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Books > Law > Jurisprudence & general issues > Jurisprudence & philosophy of law
Ubiquitous Law explores the possibility of understanding the law in dissociation from the State while, at the same time, establishing the conditions of meaningful communication between various legalities. This book argues that the enquiry into the legal has been biased by the implicit or explicit presupposition of the State's exclusivity to a claim to legality as well as the tendency to make the enquiry into the law the task of experts, who purport to be able to represent the legal community's commitments in an authoritative manner. Very worryingly, the experts' point of view then becomes constitutive of the law and parasitic to and distortive of people's commitments. Ubiquitous Law counter-suggests a new methodology for legal theory, which will not be based on rigid epistemological and normative assumptions but rather on self-reflection and mutual understanding and critique, so as to establish acceptable differences on the basis of a commonality.
Malcolm Feeley, one of the founding giants of the law and society field, is also one of its most exciting, diverse, and contemporary scholars. His works have examined criminal courts, prison reform, the legal profession, legal professionalism, and a variety of other important topics of enduring theoretical interest with a keen eye for the practical implications. In this volume, The Legal Process and the Promise of Justice, an eminent group of contemporary law and society scholars offer fresh and original analyzes of his work. They asses the legacy of Feeley's theoretical innovations, put his findings to the test of time, and provide provocative historical and international perspectives for his insights. This collection of original essays not only draws attention to Professor Feeley's seminal writings but also to the theories and ideas of others who, inspired by Feeley, have explored how courts and the legal process really work to provide a promise of justice.
Religious freedom is one of the most debated and controversial human rights in contemporary public discourse. At once a universally held human right and a flash point in the political sphere, religious freedom has resisted scholarly efforts to define its parameters. Taliaferro explores a different way of examining the tensions between the aims of religion and the needs of political communities, arguing that religious freedom is a uniquely difficult human right to uphold because it rests on two competing conceptions, human and divine. Drawing on classical natural law, Taliaferro expounds a new, practical theory of religious freedom for the modern world. By examining conceptions of law such as Sophocles' Antigone, Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed, Ibn Rushd's Middle Commentary on Aristotle's Rhetoric, and Tertullian's writings, The Possibility of Religious Freedom explains how expanding our notion of law to incorporate such theories can mediate conflicts of human and divine law and provide a solid foundation for religious liberty in modernity's pluralism.
Despite the tremendous progress in the development of scientific knowledge, the understanding of the causes of poverty and inequality, and the role of politics and governance in addressing modern challenges, issues such as social inclusion, poverty, marginalization and despair continue to be a reality across the world - and most often impact Indigenous Peoples. At the Margins of Globalization explores how Indigenous Peoples are affected by globalization, and the culture of individual choice without responsibility that it promotes, while addressing what can be done about it. Though international trade and investment agreements are unlikely to go away, the inclusion of Indigenous rights provisions has made a positive difference. This book explains how these provisions operate and how to build from their limited success.
Sovereignty, as a concept, is in a state of flux. In the course of the last century, traditional meanings have been worn away while the limitations of sovereignty have been altered as transnational issues compete with domestic concerns for precedence. This volume presents an interdisciplinary analysis of conceptions of sovereignty. Divided into six overarching elements, it explores a wide range of issues that have altered the theory and practice of state sovereignty, such as: human rights and the use of force for human protection purposes, norms relating to governance, the war on terror, economic globalization, the natural environment and changes in strategic thinking. The authors are acknowledged experts in their respective areas, and discuss the contemporary meaning and relevance of sovereignty and how it relates to the constitution of international order.
This book provides an analysis of how commercial and banking disputes can be settled under the Islamic regime for arbitration. The work focuses on the Saudi legal system as representative of Shari'a law in commercial and banking arbitration, and where relevant, makes comparisons with the settlement of banking disputes in Egypt and the UAE. Shari'a Law in Commercial and Banking Arbitration provides a general introduction to the Saudi law and to the main principles and sources of Islamic Shari'a, on which Saudi law is based. It explores uncertainties resulting from the current system, such as the payment of interest, and examines possible alternative remedies for both domestic and international banking arbitration. It will be key reading for anyone interested in business and commercial law.
