This book provides a comprehensive introduction to global legal thought. It argues that economic globalization and digitalization have induced significant insecurity about the future of human social organization. While traditional international law as a system based on the consent of national states is in the process of rapid adaptation to its new social preconditions, a variety of transnational regulatory levels compete for legal authority. In this process of change, there is more need than ever to guide the theoretical understanding because academic concepts have a crucial influence on the emerging practice of global law. This book highlights which choices are available and argues that global law requires taking a stand in mutually irreconcilable choices.

The hunt for beneficial owners is on. Like an elephant, the beneficial owner hides in the jungle of complex legal structures, waiting to be discovered by eager prosecutors. But what lies behind this metaphor? What is a Beneficial Owner? Is beneficial ownership a right? What does this right encompass? What is the value of this right compared to other rights? And if beneficial ownership is not a right, is it still a legally relevant relation? How do courts, namely the U.S. Supreme Court deal with the concept? When do Anglo-American judges and European scholars resort to the concept?

This book approaches these questions from two perspectives: legal fundamentals and the field of U.S. federal Indian law. Both legal theories and case law are scrutinized with the aim to find a better understanding of the basic conception and characteristics of beneficial ownership. Federal Indian law has been chosen for the study of the concrete implications of the beneficial ownership concept in what Roscoe Pound referred to as "the law in action." To some, this choice of legal field might seem somewhat unusual. What answers could federal Indian law possibly offer with regard to pressing questions from the financial industry? As always, there is a short and a long answer. The short answer is that the analysis of an equally sophisticated field of law can open new perspectives on a given field of law. For example, not only potential criminals and tax evaders but also members of an older civilization are beneficial owners. The long answer can be found in this very book."

This book reviews the knowledge corpus about access to civil justice across disciplines and legal traditions and proposes a new research framework for civil justice reform. This framework is intended to foster further critical analysis of the justice system in a systematic and organized way. In particular, the framework underlines the tensions between different values considered as central to the civil justice system, and in doing so potentially allows for conscious, reflected and enlightened choices about the values that are to be prioritized in the reform of justice systems.

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.

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.

This book critically explores the development of radical criminology through a range of written Ancient Greek works including epic and lyrical poetry, drama and philosophy, across different chapters. It traces the development of political power and the concepts of law, legitimacy, crime, justice and deviance in the Ancient Greek world and the political struggles that propelled that development, using the conflict perspective as a conceptual tool of the sociological analysis of reality. Theoretical discussions of crime and justice typically stem from the better known works of Plato or Aristotle although this book explores the works preceding these. This book will appeal to those interested in the (pre)history of criminology and the historical production of criminological knowledge.

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."

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.

This new English translation of Solov'ev's principal ethical treatise, written in his later years, presents Solov'ev's mature views on a host of topics ranging from a critique of individualistic ethical systems to the death penalty, the meaning of war, animal rights, and environmentalism. Written for the educated public rather than for a narrow circle of specialists, Solov'ev's work largely avoids technical vocabulary while illustrating his points with references to classical literature from the ancient Greeks to Goethe. Although written from a deeply held Christian viewpoint, Solov'ev emphasizes the turn from his earlier position, now allegedly developing the independence of moral philosophy from metaphysics and revealed religion. Solov'ev sees the formal universality of the idea of the moral good in all human beings, albeit that this idea is bereft of material content. This first new English-language translation in a century makes a unique contribution to the study of Solov'ev's thought. It uses the text of the second edition published in 1899 as its main text, but provides the variations and additions from the earlier versions of each chapter in running notes. Other unique features of this translation are that the pagination of the widely available 1914 edition is provided in the text, and the sources of Solov'ev's numerous Biblical quotations and references as well as literary and historical allusions.

