In this translation of Saint Thomas Aquinas's The Treatise on Law, R. J. Henle, S.J., a well-known authority on philosophy and jurisprudence, fluently and accurately presents the Latin and English translation of this important work. Henle provides the necessary background for an informed reading of the Treatise, as well as the only in-depth commentary available in English on this text. The first section of the book contains an introduction to St. Thomas's life, work, writings, and jurisprudence. Henle discusses the structure of St. Thomas's magnum opus, Summa Theologiae, from which The Treatise on Law is excerpted. A brief section is included on Scholastic philosophy and also on St. Thomas's approach to the study of law. Henle then examines Thomas's definition of a law and the general doctrinal background for the Treatise. Finally Henle explores St. Thomas's sources, including his use of auctoritates, or authoritative quotations drawn primarily from the Bible, Aristotle, St. Augustine, and St. Isidore of Seville. The second part of the book contains the Latin text of the Treatise presented unit by unit, each followed by the English translation and, when appropriate, by a comment. The Treatise on Law will be of interest to law students, lawyers, judges, and legal scholars. It will also appeal to those interested in St. Thomas's legal philosophy, such as political scientists, theoretical sociologists, and cultural historians. For philosophers, especially beginners in medieval philosophy, it serves as a good introduction to the thought of St. Thomas.

This book develops an original and comprehensive theory of political liberalism. It defends bold new accounts of the nature of autonomy and individual liberty, the content of distributive justice, and the justification for the authority of the State. The theory that emerges integrates contemporary progressive and pluralistic liberalism into a broadly Aristotelian intellectual tradition. The early chapters of the book challenge the traditional conservative idea of individual liberty-the liberty to dispose of one's property as one wishes-and replace it with a new one, according to which liberty is of equal value to all persons, regardless of economic position. The middle chapters present an original theory of socio-economic justice, arguing that a society in which every citizen enjoys an equal share of liberty should be the distributive goal of the State. It is argued that this goal is incompatible with the existence of large disparities in wealth and economic power, and that (contra conservative and libertarian economic arguments) such disparities are harmful to the overall health of national and global economies. The final chapters provide an original argument that the State has both a moral duty and a moral right to pursue this program of socio-economic justice (contra conservative and libertarian moral arguments), and that only the measures necessary to implement this program lie within the morally justifiable limits on the State's authority. Though primarily a political work, it spans most areas of practical philosophy-including ethical, social, and legal theory; and meta-ethics, moral psychology, and action theory. And though fundamentally a philosophical work, it incorporates research from a number of fields-including decision theory, economics, political science, and jurisprudence; primatology, neuroscience, and psychology; and history, anthropology, sociology, and ecology-and is sure to be of interest to a wide range of scholars and students.

Among the most prominent and significant political and legal developments since the end of the Cold War is the proliferation of mechanisms for addressing the complex challenges of transition from authoritarian rule to human rights-based democratic constitutionalism, particularly with regards to the demands for accountability in relation to conflicts and abuses of the past. Whether one thinks of the Middle East, South Africa, the Balkans, Latin America, or Cambodia, an extraordinary amount of knowledge has been gained and processes instituted through transitional justice. No longer a byproduct or afterthought, transitional justice is unquestionably the driver of political change. In Globalizing Transitional Justice, Ruti G. Teitel provides a collection of her own essays that embody her evolving reflections on the practice and discourse of transitional justice since her book Transitional Justice published back in 2000. In this new book, Teitel focuses on the ways in which transitional justice concepts have found legal expression, especially through human rights law and jurisprudence, and international criminal law. These essays shed light on some of the difficult choices encountered in the design of transitional justice: criminal trials vs. amnesties, or truth commissions; domestic or international processes; peace and reconciliation vs. accountability and punishment. Transitional justice is considered not only in relation to political events and legal developments, but also in relation to the broader social and cultural tendencies of our times.

