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Books > Law > Jurisprudence & general issues > Jurisprudence & philosophy of law
The Aboriginal Tent Embassy was established in Canberra in January 1972, when four Aboriginal activists drove from Sydney to Canberra, planted a beach umbrella on the lawns across the road from the Commonwealth Parliament House, and called it an Embassy. They were responding to a speech by conservative Prime Minister William McMahon in which he rejected Aboriginal land rights and reaffirmed the government's commitment to a policy of assimilation. The protestors declared that McMahon's statement effectively relegated indigenous people to the status of 'aliens in our own land', thus as aliens 'we would have an embassy of our own'. The brilliant idea of pitching a Tent Embassy hijacked all the symbolic 'national significance' attached to this small patch of grass by the Australian state and media, and put it to work for radically different purposes. It enacted the kind of land rights that the activists were seeking, and it did so in a way that also drew attention to the living conditions of so many Aboriginal people across Australia. On its twentieth anniversary, the Embassy was permanently established, as part of an on-going struggle for recognition of Aboriginal land rights and sovereignty. It remains today, and celebrates its fortieth anniversary in 2012. This book draws together contributions from an interdisciplinary group of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal scholar, some of whom were participants in the events that they write about, to examine the social, historical and political significance of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy for Australian society and for the struggle for indigenous rights internationally.
Contributions to Law, Philosophy and Ecology: Exploring Re-Embodiments is a preliminary contribution to the establishment of re-embodiments as a theoretical strand within legal and ecological theory, and philosophy. Re-embodiments are all those contemporary practices and processes that exceed the epistemic horizon of modernity. As such, they offer a plurality of alternative modes of theory and practice that seek to counteract the ecocidal tendencies of the Anthropocene. The collection comprises eleven contributions approaching re-embodiments from a multiplicity of fields, including legal theory, eco-philosophy, eco-feminism and anthropology. The contributions are organized into three parts: 'Beyond Modernity', 'The Sacred Dimension' and 'The Legal Dimension'. The collection is opened by a comprehensive introduction that situates re-embodiments in theoretical context. Whilst closely bound with embodiment and new materialist theory, this book contributes a unique voice that echoes diverse political processes contemporaneous to our times. Written in an elegant and accessible language, the book will appeal to undergraduates, postgraduates and established scholars alike seeking to understand and take re-embodiments further, both politically and theoretically.
* John Connor describes and evaluates the results of his extensive
survey of reports of cartel overcharges.
How do laws resemble rules of games, moral rules, personal rules, rules found in religious teachings, school rules, and so on? Are laws rules at all? Are they all made by human beings? And if so how should we go about interpreting them? How are they organized into systems, and what does it mean for these systems to have 'constitutions'? Should everyone want to live under a system of law? Is there a special kind of 'legal justice'? Does it consist simply in applying the law of the system? And how does it relate to the ideal of 'the rule of law'? These and other classic questions in the philosophy of law form the subject-matter of Law as a Leap of Faith. In this book John Gardner collects, revisits, and supplements fifteen years of celebrated writings on general questions about law and legal systems - writings in which he attempts, without loss of philosophical finesse or insight, to cut through some of the technicalities with which the subject has become encrusted in the late twentieth century. Taking his agenda broadly from H.L.A. Hart's The Concept of Law (1961), Gardner shows how the key ideas in that work live on, and how they have been and can still be improved in modest ways to meet important criticisms - in some cases by concession, in some cases by circumvention, and in some cases by restatement. In the process Gardner engages with key ideas of other modern giants of the subject including Kelsen, Holmes, Raz, and Dworkin. Most importantly he presents the main elements of his own unique and refreshingly direct way of thinking about law, brought together in one place for the first time.
