Since its inception in 1998 the Human Rights Act (HRA) has come in for a wide variety of criticism on legal, constitutional, political and cultural grounds. More recently, this criticism escalated significantly as politicians have seriously considered proposals for its abolition. This book examines the main arguments against the HRA and the issues which have led to public hostility against the protection of human rights. The first part of the book looks at the legal structures and constitutional aspects of the case against the HRA, including the criticism that the HRA is undemocratic and is used by judges to subvert the will of parliament. The second part of the book looks at specific issues, such as immigration and terrorism, where cases involving the HRA have triggered broader public concerns about the protection of human rights. The final section of this book looks at some of the structural issues that have generated hostility to the HRA, such as media coverage and the perception of the legal profession. This book aims to unpick the complex climate of hostility that the HRA has faced and examine the social, political and legal forces that continue to inform the case against the HRA.

Challenging the dominant account of medical law as normatively and conceptually subordinate to medical or bioethics, this book provides an innovative account of medical law as a rhetorical practice. The aspiration to provide a firm grounding for medical law in ethical principle has not yet been realized. Rather, legal doctrine is marked, if anything, by increasingly evident contradiction and indeterminacy that are symptomatic of the inherently contingent nature of legal argumentation. Against the idea of a timeless, placeless ethics as the master discipline for medical law, this book demonstrates how judicial and academic reasoning seek to manage this contingency, through the deployment of rhetorical strategies, persuasive to concrete audiences within specific historical, cultural and political contexts. Informed by social and legal theory, cultural history and literary criticism, John Harrington's careful reading of key judicial decisions, legislative proposals and academic interventions offers an original, and significant, understanding of medical law.

In a consolidated democracy, amnesties and pardons do not sit well with equality and a separation of powers; however, these measures have proved useful in extreme circumstances, such as transitions from dictatorships to democracies, as has occurred in Greece, Portugal and Spain. Focusing on Spain, this book analyses the country's transition, from the antecedents from 1936 up to the present, within a comparative European context. The amnesties granted in Greece, Portugal and Spain saw the release of political prisoners, but in Spain amnesty was also granted to those responsible for the grave violations of human rights which had been committed for 40 years. The first two decades of the democracy saw copious normative measures that sought to equate the rights of all those who had benefitted from the amnesty and who had suffered or had been damaged by the civil war. But, beyond the material benefits that accompanied it, this amnesty led to a sort of wilful amnesia which forbade questioning the legacy of Francoism. In this respect, Spain offers a useful lesson insofar as support for a blanket amnesty - rather than the use of other solutions within a transitional justice framework, such as purges, mechanisms to bring the dictatorship to trial for crimes against humanity, or truth commissions - can be traced to a relative weakness of democracy, and a society characterised by the fear of a return to political violence. This lesson, moreover, is framed here against the background of the evolution of amnesties throughout the twentieth century, and in the context of international law. Crucially, then, this analysis of what is now a global reference point for comparative studies of amnesties, provides new insights into the complex relationship between democracy and the varying mechanisms of transitional justice.

This work provides an analytical and comparative analysis of the development of charity law, as well as providing a critical commentary on a number of contemporary changes within the charity law field across a range of common law jurisdictions. The book follows earlier studies which cover a similar, and traditional, jurisdictional spread, but which are now dated. It further considers in detail charity law issues within Hong Kong and Singapore, about which there has been historically more limited charity law discussion. The area is growing in terms of practical legal and academic interest.

What can law's popular cultures do for law, as a constitutive and interrogative critical practice? This collection explores such a question through the lens of the 'cultural legal studies' movement, which proffers a new encounter with the 'cultural turn' in law and legal theory. Moving beyond the 'law ands' (literature, humanities, culture, film, visual and aesthetics) on which it is based, this book demonstrates how the techniques and practices of cultural legal studies can be used to metamorphose law and the legalities that underpin its popular imaginary. By drawing on three different modes of cultural legal studies - storytelling, technology and jurisprudence - the collection showcases the intersectional practices of cultural legal studies, and law in its popular cultural mode. The contributors to the collection deploy differentiated modes of cultural legal studies practice, adopting diverse philosophical, disciplinary, methodological and theoretical approaches and subjects of examination. The collection draws on this mix of diversity and homogeneity to thread together its overarching theme: that we must take seriously an interrogation of law as culture and in its cultural form. That is, it does not ask how a text 'represents' law; but rather how the representational nature of both law and culture intersect so that the 'juridical' become visible in various cultural manifestations. In short, it asks: how law's popular cultures actively effect the metamorphosis of law.