The nature and purpose of legal education has become a topic of intense debate in recent years. This timely book calls for a critical re-evaluation of university legal education, with the particular aim of strengthening its academic nature. The contributors emphasise lecturers' responsibility to challenge the assumptions students have about law, and the importance of putting law in a theoretical and social context that allows for critical reflection and sceptical detachment. In addition, the book reports upon teaching experiences and innovations, offering tools for teachers to strengthen the academic nature of legal education, and concludes with concrete proposals for change. Students and scholars engaged in the debate regarding the re-evaluation of academic legal education will find this book invaluable to their work. It will also be of interest to practitioners, such as educational experts and administrators looking to understand the role of law schools in creating responsible citizens. Contributors include: T. Bleeker, A. Boening, L. Corrias, U. de Vries, M. Del Mar, L. Francot, S. Germain, T. Hutchinson, B. Oomen, C. Schwoebel-Patel, B. Sokhi-Bulley, G. Uygur, B. van Klink, W. van Rossum

In his collection George extends the critique of liberalism he expounded in Making Men Moral and also goes beyond it to show how contemporary natural law theory provides a superior way of thinking about basic problems of justice and political morality. It is written with the same combination of stylistic elegance and analytical rigour that distinguished his critical work. Not content merely to defend natural law from its cultural despisers, he deftly turns the tables and deploys the idea to mount a stunning attack on regnant liberal beliefs about such issues as abortion, sexuality, and the place of religion in public life.

This book examines the concept of meaning and our general understanding of reality in a legal and philosophical context. Starting from the premise that meaning is a matter of linguistic and other forms of articulation, it considers the inherent philosophical consequences. Part I presents Klages', Derrida's, Von Hofmannsthal's and Wittgenstein's explorations of silence as a source of articulation and meaning. Debates about 20th century psychologism gave the attitude concept a pivotal role; it illustrates the importance of the discovery that a word is globally qualified as 'the basic unit of language'. This is mirrored in the fact that we understand reality as a matter of particles and thus interpret the real as a component of an all-embracing 'particle story'. Each chapter of the book focuses on an aspect of legal semiotics related to the chapter's theme: for instance on the meaning of a Judge's 'Saying for Law', on law students training in varying attitudes or on the ties between law and language. Part II of the book illustrates our general understanding of reality as a matter of particles and partitioning, and examines texts that prove that particle thinking is basic for our meaning concept. It shows that physics, quantum theory, holism, and modern brain research focusing on human linguistic capabilities, confirm their ties to the particle story. In contrast, the book concludes that partitions and particles are neither a fact in the history of the cosmos nor a determinant of knowledge and the sciences, and that meaning is a process: a constellation rather than a fixation. This is manifest once one understands meaning as the result of continuously changing attitudes, which create our narratives on cosmos and creation. The book proposes a new key for meaning: a linguistic occurrence anchored in dimensions of human narrativity.

Autonomy is the central idea of modern practical philosophy. Understood as self-legislation, autonomy seems to require that the validity of norms depends on recognition, namely, that their addressees, being autonomous agents, recognize these norms to be valid. But, how can one be bound by norms whose validity depends on their being recognized as valid by their addressees? The questions of how autonomous morality and, on this basis, the authoritative character of law can be understood present persistent puzzles that have been widely discussed, but still await a satisfactory solution. This book presents an analysis of the idea of autonomy as self-legislation and its consequences for law and morality. The book links the idea of autonomy with the idea of the balancing of normative arguments. It develops a notion of normative arguments as distinct from normative judgments and statements, and it explains claims to correctness and objectivity that are found in normative discourse. Thus, a 'logic of autonomy' emerges, and it is pervasive in normative reasoning. The book connects theses regarding the logic of norms, the structure of balancing, human and fundamental rights, legal validity, legal interpretation, and the relations among legal systems, offering a theory of central elements of normative argumentation, a theory that is undergirded by the mutual relations that exist between and among its parts, as well as through the relations that it bears to other theories. Moreover, it offers an alternative to Kantian notions of autonomy and provides solutions to problems that other theories have not been able to cope with. (Series: Law and Practical Reason - Vol. 5)

Law is generally understood to be a mirror of society that functions to maintain social order. Focusing on this general understanding, this book conducts a survey of Western legal and social theories about law and its relationship within society. It then engages in a theoretical and empirical critique of this common understanding, covering such subjects as the impact of legal transplantation and globalization of law, and it proposes an alternative way to understand the relationship between law and society.

This book presents an analysis of global legal history in Modern times, questioning the effect of political revolutions since the 17th century on the legal field. Readers will discover a non-linear approach to legal history as this work investigates the ways in which law is created. These chapters look at factors in legal revolution such as the role of agents, the policy of applying and publicising legal norms, codification and the orientations of legal writing, and there is a focus on the publicization of law.

The author uses Herbert Hart s schemes to conceive law as a human artefact or convention, being the union between primary rules of obligations and secondary rules conferring powers. Here we learn about those secondary rules and the legal construction of the Modern state and we question the extent to which codification and law reporting were likely to revolutionize the legal field.