This work deals with the temporal effect of judicial decisions and more specifically, with the hardship caused by the retroactive operation of overruling decisions. By means of a jurisprudential and comparative analysis, the book explores several issues created by the overruling of earlier decisions. Overruling of earlier decisions, when it occurs, operates retrospectively with the effect that it infringes the principle of legal certainty through upsetting any previous arrangements made by a party to a case under long standing precedents established previously by the courts. On this account, in the recent past, a number of jurisdictions have had to deal with the prospect of introducing in their own systems the well-established US practice of prospective overruling whereby the court may announce in advance that it will change the relevant rule or interpretation of the rule but only for future cases. However, adopting prospective overruling raises a series of issues mainly related to the constitutional limits of the judicial function coupled by the practical difficulties attendant upon such a practice. This book answers a number of the questions raised by this practice. It makes use of the great reservoir of foreign legal experience that furnishes theoretical and practical ideas from which national judges may draw their knowledge and inspiration in order to be able to advise a rational method of dealing with time when they give their decisions.

This edited work collates novel contributions on contemporary topics that are related to human rights. The essays address analytic-descriptive questions, such as what legal personality actually means, and normative questions, such as who or what should be recognised as a legal person. As is well-known among jurists, the law has a special conception of personhood: corporations are persons, whereas slaves have traditionally been considered property rather than persons. This odd state of affairs has not garnered the interest of legal theorists for a while and the theory of legal personhood has been a relatively peripheral topic in jurisprudence for at least 50 years. As readers will see, there have recently been many developments and debates that justify a theoretical investigation of this topic. Animal rights activists have been demanding that some animals be recognized as legal persons. The field of robotics has prompted questions about driverless cars: should they be granted a limited legal personality, so that the car itself would be responsible for damages? This book explores such concepts and touches on matters of bioethics, animal law and medical law. It includes matters of legal history and appeals to both legal scholars and philosophers, especially those with an interest in theories of law and the philosophy of law.

This book demonstrates the importance of a duty-based approach to morality. The dominance of what has been labeled "rights talk" leads to the neglect of duties without corresponding rights (e.g., duties of virtue) and stimulates the proliferation of questionable human rights. Therefore, this book argues for a duty-based perspective on morality in order to, first, salvage duties of virtue, and, second, counter the trend of rights-proliferation by providing some conceptual clarity concerning rights and duties that will enable us to differentiate between genuine and spurious rights-claims. The argument for this duty-based perspective is made by examining two particularly contentious duties: duties to aid the global poor and civic duties. These two duties serve as case studies and are explored from the perspectives of political theory, jurisprudence and moral philosophy. The argument is made that both these duties can only be adequately defined and allocated if we adopt the perspective of duties, as the predominant perspective of rights either does not recognize them to be duties at all or else leaves their content and allocation indefinite. This renewed focus on duties does not wish to diminish the importance of rights. Rather, the duty-based perspective on morality will strengthen human rights discourse by distinguishing more strictly between genuine and inauthentic rights. Furthermore, a duty-based approach enriches our moral landscape by recognizing both duties of justice and duties of virtue. The latter duties are not less important or supererogatory, but function as indispensable complements to the duties prescribed by justice. In this perceptive and exceptionally lucid book, Eric Boot argues that a duty-focused approach to morality will remedy the shortcomings he finds in the standard accounts of human rights. The study tackles staple philosophical topics such as the contrasts between duties of virtue and duties of justice and imperfect and perfect obligations. But more importantly perhaps, it also confronts the practical question of what our human rights duties are and how we ought to act on them. Boot's book is a splendid example of how philosophy can engage and clarify real world problems. Kok-Chor Tan, Department of Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania A lively and enjoyable defence of the importance of our having duties to fellow human beings in severe poverty. At a time when global justice has never been more urgent, this new book sheds much needed light. Thom Brooks, Professor of Law and Government and Head of Durham Law School, Durham University

This handbook addresses legal reasoning and argumentation from a logical, philosophical and legal perspective. The main forms of legal reasoning and argumentation are covered in an exhaustive and critical fashion, and are analysed in connection with more general types (and problems) of reasoning. Accordingly, the subject matter of the handbook divides in three parts. The first one introduces and discusses the basic concepts of practical reasoning. The second one discusses the general structures and procedures of reasoning and argumentation that are relevant to legal discourse. The third one looks at their instantiations and developments of these aspects of argumentation as they are put to work in the law, in different areas and applications of legal reasoning.

