From early in his career Jacques Derrida was intrigued by law. Over time, this fascination with law grew more manifest and he published a number of highly influential analyses of ethics, justice, violence and law. This book brings together leading scholars in a variety of disciplines to assess Derrida's importance for and impact upon legal studies.

DESCRIPTION: This volume of Studies in Law, Politics, and Society presents a diverse array of articles by an interdisciplinary and international group of scholars. Their work spans the social sciences, humanities, and law. It examines new perspectives on the relationship of law and values and race and the law. The articles published here exemplify the exciting and innovative work now being done in interdisciplinary legal scholarship. TABLE OF CONTENTS: List of contributors; Law and Values: Interpretive freedom and divine law: early rabbinic renderings of divine justice (C. Halberstam); Rawls' law of peoples: an expansion of the prioritization of political over religious values (E. Carpenter); Post modernity and the fading of individual responsibility (J. Krapp); Race in Law; Passing phantasms/sanctioning perfomativities: (re)reading white masculinity in Rhinelander v. Rhine lander (N. Hers); Tortious race, race torts: hate speech, intentional infliction, and the problem of harm (P.L. Rivers); Before or against the law? Citizens' legal beliefs and experiences as death penalty jurors (B. Steiner).

Kant's Master WorkPublished in 1797, The Philosophy of Law Rechtslehre] stands as one of the most significant late works by the great Prussian philosopher. Though he lived in an atmosphere of political and social repression, it is evident that Kant was sensitive to the revolutionary spirit that was spreading throughout Europe in the wake of Napoleon's armies. Claiming that man is born with reason and an innate desire for freedom, he argued that the union of these natural gifts could bring about a new sense of order and harmony in future generations. This edition also reprints Kant's later Supplementary Explanations (1797), which was added to the second edition (1798).Immanuel Kant 1724-1804] was the foremost thinker of the late Enlightenment and one of the greatest figures in the history of Western philosophy. Concerned principally with epistemology, ethics and aesthetics, his work synthesized trends initiated by Rationalism and Empiricism; it has been a significant influence in the subsequent development of philosophy, religion and law.

The aim of this book is to explore what it means to live a life under the law. Does a life of law preclude love and does a life of love preclude law? Part of the theme of the book is that social questions also raise individual moral and ethical questions; that to live lawfully implies both a question of how I should live in my relations with my fellows and how society should be organised. These questions must be looked at together. The book explores these questions and in looking at the articulation of law and love touches upon debates in personal morality, aesthetics, epistemology, social and political organisation, institutional design and the form and substance of law. It raises questions that are of interest to students and those working in law, theology, and social and political theory.

Is legal reasoning rationally persuasive, working within a discernible structure and using recognisable kinds of arguments? Does it belong to rhetoric in this sense, or to the domain of the merely 'rhetorical' in an adversative sense? Is there any reasonable certainty about legal outcomes in dispute-situations? If not, what becomes of the Rule of Law? Neil MacCormick's book tackles these questions in establishing an overall theory of legal reasoning which shows the essential part 'legal syllogism' plays in reasoning aimed at the application of law, while acknowledging that simple deductive reasoning, though always necessary, is very rarely sufficient to justify a decision. There are always problems of relevancy, classification or interpretation in relation to both facts and law. In justifying conclusions about such problems, reasoning has to be universalistic and yet fully sensitive to the particulars of specific cases. How is this possible? Is legal justification at this level consequentialist in character or principled and right-based? Both normative coherence and narrative coherence have a part to play in justification, and in accounting for the validity of arguments by analogy. Looking at such long-discussed subjects as precedent and analogy and the interpretative character of the reasoning involved, Neil MacCormick expands upon his celebrated Legal Reasoning and Legal Theory (OUP 1978 and 1994) and restates his 'institutional theory of law'.

Vagueness in law leads to indeterminacies in legal rights and obligations in many cases. The book defends that claim and explains its implications for legal theory. Vague language is the book's focus, but vagueness is not merely a linguistic feature of law. Law is necessarily vague. That fact seems to threaten the coherence of the ideal of the rule of law. The book defends a new, coherent articulation of that ideal.