These chapters examine the hypothesis of a legal revolution that could have concerned many countries in modern times. To begin with, the book considers the legal aspect of the construction of Modern States in the 17th and 18th centuries. It goes on to examine the consequences of the codification movement as a legal revolution before looking at the so-called constitutional revolution, linked with the extension of judicial review in many countries after World War II. Finally, the book enquires into the construction of an EU legal order and international law.

In each of these chapters, the author measures the scope of the change, how the secondary rules are concerned, the role of the professional lawyers and what are the characters of the new configuration of the legal field. This book provokes new debates in legal philosophy about the rule of change and will be of particular interest to researchers in the fields of law, theories of law, legal history, philosophy of law and historians more broadly."

Even in our most casual encounters with strangers -- when we are looking at each other, talking, or standing in line -- legal systems with elaborate codes, authorized exceptions, and procedures for sanctioning deviance operate with a remarkable degree of success. In this pathbreaking book, Michael Reisman describes how law is an integral and indispensable part of every social interaction. The private sphere or civic order that the liberal state is committed to preserving and in which it tries to refrain from legislating, says Reisman, is not a legal vacuum but the zone of microlaw -- some of it just, some unsatisfactory, and some tyrannical.

Interweaving numerous real-life examples with a detailed review of the scientific literature of many disciplines, Reisman shows the extent to which microlegal systems function in our own lives. More important, he draws on the criteria of ethics and legal philosophy to demonstrate that, paradoxically, efforts to improve microlaw may threaten the very autonomy of the private sphere that central is to the liberal state.

The contributions presented in this volume are the result of research activities and interdisciplinary encounters organised by the Nordic Network of Law and Literature. They focus on current discussions on justice in a Nordic and European context. By expanding the focus to justice and humanities - beyond "law and literature" - the authors intend to not only cover law and literature in a traditional (narrow) sense, but to embrace different perspectives closely linked to the research and debate about law and literature, e.g., in cultural studies. The volume specifically deals with four main themes, each of which is described and analysed from different angles, by a scholar with a background in the humanities and a scholar with a legal background (or lawyer), respectively: Law and Humanities - the Road Ahead; History, Memory and Human Rights; Forgiveness and Law; Justice, Culture and Copyright.

In this book the author investigates what is common to the German idea of the "Rechtsstaat "and the Anglo-American idea of the Rule of Law. He argues that, although dressed up in rather different garb, these two concepts are in fact based on the same fundamental idea and stand for the same values ( the law-state values ) all ideas that are in the European tradition older than their British and German variants. The fundamental idea is that the individual shall enjoy legal protection against infringements brought about by the exercise of power on the part of the state. In the book basic concepts such as legality, legal equality, legal certainty, legal accessibility and legal security are investigated. Also explored are their mutual relations, in particular, conflicts between them. Furthermore, the book offers practical advice on realising and sustaining these values in practice. Finally, it is argued that the characteristic law-state values can only be justified by reference to an even more fundamental humanistic idea, namely, what the author calls a life of human dignity ."

Reprint complete in one volume that contains "an English translation of five sections of the fourth volume of Otto von Gierke's magisterial treatise on the history of the German law of associations. When this edition was published, all competent students of the history of jurisprudence and political thought at once recognized that Professor Barker had made a very important contribution to the literature of these fields, none the less so because of the elaborate and learned Introduction which he himself had contributed." C.J. Friedrich, Harv. L. Rev. 49:677-680 cited in Marke, Catalogue of the Law Collection at New York University 938. Gierke [1841-1921], an important German jurist, is widely considered to be a founder of modern German constitutional law.

In this long-awaited book, Antony Duff offers a new perspective on the structures of criminal law and criminal liability. His starting point is a distinction between responsibility (understood as answerability) and liability, and a conception of responsibility as relational and practice-based. This focus on responsibility, as a matter of being answerable to those who have the standing to call one to account, throws new light on a range of questions in criminal law theory: on the question of criminalization, which can now be cast as the question of what we should have to answer for, and to whom, under the threat of criminal conviction and punishment; on questions about the criminal trial, as a process through which defendants are called to answer, and about the conditions (bars to trial) given which a trial would be illegitimate; on questions about the structure of offences, the distinction between offences and defences, and the phenomena of strict liability and strict responsibility; and on questions about the structures of criminal defences. The net result is not a theory of criminal law; but it is an account of the structure of criminal law as an institution through which a liberal polity defines a realm of public wrongdoing, and calls those who perpetrate (or are accused of perpetrating) such wrongs to account.