Drafting Legislation sets out to prove Sir William Dale's doctrine that the rules for drafting good quality legislation are the same in common and civil systems of law. Legislative solutions can therefore serve the drafter, the judge and the practitioner of any jurisdiction. The book discusses the general issue of quality in legislation from the legislative process to the actual drafting interpretation and enforcement. It also analyzes topics related to quality in legislation such as clarity, precision and disambiguity, plain language and gender-neutral language and assesses whether Sir William's view of universality in the definition and elements of quality in legislation is right or not. The volume is of critical interest to students and scholars of European law and the philosophy and theory of law.
Synesthesia is the phenomenon where sensual perceptions are joined together as a combined experience - that is, the ability to feel color, hear the visual, or even smell emotion. These types of unions expand the normativity of our legal thinking, as the abilities to represent the tethering of emotion, place, and concept to law are magnified. In this way, interpretations of law and legal phenomena that are enriched with embodied meaning contribute to our understanding of how law works - namely through sensory input, sensory output, and the attachment that happens within these sensory unions. This edited volume explores the richly complex manifestations of synesthesia and law drawing from a plurality of approaches, including legal studies, philosophy, social science, linguistics, history, cultural studies, and the humanities. Contributions in the volume discuss how we feel/taste/smell/see/hear law within the synesthetic scope of legal interpretation, legal consciousness, and legal culture. The collection examines aspects of embodiment, place, and presence that constitutively frame law amidst social, cultural, and historical contexts.
This book, first published in 1983, looks at discipline in industry and shows how private justice is integrally bound up with formal law. It is a timely examination of the forms of social control that exist ostensibly outside the formal legal system but on which it crucially depends. Private Justice: Towards Integrated Theorising in the Sociology of Law will be of interest to students of law, sociology, and criminology. Dr. Stuart Henry is currently Professor and Director of the School of Public Affairs at San Diego State University where he has been since 2006. Since leaving Trent Polytechnic (now Nottingham Trent University) in 1983 he has held positions in the United States at Eastern Michigan University, Wayne State University, and the University of Texas at Arlington. He is the author or editor of 30 books and over 100 articles on crime, deviance and social control.
This volume presents a leading contribution to the substantive arena relating to consent in the criminal law. In broad terms, the ambit of legally valid consent in extant law is contestable and opaque, and reveals significant problems in adoption of consistent approaches to doctrinal and theoretical underpinnings of consent. This book seeks to provide a logical template to focus the debate. The overall concept addresses three specific elements within this arena, embracing an overarching synergy between them. This edifice engages in an examination of UK provisions, with specialist contributions on Irish and Scottish law, and in contrasting these provisions against alternative domestic jurisdictions as well as comparative contributions addressing a particularised research grid for consent. The comparative chapters provide a wider background of how other legal systems' treat a variety of specialised issues relating to consent in the context of the criminal law. The debate in relation to consent principles continues for academics, practitioners and within the criminal justice system. Having expert descriptions of the wider issues surrounding the particular discussion and of other legal systems' approaches serves to stimulate and inform that debate. This collection will be a major source of reference for future discussion.
The challenge of thinking about the place of constitutionalism beyond the conventional categories of the nation state has become a principal concern for legal and political scholars. This book casts this issue in a different light by exploring the implications for the constitutionalism of legal integration in the European Union's 'area of freedom, security and justice'. In doing so it makes a novel contribution to an understanding of the European Union as a political community beyond the state, but in addition explores how this entails thinking differently about what is essential concerning constitutionalism. The book argues that instead of seeking to theorise constitutional foundations we actually begin to encounter the constitutional life implied by political and legal practices in the European Union and as exemplified here by 'the area of freedom, security and justice'.
The Ancient Greek notion of agonism, meaning struggle, has been revived in radical legal and political theory to rethematize class conflict and to conceptualize the conditions of possibility of freedom and social transformation in contemporary society. Insisting that what is ultimately at stake in politics are the terms in which social conflict is represented, agonists highlight the importance of the strategic, affective and aesthetic aspects of politics for democratic praxis. This volume examines the implications of this critical perspective for understanding law and considers how law serves either to sustain or curtail the democratic agon. While sharing a critical perspective on the deliberative turn in legal and political theory and its tendency to depoliticize social conflict, the various contributors to this volume diverge in arguing variously for pragmatic, expressivist or strategic conceptions of agonism. In doing so they question the glib assumptions that often underlie a sometimes too easy celebration of conflict as an antidote to de-politicizing consensus. This thought provoking volume will be of interest to students and researchers working in legal and political theory and philosophy.
