This book investigates the limits of the legitimate role of the state in regulating the human body. It questions whether there is a public interest in issues of bodily autonomy, with particular focus on reproductive choices, end of life choices, sexual autonomy, body modifications and selling the body. The main question addressed in this book is whether such autonomous choices about the human body are, and should be, subject to state regulation. Potential justifications for the state's intervention into these issues through mechanisms such as the criminal law and regulatory schemes are evaluated. These include preventing harm to others and/or to the individual involved, as well as more abstract concepts such as public morality, the sanctity of human life, and the protection of human dignity. The State and the Body argues that the state should be particularly wary about encroaching upon exercises of autonomy by embodied selves and concludes that only interventions based upon Mill's harm principle or, in tightly confined circumstances, the dignity of the human species as a whole should suffice to justify public intervention into private choices about the body.

The European Convention on Human Rights is one of the world's most important and influential human rights documents. It owes its value mainly to the European Court of Human Rights, which applies the Convention rights in individual cases. This book offers insight into the concepts and principles that are key to understanding the European Convention and the Court's case law. It explains how the Court approaches its cases and its decision-making process, illustrated by numerous examples taken from the Court's judgments. Core issues discussed include types of Convention rights (such as absolute rights); the structure of the Court's Convention rights review; principles and methods of interpretation (such as common-ground interpretation and the use of precedent); positive and negative obligations; vertical and horizontal effect; the margin of appreciation doctrine; and the requirements for the restriction of Convention rights.

This book discusses a central chapter in the history of free speech in the western world. The nature and limits of freedom of speech prompted sophisticated debate in a wide range of areas in the early seventeenth century; it was one of the 'liberties of the subject' fought for by individuals and groups across the political landscape. David Colclough argues that freedom of speech was considered to be a significant civic virtue during this period. Discussions of free speech raised serious questions about what it meant to live in a free state, and how far England was from being such a state. Examining a wide range of sources, from rhetorical handbooks to Parliamentary speeches and manuscript miscellanies, Dr Colclough demonstrates how freedom of speech was conceived positively in the period c. 1603-1628, rather than being defined in opposition to acts of censorship.

The Trump administration violated the rights of migrant children who fled brutal violence in the Northern Triangle of Central America. Their rights are human rights. This book explores the administration's policies and practices of family separation at the U.S. southern border and its confinement of migrant children that, in some cases, experts describe as torture. Specific connections are made between harmful actions on the part of government officials and agencies, and provisions that protect against them in The Convention on the Rights of the Child and four other UN conventions. Awareness of the violations and the safeguards afforded to children may help preserve children's human rights. The book also examines efforts of humanitarian organizations, courts, and legislators to reclaim and defend migrant children's rights. The author's research includes information from international and national government documents, news reports, and interviews and stories that resulted from networking with advocates in both Arizona and Mexico. The young asylum seekers were called "criminals" and "not-innocent" by the President. However, his narrative is contradicted by vignettes that describe children's own experiences and beliefs and by photographs of them taken by advocates in Arizona and by the author in shelters in Mexico where families await asylum.

In this book, leading international thinkers take up the demanding challenge to rethink our understanding of social justice at work and our means for achieving it - at a time when global forces are tearing the familiar fabric of our working lives and the laws regulating them. When fabric is torn we can see deeply into it, understand its structural weaknesses, and imagine alterations in the name of resilience and sustainability. Seizing that opportunity, the authoritative commentators examine the lessons revealed by the pandemic and other global shocks for our ideas about justice at work, and how to advance that cause in the world as we now find it. The chapters deliver critical re-assessments of our goals, explore our new challenges, and creatively re-imagine trajectories for progress on two global fronts - via international institutions and by a myriad of other transnational techniques. These forward-looking essays are in honour of Francis Maupain, whose international career and scholarly writing are inspiring models for those who, in a changing world, seize opportunities for creativity in the pursuit of global justice at work.