From the sex-free paradise of the Shakers to the worker's paradise of Marx, utopian ideas seem to have two things in common--they all are wonderfully plausible at the start and they all end up as disasters. In Visions of Utopia, three leading cultural critics--Edward Rothstein, Martin Marty, and Herbert Muschamp--look at the history of utopian thinking, exploring why they fail and why they are still worth pursuing.

Edward Rothstein, New York Times cultural critic, contends that every utopia is really a dystopia--a disaster in the making--one that overlooks the nature of humanity and the impossibilities of paradise. He traces the ideal in politics and technology and suggests that only in art--and especially in music--does the desire for utopia find satisfaction. Martin Marty examines several models of utopia--from Thomas More's to a 1960s experimental city that he helped to plan--to show that, even though utopias can never be realized, we should not be too quick to condemn them. They can express dimensions of the human spirit that might otherwise be stifled and can plant ideas that may germinate in more realistic and practical soil. And Herbert Muschamp, the New York Times architectural critic, looks at Utopianism as exemplified in two different ways: the Buddhist tradition and the work of visionary Viennese architect Adolph Loos.

Utopian thinking embodies humanity's noblest impulses, yet it can lead to horrors such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Regime. In Visions of Utopia, these leading thinkers offer an intriguing look at the paradoxes of paradise.

This book presents the current state of the art regarding the application of logical tools to the problems of theory and practice of lawmaking. It shows how contemporary logic may be useful in the analysis of legislation, legislative drafting and legal reasoning concerning different contexts of law making. Elaborations of the process of law making have variously emphasised its political, social or economic aspects. Yet despite strong interest in logical analyses of law, questions remains about the role of logical tools in law making. This volume attempts to bridge that gap, or at least to narrow it, drawing together some important research problems-and some possible solutions-as seen through the work of leading contemporary academics. The volume encompasses 20 chapters written by authors from 16 countries and it presents diversified views on the understanding of logic (from strict mathematical approaches to the informal, argumentative ones) and differentiated choices concerning the aspects of law making taken into account. The book presents a broad set of perspectives, insights and results into the emerging field of research devoted to the logical analysis of the area of creation of law. How does logic inform lawmaking? Are legal systems consistent and complete? How can legal rules be represented by means of formal calculi and visualization techniques? Does the structure of statutes or of legal systems resemble the structure of deductive systems? What are the logical relations between the basic concepts of jurisprudence that constitute the system of law? How are theories of legal interpretation relevant to the process of legislation? How might the statutory text be analysed by means of contemporary computer programs? These and other questions, ranging from the theoretical to the immediately practical, are addressed in this definitive collection.

This book presents the theory of the validity of legal norms, aimed at the practice of law, in particular the jurisdiction of the constitutional courts. The postpositivist concept of the validity of statutory law, grounded on a critical analysis of the basic theories of legal validity elaborated up to now, is introduced. In the first part of the book a contemporary German nonpositivist conception of law developed by Ralf Dreier and Robert Alexy is analysed in order to answer the question whether the juristic concept of legal validity should include moral standards or criteria. In the second part, a postpositivist concept of legal validity and an innovative model of validity discourse, based on the juristic presumption of the validity of legal norms, are proposed. The book is a work on analytical legal theory, written from a postpositivist, detached point of view.

American legal thought has progressed remarkably quickly from premodernism to modernism and into postmodernism in little over two hundred years, running from the nation's founding through today. This book tells the story of this mercurial journey through jurisprudence by showing the development of legal thought through these three intellectual periods. Feldman's narrative revolves around two broad interrelated themes: jurisprudential foundations and the idea of progress. Comprehensive and accessible, the book draws on significant cases from Supreme Court history to provide a handy one-volume overview for law students, practitioners, and legal scholars.