This collection provides an up-to-date analysis of key country approaches to Militant Democracy. Featuring contributions from some of the key people working in this area, including Mark Tushnet and Helen Irving, each chapter presents a stocktaking of the legal measures to protect the democracy against its enemies within. In addition to providing a description of the country's view of Militant Democracy and the current situation, it also examines the legal and political provisions to defend the democratic structure against attacks. The discussion also presents proposals for the development of the Militant Democracy principle or its alternatives in policy and legal practice. In the final chapter the editor compares the different arrangements and formulates a minimum consensus as to what measures are indispensable to protect a democracy. Highly topical, this book is a valuable resource for students, academics and policy-makers concerned with democratic principles.
Following the boom in population databases in recent years there has been sustained and intense international debate about political processes and legal and ethical issues surrounding the protection and use of genetic data. As a result, several national and international organizations and committees have published widely differing guidelines and statements concerning genetic databases and biobanks. Ethical Issues of Human Genetic Databases compares the new area of biobanking with the tradition of ethically accepted classical research and highlights the distinctive features of existing databases and guidelines. The volume identifies areas of consensus and controversy while investigating the challenges posed to classical health research ethics by the existence of genetic databases, analyzing the reasons for such varying guidelines. The book will be essential to academics, biobankers, policy-makers and researchers in the field of medical ethics.
Through the creative use of literary analysis, Memory, Imagination, Justice provides a critical and highly original discussion of contemporary topics in criminal law and bioethics. Author David Gurnham uses popular and classical texts, by authors including Shakespeare, Dickens, Euripides, Kafka, the Brothers Grimm, Huxley and Margaret Atwood to shed fresh light on such controversial legal and ethical issues as passionate homicide, life sentences, child pornography and genetic enhancement. Gurnham's overarching theme is the role of memory and imagination in shaping legal and ethical attitudes. Along this line, this book examines the ways in which past wrongs are remembered and may be forcefully responded to, both by the criminal justice system itself and also by individuals responding to what they regard as gross insults, threats or personal violations. The volume further discusses the role of imagination as a creative force behind legal reform, in terms of the definition of criminal behaviour and the possible future development of the law. These ideas provide a useful and highly original perspective on contemporary issues of crime and society as they resonate both in legal and literary discussion.
Crossing the usual boundaries of abstract legal theory, this book considers actual charter systems - legal systems with explicitly posited moral-political rights, such as those of Canada and the United States - as well as cases in constitutional adjudication. It shows the worth of careful reflection on methodological and meta-theoretical issues for a comprehensive account of a present-day legal system which is fast becoming the norm. The author explicitly connects the ongoing Methodology Debate within legal philosophy to constitutional adjudication and Canadian law. By drawing out the implications of the Methodology Debate and the challenge of giving a proper account of constitutional adjudication in a general theory of law, the study examines how a descriptive, morally and politically neutral legal theory can deal with epistemic uncertainty - uncertainty about the actual status of moral-political legal provisions and their jurisprudential function - in a thoroughgoing manner. It also demonstrates the merits of a minimalist version of Legal Positivism with regard to the practical importance of charters in charter systems and societies.
Democracy, Law and Governance details the transformation of the modes of governance of contemporary developed democracies and aims to define the conditions required for promoting public interest in their public policy. Firstly, the volume illustrates why a sound theoretical approach to the concept of law results in opening up the theory of law to the debate on governance in the social sciences. Secondly, it reconstructs the underpinnings of recent debate on governance, focusing on the pragmatist turn that has marked efforts to overcome the inadequacies of both the economic and the deliberative approaches. In fulfilling this second goal, it examines the advances yielded by the pragmatist turn as well as its limitations, and concludes by proposing a theoretical approach for dealing with them. This illuminating book applies recent research in both theory of law and theory of governance to deepen the analytic impact of the recent pragmatist revival.
Biotechnology and the Challenge of Property addresses the question of how the advancement of property law is capable of controlling the interests generated by the engineering of human tissues. Through a comparative consideration of non-Western societies and industrialized cultures, this book addresses the impact of modern biotechnology, and its legal accommodation on the customary conduct and traditional beliefs which shape the lives of different communities. Nwabueze provides an introduction to the legal regulation of the evolving uses of human tissues, and its implications for traditional knowledge, beliefs and cultures.