This book examines the often tough questions raised by infectious diseases through essays that explore a host of legal and ethical issues. The authors also offer potential solutions in order to ensure that past errors are not repeated in response to future outbreaks. The essays touch on a number of key themes, including institutional competence, the accountability and responsibility of non-state actors, the importance of pharmaceuticals, and the move towards a rights-based approach in global health. Readers gain insights into such important questions as follows: How can we help victims in other countries? What (if any) responsibility should be placed upon international organizations whose actions exacerbate infectious diseases? How can we ensure that pharmaceutical research helps all communities, even those who cannot afford to pay for the products? While broadly covering global health law, the book adopts an inter-disciplinary approach that draws on public international law, philosophy, international relations, human rights law, and healthcare economics. As such, it is a valuable resource for academic libraries, appealing to scholars and postgraduates engaged in relevant research, as well as to those engaged with global health and policy at the international level.

Human rights and their principles of interpretation are the leading legal paradigms of our time. Freedom of religion occupies a pivotal position in rights discourses, and the principles supporting its interpretation receive increasing attention from courts and legislative bodies. This book critically evaluates religious pluralism as an emerging legal principle arising from attempts to define the boundaries of freedom of religion. It examines religious pluralism as an underlying aspect of different human rights regimes and constitutional traditions. It is, however, the static and liberal shape religious pluralism has assumed that is taken up critically here. In order to address how difference is vulnerable to elimination, rather than recognition, the book takes up a contemporary ethics of alterity. More generally, and through its reconstruction of a more difference-friendly vision of religious pluralism, it tackles the problem of the role of rights in the era of diverse narratives of emancipation.

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.

During the first part of the twenty-first century, bloggers, citizen journalists, social media users, Yelp reviewers, and a myriad of other communicators have found themselves facing defamation, privacy, campaign finance, and other lawsuits as a result of the messages they have communicated. In many ways, these communicators are facing legal questions that are similar to what traditional journalists have faced for centuries regarding their rights to gather and publish information. This book examines how the press clause, a First Amendment freedom with no agreed-upon definition, can be understood in order to help guide the courts and twenty-first-century publishers regarding protecting expression as we move into the fourth wave of networked communication, an era that will be defined by increasingly complex relationships between humans and artificially intelligent communicators. To do so, the book draws upon the discourse theory of communication in democratic society, the legal and foundational history of the press clause, lower-court cases that involve citizen publishers who have claimed protections that have historically been associated with traditional journalism, and established legal and scholarly examinations of artificial intelligence to ultimately construct a framework for how the press clause can be reimagined to protect older and newer generations of publishers.

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.

LeMay offers an insightful examination of the enactment of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 and the Immigration Act of 1990. Using the enactment of immigration policy reform--the most substantial since 1965--he illustrates the various stages of the public policy process. He shows how problems, such as the illegal alien influx, become perceived of as public problems and get on the policy agenda of government. He illustrates the interaction of interest groups and political leadership in the branches of government in the formulation and enactment of policy reform.

By examining this area of public policy--one rich in human interest as well as substantive importance to American politics and public policy--LeMay provides useful insights into the policy process, Congressional decision-making, and the complexity of regulatory policy. This book will be of value to scholars of the immigration process, lawyers and practitioners involved in immigration, students of Congressional decision-making and of the public policy process, and general readers.

Social Justice and Counseling represents the intersection between therapy, counseling, and social justice. The international roster of contributing researchers and practitioners demonstrate how social justice unfolds, utterance by utterance, in conversations that attend to social inequities, power imbalances, systemic discrimination, and more. Beginning with a critical interrogation of the concept of social justice itself, subsequent sections cover training and supervising from a social justice perspective, accessing local knowledge to privilege client voices, justice and gender, and anti-pathologizing and the politics of practice. Each chapter concludes with reflection questions for readers to engage experientially in what authors have offered. Students and practitioners alike will benefit from the postmodern, multicultural perspectives that underline each chapter.

