This book illustrates the deep roots of natural law doctrines in America's political culture. Originally published in 1931, the volume shows that American interpretations of natural law go to the philosophical heart of the American regime. The Declaration of Independence is the preeminent example of natural law in American political thought-it is the self-evident truth of American society. Benjamin Wright proposes that the decline of natural law as a guiding factor in American political behaviour is inevitable as America's democracy matures and broadens. What Wright also chronicled, inadvertently, was how the progressive critique of natural law has opened a rift between and among some of the ruling elites and large numbers of Americans who continue to accept it. Progressive elites who reject natural law do not share the same political culture as many of their fellow citizens. Wright's work is important because, as Leo Strauss and others have observed, the decline of natural law is a development that has not had a happy ending in other societies in the twentieth century. There is no reason to believe it will be different in the United States.

Ubuntu: An African Jurisprudence examines how and why South African courts and law-makers have been using the concept of ubuntu over the last thirty years, reflecting the views of judges and scholars, and above all proclaiming the importance of this new idea for South African legal thinking. Although ubuntu is the product of relations in and between the close-knit groups of a precolonial society, its basic aims - social harmony and caring for others - give it an inherently inclusive scope. This principle is therefore quite capable of embracing all those who constitute the heterogeneous populations of modern states. Included in this work are discussions of two traditional institutions that provide model settings for the realisation of ubuntu: imbizo, national gatherings consulted by traditional rulers to decide matters of general concern, and indaba, a typically African process of making decisions based on the consensus of the group. Courts and law-makers have used imbizo to give effect to the constitutional requirement of participatory democracy, and indaba to suggest an alternative method of decision-making to systems of majority voting. Ubuntu offers something extraordinarily valuable to South Africa and, in fact, to the wider world. Its emphasis on our responsibility for the welfare of our fellow beings acts as a timely antidote not only to the typically rationalist, disinterested system of justice in Western law, but also to the sense of anomie so prevalent in today's society.

This fully updated third edition of Law in Perspectivefocuses on a range of powerful critical thinking tools drawn from logic, science, ethics, and political and social theory. Sections on terrorism and refugee law have been expanded, climate change is discussed throughout, and new chapters have been added on law and Indigenous people, lawyers' ethics and corporate power. The book considers the relationship between legal theory, social theory and empirical research methods, as a guide for students taking on higher degrees in legal research. It also analyses key theories of the nature and social role of law, including legal positivism, natural law theory and Marxist theory of law.

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.

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.

Professor Robinson provides a new critique of the often neglected problem of classification within the criminal law. He presents a discussion of the present conceptual framework of the law, and offers explanations of how and why formal structures do not match the operation of law in practice. In this scholarly exposition of applied criminal theory, Robinson argues that the current operational structure of the criminal law fails to take account of its different functions. He goes on to suggest new sample codes of criminal conduct and criminal adjudication which mark a real departure from the pragmatic approach which presently dominates code-making. This rounded exploration of the structure of systems of criminal law is an important work for law teachers and policy makers world-wide.

Building Better Beings presents a new theory of moral responsibility. Beginning with a discussion of ordinary convictions about responsibility and free will and their implications for a philosophical theory, Manuel Vargas argues that no theory can do justice to all the things we want from a theory of free will and moral responsibility. He goes on to show how we can nevertheless justify our responsibility practices and provide a normatively and naturalistically adequate account of responsible agency, blame, and desert.
Three ideas are central to Vargas' account: the agency cultivation model, circumstantialism about powers, and revisionism about responsibility and free will. On Vargas' account, responsibility norms and practices are justified by their effects. In particular, the agency cultivation model holds that responsibility practices help mold us into creatures that respond to moral considerations. Moreover, the abilities that matter for responsibility and free will are not metaphysically prior features of agents in isolation from social contexts. Instead, they are functions of both agents and their normatively structured contexts. This is the idea of circumstantialism about the powers required for responsibility. Third, Vargas argues that an adequate theory of responsibility will be revisionist, or at odds with important strands of ordinary convictions about free will and moral responsibility. Building Better Beings provides a compelling and state-of-the-art defense of moral responsibility in the face of growing philosophical and scientific skepticism about free will and moral responsibility.