Whilst feminist philosophy has frequently engaged with political theory, this original book instead considers legal theory and the practical operation of law. The work considers some of the contested meanings of what it is to be a self, a person or an individual in relation to the law of obligations. The discussion still impacts upon political theory as it concerns the way in which the question of what it is to be a woman has been defined within recent feminist theory. In order to overcome what appears to be a block in feminist legal theory, the book draws together areas of philosophy which are not normally considered within feminist or legal theory.
It is increasingly held that international commercial arbitration is becoming colonized by litigation. This book addresses, in a range of ways and from various locations and sites, those aspects of arbitration practice that are considered crucial for its integrity as an institution and its independence as a professional practice. The chapters offer multiple perspectives on the major issues in play, highlighting challenges facing the institution of arbitration, and identifying opportunities available for its development as an institution. The evidence of arbitration practice presented is set against the background of practitioner perceptions and experience from more than 20 countries. The volume will serve as a useful resource for all scholars and practitioners interested in the institution of arbitration and its professional practices.
Remorse is a powerful, important and yet academically neglected emotion. This book, one of the very few extended examinations of remorse, draws on psychology, law and philosophy to present a unique interdisciplinary study of this intriguing emotion. The psychological chapters examine the fundamental nature of remorse, its interpersonal effects, and its relationship with regret, guilt and shame. A practical focus is also provided in an examination of the place of remorse in psychotherapeutic interventions with criminal offenders. The book's jurisprudential chapters explore the problem of how offender remorse is proved in court and the contentious issues concerning the effect that remorse - and its absence - should have on sentencing criminal offenders. The legal and psychological perspectives are then interwoven in a discussion of the role of remorse in restorative justice. In Remorse: Psychological and Jurisprudential Perspectives, Proeve and Tudor bring together insights of neighbouring disciplines to advance our understanding of remorse. It will be of interest to theoreticians in psychology, law and philosophy, and will be of benefit to practising psychologists and lawyers.
Drawing on political, legal, national, post-national, as well as American and European perspectives, this collection of essays offers a diverse and balanced discussion of the current arguments concerning deliberative democracy. Its contributions' focus on discontent, provide a critical assessment of the benefits of deliberation and also respond to the strongest criticisms of the idea of democratic deliberation. The essays consider the three basic questions of why, how and where to deliberate democratically. This book will be of value not only to political and democratic theorists, but also to legal philosophers and constitutional theorists, and all those interested in the legitimacy of decision-making in national and post-national pluralistic polities.
This volume explores recent developments in the theory and practice of accommodating cultural diversity within democratic constitutional orders. The aim of the book is to provide a broad vision of the constitutional management of cultural diversity as seen through the prisms of different disciplines and experiences, both theoretical and practical. The contributions, which come from Canada and Europe, comprise a review of the evolving theory of cultural diversity, followed by two main case studies: a substantive study of the accommodation of indigenous peoples within different constitutional orders and, secondly, the importance of constitutional interpretation to the development of cultural diversity in complex pluralist democracies such as Australia, Canada and the UK.
Critical Interventions in the Ethics of Healthcare argues that traditional modes of bioethics are proving incommensurable with burgeoning biotechnologies and consequently, emerging subjectivities. Drawn from diverse disciplines, this volume works toward a new mode of discourse in bioethics, offering a critique of the current norms and constraints under which Western healthcare operates. The contributions imagine new, less paternalistic, terms by which bioethics might proceed - terms that do not resort to exclusively Western models of liberal humanism or to the logic of neoliberal economies. It is argued that in this way, we can begin to develop an ethical vocabulary that does justice to the challenges of our age. Bringing together theorists, practitioners and clinicians to present a wide variety of related disciplinary concerns and perspectives on bioethics, this volume challenges the underlying assumptions that continue to hold sway in the ethics of medicine and health sciences.
It has often been remarked that law and religion have much in common. One of the most conspicuous elements is that both law and religion frequently refer to a text that has authority over the members of a community. In the case of religion this text is deemed to be 'holy', in the case of law, some, such as the American constitution, are widely held as 'sacred'. In both examples, priests and judges exert a duty to tell the community what the founding document has to say about contemporary problems. This therefore involves an element of interpretation of the relevant authoritative texts and this book focuses on such methods of interpretation in the fields of law and religion. As its starting point, scholars from different disciplines discuss the textualist approach presented here by American Supreme Court Judge and academic scholar, Justice Antonin Scalia, not only from the perspective of law but also from that of theology. The result is a lively discussion which presents a range of diverse perspectives and arguments with regard to interpretation in law and religion. |
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