Examining contested notions of indigeneity, and the positioning of the Indigenous subject before and beyond the law, this book focuses upon the animation of indigeneities within textual imaginaries, both literary and juridical. Engaging the philosophy of Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin, as well as other continental philosophy and critical legal theory, the book uniquely addresses the troubled juxtaposition of law and justice in the context of Indigenous legal claims and literary expressions, discourses of rights and recognition, postcolonialism and resistance in settler nation states, and the mutually constitutive relation between law and literature. Ultimately, the book suggests no less than a literary revolution, and the reassertion of Indigenous Law. To date, the oppressive specificity with which Indigenous peoples have been defined in international and domestic law has not been subject to the scrutiny undertaken in this book. As an interdisciplinary engagement with a variety of scholarly approaches, this book will appeal to a broad variety of legal and humanist scholars concerned with the intersections between Indigenous peoples and law, including those engaged in critical legal studies and legal philosophy, sociolegal studies, human rights and native title law.
Law, Immunization and the Right to Die focuses on the urgent matter of legal appeals and judicial decisions on assisted death. Drawing on key cases from the United Kingdom and Canada, the book focuses on the problematic paternalism of legal decisions that currently deny assisted dying and questions why the law fails to recognize what many describe as "compassionate motives" for assisted death. When cases are analyzed as discourses that are part of a larger socio-political logic of governance, judicial decisions, it is argued here, reveal themselves as relying on the construction of neoliberal fictions - fictions that are here elucidated with reference to Michel Foucault's theoretical insights on pastoral power and Roberto Esposito's philosophical thesis on immunization. Challenging the socio-political logic of neoliberalism, the issue of assisted dying goes beyond the predominant legal concern with protecting - or immunizing - individuals from one another, in favor of minimal interference. This book calls for a new kind of politics: one that might affirm people and their finitude both more collectively, and more compassionately.
In modern liberal democracies, rights-based judicial intervention in the policy choices of elected bodies has always been controversial. For some, such judicial intervention has trivialized and impoverished democratic politics. For others, judges have contributed to a dynamic and healthy dialogue between the different spheres of the constitution, removed from pressures imposed on elected representatives to respond to popular sentiment. This book provides a critical evaluation of ongoing debates surrounding the judicial role in protecting fundamental human rights, focusing in particular on legislative/executive abridgment of a core freedom in western society - namely, liberty of expression. A range of types of expression are considered, including expression related to electoral processes, political expression in general and sexually explicit forms of expression.
The received view on the nature of legal authority contains the idea that a sound account of legitimate authority will explain how a legal authority has a right to command and the addressee a duty to obey. The received view fails to explain, however, how legal authority truly operates upon human beings as rational creatures with specific psychological makeups. This book takes a bottom-up approach, beginning at the microscopic level of agency and practical reason and leading to the justificatory framework of authority. The book argues that an understanding of the nature of legal normativity involves an understanding of the nature and structure of practical reason in the context of the law, and advances the idea that legal authority and normativity are intertwined. This point can be summarised thus: if we are able to understand both how the agent exercises his or her practical reason under legal directives and commands and how the agent engages his or her practical reason by following legal rules grounded on reasons for actions as good-making characteristics, then we can fully grasp the nature of legal authority and legal normativity. Using the philosophies of action enshrined in the works of Elisabeth Anscombe, Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, the study explains practical reason as diachronic future-directed intention in action and argues that this conception illuminates the structure of practical reason of the legal rules' addressees. The account is comprehensive and enables us to distinguish authoritative and normative legal rules in just and good legal systems from 'apparent' authoritative and normative legal rules of evil legal systems. At the heart of the book is the methodological view of a 'practical turn' to elucidate the nature of legal normativity and authority.
As neuroscientific technologies continue to develop and inform our understanding of the mind, the opportunities for applying neuroscience in legal proceedings have also increased. Cognitive neuroscientists have deepened our understanding of the complex relationship between the mind and the brain by using new techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG). The inferences drawn from these findings and increasingly sophisticated technologies are being applied to debates and processes in the legal field, from lie detection in criminal trials to critical legal doctrines surrounding the insanity defense or guilt adjudication. In Minds, Brains, and Law: The Conceptual Foundations of Law and Neuroscience, Michael S. Pardo and Dennis Patterson assess the philosophical questions that arise when neuroscientific research and technology are applied in the legal system. They examine the arguments favoring the increased use of neuroscience in law, the means for assessing its reliability in legal proceedings, and the integration of neuroscientific research into substantive legal doctrines. The authors use their explorations to inform a corrective inquiry into the mistaken inferences and conceptual errors that arise from mismatched concepts, such as the mental disconnect of what constitutes "lying" on a lie detection test. The empirical, practical, ethical, and conceptual issues that Pardo and Patterson seek to redress will deeply influence how we negotiate and implement the fruits of neuroscience in law and policy in the future.