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.

The theoretical basis of commercial law, corporate governance law, and corporate law is still unsatisfactory. There essentially is no theory of commercial law, and existing theories of corporate governance and corporate law cannot explain the behaviour of firms or the contents of existing regulation. This book proposes a coordinated solution for all three areas. The starting point is that all three areas deal with the organisation of firms. Commercial law, corporate governance, and corporate law are therefore studied from the perspective of the firm rather than that of the judge or the investor. Changing the perspective makes it easier to formulate an "umbrella" theory of commercial law, and theories of corporate governance and corporate law as applications of the main theory. The book provides examples of how the proposed theories work by studying legal corporate governance tools and practices that increase the sustainability of the firm. Sustainability can be bolstered by making the governance model more self-enforcing and ensuring that it fosters innovation.

Enabling information interoperability, fostering legal knowledge usability and reuse, enhancing legal information search, in short, formalizing the complexity of legal knowledge to enhance legal knowledge management are challenging tasks, for which different solutions and lines of research have been proposed.

During the last decade, research and applications based on the use of legal ontologies as a technique to represent legal knowledge has raised a very interesting debate about their capacity and limitations to represent conceptual structures in the legal domain. Making conceptual legal knowledge explicit would support the development of a web of legal knowledge, improve communication, create trust and enable and support open data, e-government and e-democracy activities. Moreover, this explicit knowledge is also relevant to the formalization of software agents and the shaping of virtual institutions and multi-agent systems or environments.

This book explores the use of ontologism in legal knowledge representation for semantically-enhanced legal knowledge systems or web-based applications. In it, current methodologies, tools and languages used for ontology development are revised, and the book includes an exhaustive revision of existing ontologies in the legal domain. The development of the Ontology of Professional Judicial Knowledge (OPJK) is presented as a case study.
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This book focuses on the problems of rules, rule-following and normativity as discussed within the areas of analytic philosophy, linguistics, logic and legal theory. Divided into four parts, the volume covers topics in general analytic philosophy, analytic legal theory, legal interpretation and argumentation, logic as well as AI& Law area of research. It discusses, inter alia, "Kripkenstein's" sceptical argument against rule-following and normativity of meaning, the role of neuroscience in explaining the phenomenon of normativity, conventionalism in philosophy of law, normativity of rules of interpretation, some formal approaches towards rules and normativity as well as the problem of defeasibility of rules. The aim of the book is to provide an interdisciplinary approach to an inquiry into the questions concerning rules, rule-following and normativity.

This book provides essential legal information on state secession in an innovative manner: unlike conventional approaches, which invariably focus on whether there is a right to secession, here the discussion centers on how secessionist conflicts can be effectively resolved. To that end, the book not only reveals the inadequacy of the current international legal framework, but also carefully considers how relevant actors can work to improve the legal system. In short, it argues that secessionists and non-secessionists should conclude an agreement to reconcile their conflicting rights to self-determination, while external actors should do their utmost to ensure the success of these efforts. Positive external involvement requires external actors to refrain from the use of force and to participate more rationally in secessionist conflicts. Given its subject matter, the book will appeal to a broad readership, including students and researchers in international law, international relations and ethnic studies, as well as enthusiasts in these fields.

This volume explores the opportunities and challenges facing the accounting profession in an increasingly globalized business and financial reporting environment. It looks back at past experiences of the profession in attempting to meet its public interest obligation. It examines the role and responsibilities of accounting to society including regulatory requirements, increased emphasis on corporate social responsibility, accounting fraud and whistle-blowing implications, internationalization of public interest obligations, and providing the education needed to be successful. The book incorporates an ethical dimension in making these assessments. Its focus is a conceptual, theoretical one drawing on classical philosophy, the sociology of professions, economic theory, and the public interest dimension of accountants as professionals. The authors of papers are long-time contributors to the annual symposium on Research in Accounting Ethics sponsored by the Public Interest Section of the AAA.

