the individual chapters, it is critically important that readers focus on the entire spectrum of perspectives presented within a section to ensure they have the context necessary to frame any single perspective. Diversity of opinion has been the hallmark of the United States since its dramatic birth in 1776 and has continued unfettered through today where we now have developed the most innovative and effective military the world has ever known. Thus, it is imperative that we continue to reflect upon the diversity of ideas about how best to formulate the "right" social policy to ensure our service members can most effectively execute their missions.

This provocative book investigates the relationship between law and artificial intelligence (AI) governance, and the need for new and innovative approaches to regulating AI and big data in ways that go beyond market concerns alone and look to sustainability and social good. Taking a multidisciplinary approach, the contributors demonstrate the interplay between various research methods, and policy motivations, to show that law-based regulation and governance of AI is vital to efforts at ensuring justice, trust in administrative and contractual processes, and inclusive social cohesion in our increasingly technologically-driven societies. The book provides valuable insights on the new challenges posed by a rapid reliance on AI and big data, from data protection regimes around sensitive personal data, to blockchain and smart contracts, platform data reuse, IP rights and limitations, and many other crucial concerns for law's interventions. The book also engages with concerns about the 'surveillance society', for example regarding contact tracing technology used during the Covid-19 pandemic. The analytical approach provided will make this an excellent resource for scholars and educators, legal practitioners (from constitutional law to contract law) and policy makers within regulation and governance. The empirical case studies will also be of great interest to scholars of technology law and public policy. The regulatory community will find this collection offers an influential case for law's relevance in giving institutional enforceability to ethics and principled design.