This volume is the first to showcase the interdisciplinary nature of Terror Management Theory, providing a detailed overview of how rich and diverse the field has become since the late 1980s, and where it is going in the future. It offers perspectives from psychology, political science, communication, health, sociology, business, marketing and cultural studies, among others, and in the process reveals how our existential ponderings permeate our behavior in almost every area of our lives. It will interest a wide range of upper-level students and researchers who want an overview of past and current TMT research and how it may be applied to their own research interests.
The demand for recognition, responsibility, and reparations is regularly invoked in the wake of colonialism, genocide, and mass violence: there can be no victims without recognition, no perpetrators without responsibility, and no justice without reparations. Or so it seems from law's limited repertoire for assembling the archive after 'the disaster'. Archival and memorial practices are central to contexts where transitional justice, addressing historical wrongs, or reparations are at stake. The archive serves as a repository or 'storehouse' of what needs to be gathered and recognised so that it can be left behind in order to inaugurate the future. The archive manifests law's authority and its troubled conscience. It is an indispensable part of the liberal legal response to biopolitical violence. This collection challenges established approaches to transitional justice by opening up new dialogues about the problem of assembling law's archive. The volume presents research drawn from multiple jurisdictions that address the following questions. What resists being archived? What spaces and practices of memory - conscious and unconscious - undo legal and sovereign alibis and confessions? And what narrative forms expose the limits of responsibility, recognition, and reparations? By treating the law as an 'archive', this book traces the failure of universalised categories such as 'perpetrator', 'victim', 'responsibility', and 'innocence,' posited by the liberal legal state. It thereby uncovers law's counter-archive as a challenge to established forms of representing and responding to violence.
Advances in the field of Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) have been revolutionary. This book focuses on the use of ARTs in the context of families who seek to conceive a matching sibling donor as a source of tissue to treat an existing sick child. Such children have been referred to as 'saviour siblings'. Considering the legal and regulatory frameworks that impact on the accessibility of this technology in Australia and the UK, the work analyses the ethical and moral issues that arise from the use of the technology for this specific purpose. The author claims the only justification for limiting a family's reproductive liberty in this context is where the exercise of reproductive decision-making results in harm to others. It is argued that the harm principle is the underlying feature of legislative action in Western democratic society, and as such, this principle provides the grounds upon which a strong and persuasive argument is made for a less-restrictive regulatory approach in the context of 'saviour siblings'. The book will be of great relevance and interest to academics, researchers, practitioners and policy makers in the fields of law, ethics, philosophy, science and medicine.
This volume is the first to showcase the interdisciplinary nature of Terror Management Theory, providing a detailed overview of how rich and diverse the field has become since the late 1980s, and where it is going in the future. It offers perspectives from psychology, political science, communication, health, sociology, business, marketing and cultural studies, among others, and in the process reveals how our existential ponderings permeate our behavior in almost every area of our lives. It will interest a wide range of upper-level students and researchers who want an overview of past and current TMT research and how it may be applied to their own research interests.
Naomi Zack pioneers a new theory of justice starting from a correction of current injustices. While the present justice paradigm in political philosophy and related fields begins from John Rawls's 1970 Theory of Justice, Zack insists that what people in reality care about is not justice as an ideal, but injustice as a correctable ill. For a way to describe real injustice and the society in which it occurs, Zack resurrect Arthur Bentley's key insight that government and law (or political life) is a constant process of contending interest groups throughout society. Bentley's main idea allows for a resolution of the contradiction between formal legal equality for U.S. minorities and post-civil rights practical inequality. Just law and unjust practice co-exist as a fact of political life. The correction of injustice in reality requires applicative justice, in a comparison between those who are treated unjustly with those who are treated justly, and the design of effective measures to equalize such treatment. Zack's theory of applicative justice offers a revolutionary reorientation of society's pursuit of justice, seeking to undo injustice in a practical and fully achievable way.