With the exhaustion of postcolonial studies, and following the historical turn in studies of European imperialism, the time is ripe for a more sharply historical consideration of the role of European legal thought in processes of colonial governance. Rather than recycling general theories of the ideological role of law in European colonization, the contributions to this volume focus on the historical interaction between law and politics in British colonial contexts in order to clarify how European legal doctrines and institutions were actually transmitted, negotiated and modified in the concrete circumstances of frontier polities.

This book examines in some detail how our concepts of an ideal or universal' audience influence legal argument. It shows how asking what are the arguments and the forms of argumentation that we believe would be accepted by such an audience, is a useful analytical tool. The book explores what, if any, are the constraints that our vision of an ideal audience imposes on public discourse and particularly on legal discourse. Some visions of a universal audience are widely shared; others are only shared within particular political and legal cultures. Stylistic preferences can have as important an influence on legal decision making as do substantive preferences. In some cultures and legal systems there is a preference to resort to broad general principles; in others there is a preference for a more circumscribed and particular mode of legal argument. Different legal cultures have different idealized notions as to the role of the judge. Different conceptions of the role of the judge will influence many aspects of legal decision making, including how statutes and other authoritative official instruments should be interpreted. All these issues will also be influenced by how a particular legal culture envisions the common or public good and by how tolerant a particular legal culture is of diverse outcomes, that is by how much discretion superior legal decision makers are prepared to grant inferior decision makers. This volume will be of interest to academics and professionals in the fields of legal philosophy, argumentation and comparative law.

Republican Legal Theory discusses the history, constitution and purposes of law in a free state. This is the most comprehensive study since James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and The Federalist of republican legal ideas. Sellers explains the importance of popular sovereignty, the rule of law, the separation of powers, and other essential republican checks and balances in protecting liberty and against tyranny and corruption.

There have been few studies of the Law Lords, and no study of them by a political scientist for more than ten years. This book concentrates on the arguments the Law Lords use in justifying their decisions, and is concerned as much with the legal methodology as with the substance of their decisions. Very close attention is paid to the different approaches and styles of judicial argument, but the book is not restricted to this traditional analytic approach. One chapter applies the statistical techniques Americans call 'jurimetrics' and have successfully used on the US Supreme Court. The main theme is that the Law Lords enjoy and fully utilise far more discretion in their judgements than is normally admitted, and that much depends on exactly which judges happen to hear a case. the second part of the book shows the impact this extreme discretion has had in shaping both public law and areas of civil law.

A collection of essays discussing Herbert Hart's writings on responsibility. The essays focus upon Hart's work on causation in the law and on the justification of punishment. Specific topics discussed include senses of 'responsibility', voluntariness, Mill's harm principle, mens rea, excuses, the Hart-Wootton debate, and negligence.

We are said to face a crisis of over-criminalization: our criminal law has become chaotic, unprincipled, and over-expansive. This book proposes a normative theory of criminal law, and of criminalization, that shows how criminal law could be ordered, principled, and restrained. The theory is based on an account of criminal law as a distinctive legal practice that functions to declare and define a set of public wrongs, and to call to formal public account those who commit such wrongs; an account of the role that such practice can play in a democratic republic of free and equal citizens; and an account of the central features of such a political community, and of the way in which it constitutes its public realm-its civil order. Criminal law plays an important, but limited, role in such a political community in protecting, but also partly constituting, its civil order. On the basis of this account, we can see how such a political community will decide what kinds of conduct should be criminalized - not by applying one or more of the substantive master principles that theorists have offered, but by considering which kinds of conduct fall within its public realm (as distinct from the private realms that are not the polity's business), and which kinds of wrong within that realm require this distinctive kind of response (rather than one of the other kinds of available response). The outcome of such a deliberative process will probably be a more limited, and a more rational and principled, criminal law.