This title was first published in 2003. Xenotransplantation - the transplantation of animal organs into humans - poses a fascinating moral dilemma. Should this ability to extend the lives of millions of older people be permitted given that it might trigger a new pandemic similar to AIDS? This study examines the moral dilemma from a combination of humanistic, legalistic, bioethical, economical and technological perspectives. The first part of the book demonstrates that xenografts are the only realistic near-term technological answer to the organ shortage problem. The balance of the book is devoted to assessing whether doctrines such as the 'right to health care' trump the moral and ethical conundrums posed by xenotransplantation. The book concludes with a 'geoethical' solution that proposes authorization of xenotransplantation subject to the prior implementation of a new international organization for epidemiology and basic health care. It also suggests that the costs of operating such an organization could be covered by a global tax on xenografts.

Whenever the legitimacy of a new or ethically contentious medical intervention is considered, a range of influences will determine whether the treatment becomes accepted as lawful medical treatment. The development and introduction of abortion, organ donation, gender reassignment, and non-therapeutic cosmetic surgery have, for example, all raised ethical, legal, and clinical issues. This book examines the various factors that legitimatise a medical procedure. Bringing together a range of internationally and nationally recognised academics from law, philosophy, medicine, health, economics, and sociology, the book explores the notion of a treatment, practice, or procedure being proper medical treatment, and considers the range of diverse factors which might influence the acceptance of a particular procedure as appropriate in the medical context. Contributors address such issues as clinical judgement and professional autonomy, the role of public interest, and the influence of resource allocation in decision-making. In doing so, the book explores how the law, the medical profession, and the public interact in determining whether a new or ethically contentious procedure should be regarded as legitimate. This book will be of interest and use to researchers and students of bioethics, medical law, criminal law, and the sociology of medicine. Chapter 6 of this book 'Family perspectives on proper medical treatment for people in prolonged vegetative and minimally conscious states' by Celia Kitzinger and Jenny Kitzinger is available under an open access CC BY NC ND license and can be viewed at: http://preview.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/prevqa/NBK199156/ .

This book provides a comparative analysis of the process of breach across ten different European jurisdictions by identifying and elaborating a number of key analytical themes through which the different systems can be compared and evaluated. It is informed by and hopes to advance the research activities of the COST Action IS1106 on Offender Supervision in Europe, particularly the Action's work on developing new comparative methodologies to examine the process of decision-making involved in the breaching of offenders for non-compliance. This volume consists of country chapters and thematic chapters. Analyses are based on exhaustive reviews of the literature available in each jurisdiction as well as the results of an empirical pilot study to provide a unique and valuable insight into current practice as well as enhancing our understanding of the contingencies and vagaries of the processes of breach as they exist in both civil and common law European jurisdictions. The key themes and emerging concerns that are explored include: the roles and responsibilities of the different actors involved in the breach process; the degree and nature of discretion exercised by decision-makers; and legitimacy, due process and procedural requirements of breach processes both from a pan-European and from a comparative perspective. This book will be of interest to criminal lawyers and criminologists, policy makers, criminal justice practitioners, probation workers and students of criminal justice studies across Europe. Comparative insight into the decision-making processes of breach across Europe will also be of interest to American, Canadian and Australian audiences seeking comparisons with their own systems.

This book details the advances in drug discovery and delivery and the present need for emerging technologies. Throughout the text new micro and nanofabrication techniques are described, including methods like electrohydrodynamic processes, additive manufacturing, and microfluidics, which have the potential to produce drug delivery systems that were not possible a few years ago. This book is of great use to both entry-level and experienced researchers in the field of emerging technologies for the manufacturing of drug delivery devices.

This study primarily explores whether conflicts between patents and human rights in the context of access to medicines are inevitable, or whether patents can be made to serve human rights. The author argues that it is necessary to have a deepened understanding of each of the two sets of norms that govern this issue, that is, patent law and international human rights law. The chapters investigate the relevant dimensions of patent law and analyse particular human rights bearing upon the issue of intellectual property and access to medicines.

Increasing knowledge of the biological is fundamentally transforming what life itself means and where its boundaries lie. New developments in the biosciences - especially through the molecularisation of life - are (re)shaping healthcare and other aspects of our society. This cutting edge volume studies contemporary bio-objects, or the categories, materialities and processes that are central to the configuring of 'life' today, as they emerge, stabilize and circulate through society. Examining a variety of bio-objects in contexts beyond the laboratory, Bio-Objects: Life in the 21st Century explores new ways of thinking about how novel bio-objects enter contemporary life, analysing the manner in which, among others, the boundaries between human and animal, organic and non-organic, and being 'alive' and the suspension of living, are questioned, destabilised and in some cases re-established. Thematically organised around questions of changing boundaries; the governance and regulation of bio-objects; and changing social, economic and political relations, this book presents rich new case studies from Europe that will be of interest to scholars of science and technology studies, social theory, sociology and law.