Law moves, whether we notice or not. Set amongst a spatial turn in the humanities, and jurisprudence more specifically, this book calls for a greater attention to legal movement, in both its technical and material forms. Despite various ways the spatial turn has been taken up in legal thought, questions of law, movement and its materialities are too often overlooked. This book addresses this oversight, and it does so through an attention to the materialities of legal movement. Paying attention to how law moves across different colonial and contemporary spaces, this book reveals there is a problem with common law's place. Primarily set in the postcolonial context of Australia - although ranging beyond this nationalised topography, both spatially and temporally - this book argues movement is fundamental to the very terms of common law's existence. How, then, might we move well? Explored through examples of walking and burial, this book responds to the challenge of how to live with a contemporary form of colonial legal inheritance by arguing we must take seriously the challenge of living with law, and think more carefully about its spatial productions, and place-making activities. Unsettling place, this book returns the question of movement to jurisprudence.
Western liberal constitutionalism has expanded recently, with, in East Asia, the constitutional systems of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan based on Western principles, and with even the socialist polities of China and Vietnam having some regard to such principles. Despite the alleged universal applicability of Western constitutionalism, however, the success of any constitutional system depends in part on the cultural values, customs and traditions of the country into which the constitutional system is planted. This book explains how the values, customs and traditions of East Asian countries are Confucian, and discusses how this is relevant to constitutional practice in the region. The book outlines how constitutionalism has developed in East Asia over a long period, considers different scholarly work on the ease or difficulty of integrating Western constitutionalism into countries with a Confucian outlook, and examines the prospects for such integration going forward. Throughout, the book covers detailed aspects of Confucianism and the workings of constitutions in practice.
Arguing about Law introduces philosophy of law in an accessible and engaging way. The reader covers a wide range of topics, from general jurisprudence, law, the state and the individual, to topics in normative legal theory, as well as the theoretical foundations of public and private law. In addition to including many classics, Arguing About Law also includes both non-traditional selections and discussion of timely topical issues like the legal dimension of the war on terror. The editors provide lucid introductions to each section in which they give an overview of the debate and outline the arguments of the papers, helping the student get to grips with both the classic and core arguments and emerging debates in:
Arguing About Law is an inventive and stimulating reader for students new to philosophy of law, legal theory and jurisprudence.
This challenging book on jurisprudence begins by posing questions in the post-modern context,and then seeks to bridge the gap between our traditions and contemporary situation. It offers a narrative encompassing the birth of western philosophy in the Greeks and moves through medieval Christendom, Hobbes, the defence of the common law with David Hume, the beginnings of utilitarianism in Adam Smith, Bentham and John Stuart Mill, the hope for enlightenment with Kant, Rousseau, Hegel and Marx, onto the more pessimistic warnings of Weber and Nietzsche. It defends the work of Austin against the reductionism of HLA Hart, analyses the period of high modernity in the writings of Kelsen, Hart and Fuller, and compares the different approaches to justice of Rawls and Nozick. The liberal defence of legality in Ronald Dworkin is contrasted with the more disillusioned accounts of the critical legal studies movement and the personalised accounts of prominent feminist writers.
Focusing on the intersection of politics and law in six western European countries and in two supra-national bodies, the contributors here aim to debunk the myth that judges are merely "la bouche de la loi" and analyze similiarities in policy-making of the judiciaries from one nation to the next.