There is more to law than rules, robes and precedents. Rather, law is an integral part of social practices and policies, as diverse and complex as society itself.Thinking About Law offers a comprehensive introduction to the ways in which law has been presented and represented. It explores historical, sociological, economic and philosophical perspectives on the major legal and political debates in Australia today.The contributors examine the position of Aborigines in the Australian legal system and the impact of the Mabo case; divisions of power in Australian society and law; the question of objectivity in law; the relationship between legislation and social change; judicial decision-making and other issues.Accessibly written, Thinking About Law is essential reading for students and anyone interested in understanding our legal system.

This book provides a new conceptual model for considering constitutional rights from a comparative perspective. A prestigious club bars women from standing for executive positions. A homeowner refuses to rent their house to a person on grounds of their race. Each of these real-life cases involves the exercise of private power, which deprives individuals of their rights. Can these individuals invoke the Constitution in response? Horizontal Rights: An Institutional Approach brings a fresh perspective to these age-old, yet fraught issues. This book argues that constitutional scholarship and doctrine, across jurisdictions, has proceeded from an inarticulate premise called ‘default verticality.’ This is based on a set of underlying philosophical assumptions, which presumes that constitutional rights are presumptively applicable against the State, and need special justification to be applied against private parties. Departing from default verticality and its assumptions, this book argues that constitutional rights should apply horizontally between private parties where the existence of an economic, social, or cultural institution creates a difference in power between the parties, and allows one to violate the rights of the other. The institutional approach aims to be both theoretically convincing, as well as a providing a workable model for constitutional adjudication. It applies both to classic issues such as restrictive covenants, as well as cutting-edge contemporary legal problems around the regulation of platform work and the distribution of property upon divorce. This promises to be an exciting new contribution to the global conversation around constitutional rights and private power.

In response to ETA's 1997 kidnappings and murders thousands of Spaniards attended mass demonstrations to express their contempt for violence as a means of political pressure. The demand that public authorities prosecute and condemn those who directly or indirectly support ETA and its terrorist attacks was one of the most prevalent slogans in the marches. Indeed, the social response was aimed not only against the terrorist group, but also against Herri Batasuna (HB), the political party that openly endorse ETA's armed actions in the Basque Country. From the legal point of view, it is interesting to examine what it is citizens are requesting from the government in the above-mentioned case. How do these collective claims translate into legal language? One may think it fit to answer that Spanish citizens want violence to be met with the institutional punishment prescribed by the legal order. Nonetheless, it could also be argued that citizens in fact demand that certain kinds of behaviour be regulated by the law in their country. While from the latter viewpoint citizens wish for the creation of new legal norms, from the former they are just calling for the application of the law. What reasons may render us inclined to sympathise with one of these two views rather than the other? Which one of these two options is most appropriate? At first sight, this may appear to be a simple question.

The debate over race in this country has of late converged on the contentious issue of affirmative action. Although the Supreme Court once supported the concept of racial affirmative action, in recent years a majority of the Court has consistently opposed various affirmative action programs.

The Law of Affirmative Action provides a comprehensive chronicle of the evolution of the Supreme Court's involvement with the racial affirmative action issue over the last quarter century. Starting with the 1974 "DeFunis v. Odegaard" decision and the 1978" Bakke" decision, which marked the beginnings of the Court's entanglement with affirmative action, Girardeau Spann examines every major Supreme Court affirmative action decision, showing how the controversy the Court initially left unresolved in DeFunis has persisted through the Court's 1998-99 term.

Including nearly thirty principal cases, covering equal protection, voting rights, Title VII, and education, The Law of Affirmative Action is the only work to treat the Court decisions on racial affirmative action so closely, tracing the votes of each justice who has participated in the decisions. Indispensable for students and scholars, this timely volume elucidates reasons for the 180 degree turn in opinion on an issue so central to the debate on race in America today.