This seventh volume in the Swedish Studies in European Law series brings together some of the most prominent scholars working within the fast-evolving field of EU civil justice. Civil justice has an impact on matters involving, inter alia, family relationships, consumers, entrepreneurs, employees, small and medium-sized businesses and large multinational corporations. It therefore has great power and potential. Over the past 15 years a wealth of EU measures have been enacted in this field. Issues arising from the implementation thereof and practice in relation to these measures are now emerging. Hence, this volume will explore the benefits as well as the challenges of these measures. The particular themes covered include forum shopping, alternative dispute resolution, simplified procedures and debt collection, family matters and collective redress. In addition, the deepening of the field that continues post-Lisbon has occasioned a new level of regulatory and policy challenges. These are discussed in the final part of the volume which focuses on mutual recognition also in the broader European law context of integration in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice.

This title was first published in 2001. This text critically examines the role and relevance of international human rights law in the process of protection, especially in the cases of Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe. It argues that international human rights law does have a role to play in the protection and, indeed the enforcement of human rights in these countries and that there is an emerging trend to that effect.

This book focuses on government regulation of religious institutions in South Africa. PART 1 explains the meaning of government regulation for religious communities by providing a brief overview of the relationship between church and state, the right to freedom of religion and the legal status of religious organisations. With reference to case examples, this section highlights the importance of religious autonomy and the right to self-determination of religious institutions and non-interference by the state in the internal affairs of the organisation. No fundamental rights are however absolute and the section concludes with a discussion on the limitation of rights and an overview of the relevant constitutional provisions and anti-discrimination laws in place relevant to religious organisations, in the context of equality and non-discrimination. PART 2 discusses in more detail the daily rights, responsibilities and freedoms associated with the right to freedom of religion within some specific spheres of society where regulation of religion has occurred or are necessary or has proved to be problematic. It includes those related to the role of religion in society; the relations between religion and state institutions; education; finance; family matters; employment law; planning law; broadcast media and general governance issues.

Examining the twelve-decade legal conflict of government bans on religious garb worn by teachers in U.S. public schools, this book provides comprehensive documentation and analysis of the historical origins and subsequent development of teachers' religious garb in relation to contemporary legal challenges within the United Nations and the European Union. By identifying and correcting factual errors in the literature about historical bans on teachers' garb, Walker demonstrates that there are still substantial and unresolved legal questions to the constitutionality of state garb statutes and reflects on how the contemporary conflicts are historically rooted. Showcased through a wealth of laws and case studies, this book is divided into eight clear and concise chapters and answers questions such as: what are anti-religious-garb laws?; how have the state and federal court decisions evolved?; what are the constitutional standards?; what are the establishment clause and free exercise clause arguments?; and how has this impacted current debates on teachers' religious garb?, before concluding with an informative summary of the points discussed throughout. The First Amendment and State Bans on Teachers' Religious Garb is the ideal resource for researchers, academics, and postgraduate students in the fields of education, religion, education policy, sociology of education, and law, or those looking to explore an in-depth development of the laws and debates surrounding teachers' religious garb within the last 125 years.

This book assesses the role of social justice in legal scholarship and its potential future development by focusing upon the 'leading works' of the discipline. The rise of socio-legal studies over recent decades has led to a more interdisciplinary approach to the study of law, which prioritises placing law into its wider social context. Recognising the role that culture, economics and politics play in the development of law is important in order to fully understand the position and impact of law in society. Innovative and written in an engaging way, this collection includes leading and emerging scholars from across the world. Each contributor has been invited to select and analyse a 'leading work', a publication which has for them shed light on the way that law and social justice are interlinked and has influenced their own understanding, scholarship, advocacy, and, in some instances, activism. The book also includes a specially written foreword and afterword, which critically reflect upon the contributions of the 'leading works' to consider the role that social justice has played in law and legal education and the likely future path for social justice in legal scholarship. This book will be an essential resource for all those working in the areas of social justice, socio-legal studies and legal philosophy. It will be of wider interest to the social sciences more generally.