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.

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.

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.

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:

• the nature of law
• legality and morality
• the rule of law
• the duty to obey the law
• legal enforcement of sexual morality
• the nature of rights
• rights in an age of terror
• constitutional theory
• tort theory.

Arguing About Law is an inventive and stimulating reader for students new to philosophy of law, legal theory and 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.

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.

"Starkly essentialist reasoning sounds almost quaint by today's standards of gender equality. So it is with some surprise that general readers will encounter an intense and carefully reasoned defense of essentialism from the pen of one of America's best-known feminist legal theorists."
--"Women's Review of Books"

"By critiquing traditional ideas about 'justice, ' including economic theories about value, this provocative feminist jurisprudential scholar advances what she calls an 'ethic of care' and argues that 'if adjudication is to be just, then the goal of good judging must be both justice and care.'"
--"Georgia Bar Journal"

Over the past decade, mainstream feminist theory has repeatedly and urgently cautioned against arguments which assert the existence of fundamental--or essential--differences between men and women. Any biological or natural differences between the sexes are often flatly denied, on the grounds that such an acknowledgment will impede women's claims to equal treatment.

In "Caring for Justice," Robin West turns her sensitive, measured eye to the consequences of this widespread refusal to consider how women's lived experiences and perspectives may differ from those of men. Her work calls attention to two critical areas in which an inadequate recognition of women's distinctive experiences has failed jurisprudence. We are in desperate need, she contends, both of a theory of justice which incorporates women's distinctive moral voice on the meaning of justice into our discourse, and of a theory of harm which better acknowledges, compensates, and seeks to prevent the various harms which women, disproportionately and distinctively, suffer.

Providing afresh feminist perspective on traditional jurisprudence, West examines such issues as the nature of justice, the concept of harm, economic theories of value, and the utility of constitutional discourse. She illuminates the adverse repercussions of the anti-essentialist position for jurisprudence, and offers strategies for correcting them. Far from espousing a return to essentialism, West argues an anti- anti-essentialism, which greatly refines our understanding of the similarities and differences between women and men.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Since the early 1990s, politicians, policymakers, the media and academics have increasingly focused on religion, noting the significant increase in the number of cases involving religion. As a result, law and religion has become a specific area of study. The work of Professor Norman Doe at Cardiff University has served as a catalyst for this change, especially through the creation of the LLM in Canon Law in 1991 (the first degree of its type since the time of the Reformation) and the Centre for Law and Religion in 1998 (the first of its kind in the UK). Published to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the LLM in Canon Law and to pay tribute to Professor Doe's achievements so far, this volume reflects upon the interdisciplinary development of law and religion.

This text argues that justice is a virtue which everyone shares - a function of personal character and not just of government or economic planning. It uses examples from Plato to Ivan Boesky, to document how we live and how we feel.

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.

Clarence Thomas is one of the most vilified public figures of our day. To date, however, his legal philosophy has received only cursory treatment. First Principles provides a portrait of Thomas based not on the justice's caricatured reputation, but on his judicial opinions and votes, his scholarly writings, and his public speeches.

The paperback edition includes a provocative new Afterword by the author bringing the book up to date by assessing Justice Thomas's performance, and the reaction to his decisions, during the last five years.

This book explores the relationship between law and geography, particularly in relation to globalisation - of law, commerce, environmental change and society - which renders relations between the local and the global more significant. The book is structured according to conceptual frames - boundaries, land, property, nature, identity (persons, peoples and places), culture and time, and knowledge.

This book is a sophisticated, detailed, and original examination of the main ideas that have dominated Anglo-American legal philosophy since the Second World War. The author probes such themes as: whether there can be right answers to all disputed law cases; how laws and other rules impact on the practical rationality of actors subject to their authority; whether general principles justifying the law must themselves be thought of as part of the law binding on legal actors; and the possibility of an interpretivist jurisprudence that is continuous with law practice in a given culture.