The Lives and Works of Eminent Jurists From the Last Two Thousand Years. Written by a team of eminent scholars under the auspices of the Association of American Law Schools, this highly readable book covers the lives and chief works of selected eminent Classical, Continental and English jurists including Gaius, Papinian, Ulpian, Bartolus, Alciati, Cujas, Gentili, Hugo Grotius, Selden, Hobbes, Zouche, Pufendorf, Vico, Bynkershoek, Montesquieu, Pothier, Vattel, Beccaria, Bentham, Mittermaier, Savigny and Jhering. Originally published in the Continental Legal History Series. (1914). Contains: GAIUS by James Crawford Ledlie PAPINIAN by E.C. Clark DOMITIUS ULPIAN by James Crawford Ledlie BARTOLUS by the late Sir William Ratigan ANDREA ALCIATA AND HIS PREDECESSORS by Coleman Phillipson ALBERICUS GENTILIS by Coleman Phillipson FRANCIS BACON, BARON VERULAM by James E.G. De Montmorency HUGO GROTIUS by the late Sir William Ratigan JOHN SELDEN by Edward Manson THOMAS HOBBES by James E.G. De Montmorency RICHARD ZOUCHE by Coleman Phillipson JEAN BAPTISTE COLBERT by H.A. De Colyar GOTTFRIED WILHELM VON LEIBNITZ by Sir John MacDonell SAMUEL VON PUFENDORF by Coleman Phillipson GIOVANNI BATTISTA VICO by Michael Rafferty CORNELIUS VAN BYNKERSHOEK by Coleman Phillipson CHARLES LOUIS DE SECONDAT, BARON DE LA BREDE ET DE MONTESQUIEU by Sir Courtenay Ilbert ROBERT JOSEPH POTHIER by James E.G. De Montmorency EMERICH DE VATTEL by Coleman Phillipson CAESAR BONESANA, MARQUIS DI BECCARIA by T. Bridgwater WILLIAM SCOTT, LORD STOWELL by Norman Bentwick JEREMY BENTHAM by John Maxcy Zane CAROL JOSEPH ANTON MITTERMAIER by Levin Goldschmidt FRIEDRICH CAN VON SAVIGNY by James E.G. De Montmorency RUDOLPH VON IHERING by Sir John MacDonell"

This book provides a comparative perspective on one of the most intriguing developments in law: the influence of basic rights and human rights in private law. It analyzes the application of basic rights and human rights, which are traditionally understood as public law rights, in private law, and discusses the related spillover effects and changing perspectives in legal doctrine and practice. It provides examples where basic rights and human rights influence judicial reasoning and lead to changes of legislation in contract law, tort law, property law, family law, and copyright law. Providing both context and background analysis for any critical examination of the horizontal effect of fundamental rights in private law, the book contributes to the current debate on an important issue that deserves the attention of legal practitioners, scholars, judges and others involved in the developments in a variety of the world's jurisdictions. This book is based on the General Report and national reports commissioned by the International Academy of Comparative Law and written for the XIXth International Congress of Comparative Law in Vienna, Austria, in the summer of 2014.

This book is an adaptation of my PhD thesis Representing L3gVI Rules in Deontic Logic Royakkers, 1996]. The main alterations are: The addition of chapter 2 concerning the semantics of deontic logic based on valua tions. In this chapter I extend the Beth tableau method, which is originally developed for the propositional calculus, to also be applicable for deontic logic. For those who are not familiar with deontic logic or with the axiomatic deduction, this method is a useful tool to check whether a formula is valid or not. The addition of the notion of commitment in chapter 5, and the notion of weak and strong permission in chapter 7. The omission of the chapter concerning defeasible deontic logic, of which a revised version is published in Nute, 1997]. Chapter 6 has been revised rather thoroughly. Here I introduce the logic of enact ment based on epistemic logic and local reasoning to express normative inconsis tencies in a consistent way. I wish to thank John-Jules Meyer, Giovanni Sartor and Marek Sergot for their suggestions and criticisms of my PhD thesis, which have improved this book. Heleen Neggers and Jan Draisma deserve credit for the layout. Special thanks go to Frank Dignum for his continuous support and inspiring sugges tions. v Contents 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Logic and law. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . 1 . . . 1.2 Conflicting speed limits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . 3 . ."