The book examines how the absence of insurance in the past led to some special maritime liability law principles such as 'general average' (i.e., losses or expenses shared by all the parties to a maritime adventure) and the limitation of shipowners' liability. In the absence of insurance, these principles served the function of insurance mostly for shipowners. As commercial marine insurance is now widely available, these principles have lost their justification and may in fact interfere with the most important goal of liability law i.e., deterrence from negligence. The work thus recommends their abolition. It further argues that when insurance is easily available and affordable to the both parties to a liability claim, the main goal of liability law should be deterrence as opposed to compensation. This is exactly the case with the maritime cargo liability claims where both cargo owners and shipowners are invariably insured. As a result, the sole focus of cargo liability law should be and to a great extent, is deterrence. On the other hand in the vessel-source oil pollution liability setting, pollution victims are not usually insured. Therefore oil pollution liability law has to cater both for compensation and deterrence, the two traditional goals of liability law. The final question the work addresses is whether the deterrent effect of liability law is affected by the availability of liability insurance. Contrary to the popular belief the work attempts to prove that the presence of liability insurance is not necessarily a hindrance but can be a complementary force towards the realization of deterrent goal of liability law.

This book contains 20 essays tracing the work of David Zarefsky, a leading North American scholar of argumentation from a rhetorical perspective.The essays cohere around 4 general themes: objectives for studying argumentation rhetorically, approaches to rhetorical study of argumentation, patterns and schemes of rhetorical argumentation, and case studies illustrating the potential of studying argumentation rhetorically.These articles are drawn from across Zarefsky's 45-year career. Many of these articles originally appeared in publications that are difficult to access today, and this collection brings the reader up to date on the topic.

Zarefsky's scholarship focuses on the role of language in political argumentation, the ways in which argumentation creates public knowledge and belief, the influence of framing and context on what is said and understood, the deployment of particular patterns and schemes of argumentation in public reasoning, and the influence of debate on politics and governance. All these topics are addressed in this book.

Each of the conceptual essays includes brief application to specific cases, and five extended case studies are also presented in this volume. The case studies cover different themes: two explore famous political debates, the third focuses on presidential rhetoric across the course of United States history, the fourth on the arguments for liberalism at a time of political polarization, and the fifth on the contemporary effort to engage the United States with the Muslim world.

This bookis ofinterest to scholars in the fields of philosophy, logic, law, philosophy of law, and legal history. The range of topics and concepts addressed, the interplay of concepts and cases and the unifying perspective of rhetorical argumentation make this book a valuable read for students of argumentative practice, whether rhetorically or otherwise."

This text offers a review of historical traditions of international ethical and political theory in the light of modern developments in political philosophy. McCarthy provides a defence of natural law tradition, and in response to the criticism of natural law that, along with Kantianism, it is too abstract to produce a substantive account of justice and rights, constructs an argument for basic, agency-grounded rights. Through his study, the author attacks "realism" and the modern "cosmopolitan" theories that have been too little debated.

All over the world the practice of peacebuilding is beset with common dilemmas: peace versus justice, religious versus secular approaches, individual versus structural justice, reconciliation versus retribution, and the harmonization of the sheer multiplicity of practices involved in repairing past harms. Progress towards the resolution of these dilemmas requires far more than reforming institutions and practices but rather clear thinking about the more basic questions: What is justice? And how is it related to the building of peace? The twin concepts of reconciliation and restorative justice, both involving the holistic restoration of right relationship, contain not only a compelling logic of justice but also great promise for resolving peacebuilding's tensions and for constructing and assessing its institutions and practices. This volume furthers this potential by developing not only the core content of these concepts but also their implications for accountability, forgiveness, reparations, traditional practices, human rights, and international law. While the volume's central orientation is theory, it contains much of interest to a wide range of scholars as well as practitioners. It is both interdisciplinary and accessibly written. It situates its analysis in countries as diverse as South Africa, El Salvador, Canada, and East Timor and in the work of institutions and communities such as the United Nations, the Catholic Church, various indigenous communities, and the international law community. It contains essays by leading scholars of restorative justice, international law, transitional justice, political philosophy and theology.

This collection of essays is the outcome of a workshop with Scott Shapiro on The Planning Theory of Law that took place in December 2009 at Bocconi University. It brings together a group of scholars who wrote their contributions to the workshop on a preliminary draft of Shapiro's "Legality." Then, after the workshop, they wrote their final essays on the published version of the book. The contributions clearly highlight the difference of the continental and civil law perspective from the common law background of Shapiro but at the same time the volume tries to bridge the gap between the two. The essays provide a critical reading of the planning theory of law, highlighting its merits on the one hand and objecting to some parts of it on the other hand. Each contribution discusses in detail a chapter of Shapiro's book and together they cover the whole of Shapiro's theory. So the book presents a balanced and insightful discussion of the arguments of "Legality."