Over the past few decades, European countries have witnessed a proliferation of legal norms concerning marginalised individuals and minorities who increasingly invoke them in front of courts to assert their rights and claim protection. The present volume explores the relationship between law, rights and social mobilisation in Europe. It specifically enquires into the extent and ways in which legal processes and entitlements are mobilised by less privileged social actors to advance their rights claims and pursue social change. Most distinctly, it explores such processes in the context of the multi-level European system, characterised by the existence of multiple legal and judicial arenas at the national, subnational and supranational/transnational level. In such a complex system of law and governance in Europe, concepts like legal opportunity structures, as well as the factors shaping them need to be reconceptualised. How does the multi-level European context distinctly shape the nature and salience of rights, as well as their mobilisation by individuals and minority actors?

The world seems to have reached agreement on a set of ideals regarding state human rights behavior and the appropriate institutions to promote and protect those ideals. The global script for state legitimacy calls for a written constitution or the equivalent with an embedded bill of rights, democratic processes and institutions, and increasingly, a judicial check on state power to protect human rights. While the progress toward universal formal adherence to this global model is remarkable, Linda Camp Keith argues that the substantive meaning of this progress is much less clear. In "Political Repression," she seeks to answer two key questions: Why do states make formal commitments to democratic processes and human rights? What effect do these commitments have on actual state behavior, especially political repression?The book begins with a thorough exploration of a variety of tools of state repression and presents evidence for substantial formal acceptance of international human rights norms in constitutional documents as well as judicial independence. Keith finds that these institutions reflect the diffusion of global norms and standards, the role of transnational networks of nongovernmental organizations, and an electoral logic in which regimes seek to protect their future interests. Economic liberalism, on the other hand, decreases the likelihood that states adopt or maintain these provisions. She demonstrates that the level of judicial independence is influenced by constitutional structures and that levels of judicial independence subsequently achieved in turn diminish the probability of state repression of a variety of rights. She also finds strong evidence that rights provisions may indeed serve as a constraint on state repression, even when controlling for many other factors.

First published in 2006, this book brings together some of the most innovative and important research on civil rights law and legality, this book draws on narratives of individuals from a variety of contexts to provide a rich and contextualized understanding of what happens when law interacts with other competing systems or forms of social organization. By privileging the real world experiences of those most influenced by rights, the collection moves beyond the traditional polarizing debates and presents a constitutive approach to rights that is not reducible to a simple 'for or against' rights formula. While this complex consciousness approach often contributes to the reproduction of dominant-subordinate social relations, it also allows for spaces of resisting existing hierarchical structures embedded in various law-related sites.

More than any other people on earth, we Americans are free to say and write what we think. The press can air the secrets of government, the corporate boardroom, or the bedroom with little fear of punishment or penalty. This extraordinary freedom results not from America's culture of tolerance, but from fourteen words in the constitution: the free expression clauses of the First Amendment.

In "Freedom for the Thought That We Hate," two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Anthony Lewis describes how our free-speech rights were created in five distinct areas--political speech, artistic expression, libel, commercial speech, and unusual forms of expression such as T-shirts and campaign spending. It is a story of hard choices, heroic judges, and the fascinating and eccentric defendants who forced the legal system to come face to face with one of America's great founding ideas.

In this original reinterpretation of the legal status of foreigners in medieval England, Keechang Kim proposes a radically new understanding of the genesis of the modern legal regime and the important distinction between citizens and noncitizens. Making full use of medieval and early modern sources, the book examines how feudal legal arguments were transformed by the political theology of the Middle Ages to become the basis of the modern legal outlook. This innovative study will interest academics, lawyers, and students of legal history, immigration and minority issues.

Since the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty, data protection has been elevated to the status of a fundamental right in the European Union and is now enshrined in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights alongside the right to privacy. This timely book investigates the normative significance of data protection as a fundamental right in the EU. The first part of the book examines the scope, the content and the capabilities of data protection as a fundamental right to resolve problems and to provide for an effective protection. It discusses the current approaches to this right in the legal scholarship and the case-law and identifies the limitations that prevent it from having an added value of its own. It suggests a theory of data protection that reconstructs the understanding of this right and could guide courts and legislators on data protection issues. The second part of the book goes on to empirically test the reconstructed right to data protection in four case-studies of counter-terrorism surveillance: communications metadata, travel data, financial data and Internet data surveillance. The book will be of interest to academics, students, policy-makers and practitioners in EU law, privacy, data protection, counter-terrorism and human rights law.