There is no more vivid example of a state's power over its citizens than the criminal law. By criminalizing various behaviours, the state sets boundaries on what we can and cannot do. And the criminal law is in many ways unique in the harshness of its sanctions. But traditional criminal law theory has for too long focussed on the questions, "what is a crime?" and "what is the justification of punishment?" The significance of the criminal law extends beyond these questions; indeed, critical philosophical questions underlie all aspects of the criminal justice system. The criminal law engages us not just as offenders or potential offenders, but also as victims, suspects, judges and jurors, prosecutors and defenders-and as citizens. The authors in this volume go beyond traditional questions to challenge our conventional understandings of the criminal law. In doing so, they draw from a number of disciplines including philosophy, history, and social science.
There is no more vivid example of a state's power over its citizens than the criminal law. By criminalizing various behaviours, the state sets boundaries on what we can and cannot do. And the criminal law is in many ways unique in the harshness of its sanctions. But traditional criminal law theory has for too long focussed on the questions, "what is a crime?" and "what is the justification of punishment?" The significance of the criminal law extends beyond these questions; indeed, critical philosophical questions underlie all aspects of the criminal justice system. The criminal law engages us not just as offenders or potential offenders, but also as victims, suspects, judges and jurors, prosecutors and defenders-and as citizens. The authors in this volume go beyond traditional questions to challenge our conventional understandings of the criminal law. In doing so, they draw from a number of disciplines including philosophy, history, and social science.
This volume presents a collection of essays on objectivity in legal discourse. Has law a distinctive type of objectivity? Is there one specific type of legal objectivity or many, depending on the observatory language utilized? Is objectivity fit for law? The analyses in the various contributions show that the Cartesian paradigm of objectivity is not relevant to the current legal discourse, and new forms of legal objectivity are revealed instead. Each essay, in its distinctive way, analyses the strong commitment of law to objectivity, shedding light on the controversies that surround it.
The articles in this collection cover a wide range of approaches to law and legal theory, including Analytical Jurisprudence, Legal Realism, Law and Economics, Critical Legal Studies, Feminism, and Critical Race Theory. The essays consider foundational questions regarding the objectivity of law, the nature of rules, the relationship of law and morality and the philosophical foundations of the common law, and offer critical inquiries into whether law systematically fails women and racial minorities. The contributors, who include some of the best-known names in legal theory from the United States, Britain, Canada, and Israel, are responsible for some of the most important and challenging work in legal theory today. A central focus of the essays in this work is the contribution of the well-known philosopher Jules Coleman to the various topics which are covered by the contributors.
Justice as Right Actions presents an original theory of justice anchored in the analytical philosophical tradition. In contrast to many contemporary approaches, the theory provides normative guidance, rather than focusing solely on political structures and institutions, as the question of justice is seen to comprise both a moral inquiry concerned with questions of good and bad, right and wrong, and a political inquiry, concerned with the nature of the polity and how individuals relate to it. Presenting a relational account of justice, rather than a distributive account - the latter, so much more prevalent in current studies - communications are seen as the key to the theory, both in the substantive sense as a discursive method of resolving disputes, as well as instrumentally, in the transmission of concepts, especially values through time. Rule-oriented in approach, justice as right actions attempts to be value-neutral, acknowledging, however, an underlying thin theory of the good, including concepts of rationality, autonomous moral agency, equal concern and respect for others, as well as plurality of values. Its political context is liberalism, with components of negative liberty and equality of concern and respect, while underscoring as well, the concepts of tolerance and social diversity. In this study, the original theory of Justice as Right Actions is also contrasted with and situated among contemporary accounts of justice, including the most important theoretical works on the topic in the past half-century. Thus, the study also serves as a valuable review and critique of such major contemporary accounts of justice.
This book is about legal theory and legal reasoning. In particular, it seeks to examine the relations that obtain between law and a theory of law and legal reasoning and a theory of legal reasoning. Two features of law and legal reasoning are treated as being of particular importance in this regard: law is institutional, and legal reasoning is formal. These two features are so closely connected that it is reasonable to believe that in fact they are simply two ways of looking at the same issue. This becomes clearer as the focus of the book shifts from the institutional nature of law to the consequences of this for legal reasoning, and which is the principal focus of the book. The author received the European Academy of Legal Theory award in 2000 for the doctoral dissertation on which this work was based. |
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