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Does an offender have the "right" to be punished? "The right to be punished" may sound like an oxymoron, but it is not necessarily so. With the emergence of modern criminal law, the offender gained the "right" to be punished by rational criminal law rather than being lynched by an angry mob. The present-day offender may have the "right" to be punished by doctrinal sentencing rather than being subjected to verdicts based on vague, unclear, and uncertain principles. In modern criminal law, the imposition of criminal liability follows accurate and strict rules, whereas there are no similar rules for the imposition of punishment. The process of sentencing is vague and obscure, as are the considerations used for the imposition of punishments. The objective of the present book is to propose a comprehensive, general, and legally sophisticated theory of modern doctrinal sentencing. The challenges of such a legal theory are plenty and complex. In addition to increasing clarity and certainty, modern doctrinal sentencing must deal with modern types of delinquency (e.g. organized crime, recidivism, corporate offenders, high-tech offenses, etc.) and modern principles of criminal law. Modern doctrinal sentencing must serve to ensure optimal sentencing.

This work deals with the applications of Semantic Publishing technologies in the legal domain, i.e., the use of Semantic Web technologies to address issues related to the Legal Scholarly Publishing. Research in the field of Law has a long tradition in the application of semantic technologies, such as Semantic Web and Linked Data, to real-world scenarios. This book investigates and proposes solutions for three main issues that Semantic Publishing needs to address within the context of the Legal Scholarly Publishing: the need of tools for linking document text to a formal representation of its meaning; the lack of complete metadata schemas for describing documents according to the publishing vocabulary and the absence of effective tools and user interfaces for easily acting on semantic publishing models and theories.

In particular, this work introduces EARMARK, a markup meta language that allows one to create markup documents without the structural and semantic limits imposed by markup languages such as XML. EARMARK is a platform to link the content layer of a document with its intended formal semantics and it can be used with the Semantic Publishing and Referencing (SPAR) Ontologies, another topic in this book. SPAR Ontologies are a collection of formal models providing an upper semantic layer for describing the publishing domain. Using EARMARK as a foundation for SPAR descriptions opens up to a semantic characterisation of all the aspects of a document and of its parts. Finally, four user-friendly tools are introduced: LODE, KC-Viz, Graffoo and Gaffe. They were expressly developed to facilitate the interaction of publishers and domain experts with Semantic Publishing technologies by shielding such users from the underlying formalisms and semantic models of such technologies.

This text addresses the corporate causes of the collapse of the Qing Dynasty and the emergence of modern Republican China. Weaving together political, legal and business histories, it focuses on the key relationship between China, cement and corporations, and demonstrates how the particular circumstances of cement manufacturing in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China serve to illuminate key aspects of Chinese political economy and illustrate the importance of legal frameworks in the emergence of industrial enterprises. Examining the centrality of legal personality in China's historical story, seen from the angle of cement manufacturing corporations, it offers an alternative historical perspective on the making of the modern Chinese States and delves into the involvement of larger-than-life historical figures of modern China such as Yuan Shikai, Chiang Kai-shek and the revolutionary and the father of modern China, Sun Yat-sen, in the unfolding of these events.

This book focuses on the reality of China's modern judiciary, systematically demonstrating and discussing the judicial philosophy and judicial ethics as applied by Chinese courts and judges. In order to illustrate the methods of jurisprudence and sociology of law in the context of China's judicial practice and practicability of applicable laws, it also addresses judicial methodology and Chinese judges' trial methods. Based on comparative study and aiming at global judicial reform, the book provides valuable guidance and insights for readers pursuing a detailed understanding of modern Chinese judiciary, Chinese judges and Chinese rule of law. The book is intended to primarily serve the need of legal professionals around the world, in particular those who are interested in China's judicial system.

A collection of original contributions by philosophers working in the ethics of punishment, gathering new perspectives on various challenging topics including punishment and forgiveness, dignity, discrimination, public opinion, torture, rehabilitation, and restitution.