This book analyses human rights in post-national contexts and demonstrates, through the case law of the European Court of Human Rights, that the Margin of Appreciation doctrine is an essential part of human rights adjudication. Current approaches have tended to stress the instrumental value of the Margin of Appreciation, or to give it a complementary role within the principle of proportionality, while others have been wholly critical of it. In contradiction to these approaches this volume shows that the doctrine is a genuinely normative principle capable of balancing conflicting values. It explores to what extent the tension between human rights and politics, embodied in the doctrine, might be understood as a mutually reinforcing interplay of variables rather than an entrenched separation. By linking the interpretation of the Margin of Appreciation doctrine to a broader conception of human rights, understood as complex political and moral norms, this volume argues that the doctrine can assist in the formulation of the common good in light of the requirements of the Convention.

This collection sets about untangling some of the knotty issues in the underexplored relationship between human rights and the media. We investigate how complex debates in political, judicial, academic and public life on the role and value of human rights are represented in the media, particularly, in print journalism. To focus the discussion, we concentrate on media representation of the controversial proposals in the United Kingdom to repeal the Human Rights Act 1998 and to replace it with a British Bill of Rights. The collection is underpinned by the observation that views on human rights and on the proposals to repeal and replace are polarised. On the one hand, human rights are presented as threatening and, therefore, utterly denigrated; on the other hand, human rights are idolised, and, therefore, uncritically celebrated. This is the 'fear and fetish' in our title. The media plays a decisive role in constructing this polarity through its representation of political and ideological viewpoints. In order to get to grips with the fear, the fetish and this complex interrelationship, the collection tackles key contemporary themes, amongst them: the proposed British Bill of Rights, Brexit, prisoner-voting, the demonisation of immigrants, press freedom, tabloid misreporting, trial by media and Magna Carta. The collection explores media representation, investigates media polarity and critiques the media's role.

Restricting Los Angeles Paparazzi: California's Legal Efforts Impacting Free Press Rights is a detailed analysis of California's anti-paparazzi laws aimed at protecting celebrities' privacy. Joshua N. Azriel provides an ethnographic, First Amendment-based critique of the state's privacy and anti-harassment laws and discusses the broader implications of these laws on free press rights. Azriel conducted fieldwork acting as a paparazzo taking photos of celebrities and interviewed paparazzi directly about whether they comply with the laws, providing readers with insight into the challenges and ethics of the paparazzi industry and firsthand perspectives of photographers in the field. Scholars of media studies, legal studies, and sociology will find this book particularly useful.

The complex legal situations arising from the coexistence of international law, state law, and social and religious norms in different parts of the world often include scenarios of conflict between them. These conflicting norms issued from different categories of 'laws' result in difficulties in describing, identifying and analysing human rights in plural environments. This volume studies how normative conflicts unfold when trapped in the aspirations of human rights and their local realizations. It reflects on how such tensions can be eased, while observing how and why they occur. The authors examine how obedience or resistance to the official law is generated through the interaction of a multiplicity of conflicting norms, interpretations and practices. Emphasis is placed on the actors involved in raising or decreasing the tension surrounding the conflict and the implications that the conflict carries, whether resolved or not, in conditions of asymmetric power movements. It is argued that legal responsiveness to state law depends on how people with different identities deal with it, narrate it and build expectations from it, bearing in mind that normative pluralism may also operate as an instrument towards the exclusion of certain communities from the public sphere. The chapters look particularly to expose the dialogue between parallel normative spheres in order for law to become more effective, while investigating the types of socio-legal variables that affect the functioning of law, leading to conflicts between rights, values and entire cultural frames.