The concept of the cultural commons has become increasingly important for legal studies. Within this field, however, it is a contested concept: at once presented as a sphere for creativity, democratic access and freedom of speech, but one that denies property rights and misappropriates the public domain. In this book, Merima Bruncevic takes up the cultural commons not merely as an abstract notion, but in its connection to physical spaces such as museums and libraries. A legal cultural commons can, she argues, be envisioned as a lawscape that can quite literally be entered and engaged with. Focusing largely on art in the context of the copyright regime, but also addressing a number of cultural heritage issues, the book draws on the work of Deleuze and Guattari in order to examine the realm of the commons as a potential space for overcoming the dichotomy between the owner and the consumer of culture. Challenging this dichotomy, it is the productive and creative potential of law itself that is elicited through the book's approach to the commons as the empirical basis for a new legal framework, which is able to accommodate a multitude of interests and values.

When can the Executive manipulate the composition of a Court? What political factors explain judicial instability on the bench? Using original field data from Argentina's National Supreme Court and all twenty-four Provincial Supreme Courts, Andrea Castagnola develops a novel theory to explain forced retirements of judges. She argues that in developing democracies the political benefits of manipulating the court outweigh the costs associated with doing so. The instability of the political context and its institutions causes politicians to focus primarily on short-term goals and to care mostly about winning elections. Consequently, judiciaries become a valuable tool for politicians to have under their control. Contrary to the predictions of strategic retirement theory, Castagnola demonstrates that there are various institutional and non-institutional mechanisms for induced retirement which politicians have used against justices, regardless of the amount of support their party has in Congress. The theoretical innovations contained herein shed much needed light on the existing literature on judicial politics and democratization. Even though the political manipulation of courts is a worldwide phenomenon, previous studies have shown that Argentina is the theory-generating case for studying manipulation of high courts.

The Prophet Muhammad's reported traditions have evolved significantly to affect the social, cultural, and political lives of all Muslims. Though centuries of scholarship were spent on the authentication and trustworthiness of the narrators, there has been less study focused on the contents of these narratives, known as Hadith or Sunnah, and their corroboration by the Qur`an. This book is a first step in a comprehensive attempt to contrast Hadith with the Qur`an in order to uncover some of the unjust practices by Muslims concerning women and gender issues. Using specific examples the author helps the reader appreciate and understand the magnitude of the problem. It is argued that the human rights and the human development of Muslim women will not progress in a meaningful and sustainable manner until the Hadith is re-examined in a fresh new approach from within the Islamic framework, shifting the discourse in understanding Islam from a dogmatic religious law to a religio-moral rational worldview. The author argues that such re-examination requires the involvement of women in order to affirm their authority in exegetical and practical leadership within Muslim societies, and she encourages Muslim women to stand up for their rights to effect change in understanding the role of sunnah in their own life.

Presenting a unique blend of historical and contemporary research from a range of interdisciplinary and theoretical analysis, this book examines the intersection of 'race', gender and national identity. Focusing on New Zealand, the book highlights the ways in which shifts in national identity shape and limit legal claims for redress for historical racial injustices internationally. Key features: * Analyzes the identity configurations produced by New Zealand's process of 'settling' colonial injustices and highlights the wider relevance for other groups such as Australian aborigines and Native Americans. * Traces the connections and discontinuities between the free trade imperialism of the mid-19th Century and the Free Trade Globalization of the late 20th Century. * Rich, rigorous interdisciplinarity and use of a range of theoretical perspectives provides insights relevant to legal theorists, feminists and legal scholars internationally.

First published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The main feature of this work is that it explores criminal behavior from all aspects of Tinbergen's Four Questions. Rather than focusing on a single theoretical point of view, this book examines the neurobiology of crime from a biosocial perspective. It suggests that it is necessary to understand some genetics and neuroscience in order to appreciate and apply relevant concepts to criminological issues. Presenting up-to-date information on the circuitry of the brain, the authors explore and examine a variety of characteristics, traits and behavioral syndromes related to criminal behavior such as ADHD, intelligence, gender, the age-crime curve, schizophrenia, psychopathy, violence and substance abuse. This book brings together the sociological tradition with the latest knowledge the neurosciences have to offer and conveys biological information in an accessible and understanding way. It will be of interest to scholars in the field and to professional criminologists.