The US led programme of extraordinary rendition created profound challenges for the international system of human rights protection and rule of law. This book examines the efforts of authorities in Europe and the US to re-establish rule of law and respect for human rights through the investigation of the program and its outcomes. The contributions to this volume examine the supranational and national inquiries into the US CIA-led extraordinary rendition and secret detention programme in Europe. The book takes as a starting point two recent and far-reaching developments in delivering accountability and establishing the truth: First, the publication of the executive summary of the US Senate Intelligence Committee (Feinstein) Report, and second, various European Court of Human Rights judgments regarding the complicity of several state parties and the incompatibility of those actions with the European Convention of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR). The collective volume provides the first stock-taking review of the state of affairs in the quest for accountability, and identifies significant obstacles in going even further -- as international law demands. It will be vital reading for students and scholars in a wide range of areas, including international relations, international law, public policy and counter-terrorism studies.

The right to development (RTD) seeks to address global inequities hidden in world politics and global institutions through the game of influences played by powerful actors. The negative impacts of the Atlantic slave trade, colonialism, and the subjugation of Africa through globalisation and its institutions are key factors that have caused Africa and African people claiming their RTD. This book examines how the African continent protects the right to development, examining the nature of the RTD and controversies surrounding it and how it is implemented. The book then goes onto explore the RTD at the regional level including through the jurisprudence of the African Commission and the African Court on Human Rights, at the sub-regional level including in sub-regional courts and tribunals, at the national levels through case studies and through the African Union governance institutions. Through this examination, the author unveils what are the prospects and challenges to the realisation of the RTD in Africa.

In this study, an audit of British compliance with international human rights standards is carried out. The book identifies 44 violations and 19 near violations. It provides an up-to-date description of law and practice with respect of freedom of information, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly and public protest, freedom of association and trade unionism, state surveillance, the right to life and liberty, and the right to vote and stand in elections. This study looks at both the political and legal aspects of political freedom in the UK. It measures political freedom specifically against international standards and provides the "Human Rights Index" - a system for measuring political rights which may be used to monitor legislation in the UK from 1997 or in any country in the rest of the world.

Traditionally European law is important for public law. However, it is also increasingly important for private law, that is to say, the legal relationships between individuals.Instead of discussing the impact of European law as part of a certain legal subject, this book addresses and analyses the various sources of European law in (hierarchical) order, namely the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, the general principles of EU law, EU Directives and EU Regulations, as well as the influence of the European Convention on Human Rights. The nature of each source of law and its significance for and influence on the general part of national private law is discussed. Particular attention is devoted to the review of national private law legislation in the light of European legislation that has direct effect, direct and indirect effect of European law on legal relationships between individuals, ex officio application of European law by the national courts, and interpretation issues arising as a result of the interaction between European law and national law. Further, comparisons are drawn between the different sources of law.The book then concludes with a detailed overview of European Directives that are of particular relevance for general private law. European Law and National Private Law provides a concise introduction to the influence of EU law and the ECHR on legal relationships between individuals - a must read for every lawyer.

The three Abrahamic faiths have dominated religious conversations for millennia but the relations between state and religion are in a constant state of flux. This relationship may be configured in a number of ways. Religious norms may be enforced by the state as part of a regime of personal law or, conversely, religious norms may be formally relegated to the private sphere but can be brought into the legal realm through the private acts of individuals. Enhanced recognition of religious tribunals or religious doctrines by civil courts may create a hybrid of these two models. One of the major issues in the reconciliation of changing civic ideals with religious tenets is gender equality, and this is an ongoing challenge in both domestic and international affairs. Examining this conflict within the context of a range of issues including marriage and divorce, violence against women and children, and women's political participation, this collection brings together a discussion of the Abrahamic religions to examine the role of religion in the struggle for women's equality around the world. The book encompasses both theory and practical examples of how law can be used to negotiate between claims for gender equality and the right to religion. It engages with international and regional human rights norms and also national considerations within countries. This book will be of great relevance to scholars and policy makers with an interest in law and religion, gender studies and human rights law.