Talk about law often includes reference to ideals of justice, equality or freedom. But what do we refer to when we speak about ideals in the context of law? This book explores the concept of ideals by combining an investigation of different theories of ideals with a discussion of the role of ideals in law. A comparison of the theories of Gustav Radbruch and Philip Selznick leads up to a pragmatist theory of legal ideals, which provides an interesting new position in the debate about values in law between legal positivists and natural law thinkers. Attention for law's central ideals enables us to understand law's autonomous character, while at the same time tracing its connection to societal values.
Essential reading for anyone interested in the role of values or ideals in law.

This collection offers a timely opportunity to re-examine both the coherence of the concept of an 'early Enlightenment', and the specific contribution of natural law theories to its formation. It reassesses the work of major thinkers such as Grotius, Hobbes, Locke, Malebranche, Pufendorf and Thomasius, and evaluates the appeal and importance of the discourse of natural jurisprudence both to those working inside conventional educational and political structures and to those outside.

We cannot see the world as it is because we face it in a 'contaminated' vein. That is, our conceptual scheme and biological constitution condition our world view. The legal normative world we are dealing with has some special features, like the primacy of practical reason over theoretical reason and the primacy of the internal point of view over the external point of view. Although it is not a feature of all legal traditions, 'legal dogmatics' is a privileged way of knowing legal normative object, that is, our legal orders. But we are not undertaking - as legal scholars - an empiricist enterprise because, among other reasons, we are not interested in the reality 'in itself' but in the 'relevant' reality, at least for us. In this respect, we do not only depend on theories (like physicists) but also on legal authoritative sources, that is, power and legitimacy. Legal scholars (and other participants in the legal life) are not neutral observers of their own world, trying to discover some hidden truth. They are committed experts trying to describe, justify and improve the legal order.

This book centres on Samuel Pufendorf's (1632-1694) moral and political philosophy, a subject of recently renewed interest among intellectual historians, philosophers and legal scholars in the English-speaking world. Pufendorf's significance in conceptualizing sociability in a way that ties moral philosophy, the theory of the state, political economy, and moral psychology together has already been acknowledged, but this book is the first systematic investigation of the moral psychological underpinnings of Pufendorf's theory of sociability in their own right. Readers will discover how Pufendorf's psychological and social explanation of sociability plays a crucial role in his natural law theory. By drawing attention to Pufendorf's scattered remarks and observations on human psychology, a new interpretation of the importance of moral psychology is presented. The author maintains that Pufendorf's reflection on the psychological and physical capacities of human nature also matters for his description of how people adopt sociability as their moral standard in practice. We see how, since Pufendorf's interest in human nature is mainly political, moral psychological formulations are important for Pufendorf's theorizing of social and political order. This work is particularly useful for scholars investigating the multifaceted role of passions and emotions in the history of moral and political philosophy. It also affords a better understanding of what later philosophers, such as Smith, Hume or Rousseau, might have find appealing in Pufendorf's writings. As such, this book will also interest researchers of the Enlightenment, natural law and early modern philosophy.

autonomy principally in tenns of the agent's conscious choice of ends or conduct. From this, the cognitivist emphasis on mental states and their contents naturally follows. The presence of specified mental states, as signifying agent choice, thus becomes the hallmark of responsible conduct. Capacities model theorists, by contrast, interpret personal autonomy and agent responsibility in tenns of the looser notion of 'control'. From this perspective, conscious choosing is but one (highly responsible) instance of such control, and the presence or absence of mental states is primarily relevant to detennining degrees of responsibility. The examination of these two models occupies the bulk of this manuscript. Exploration of the capacities model and criticism of the orthodox view also generate treatment of legal issues such as the use of negligence liability, the nature of criminal omissions, the character of various legal defenses, and so on. Chapters 2 and 3 set out some of the thematic arguments outlined above and introduce tenninology and useful distinctions. Chapters 4 through 7 provide substantive analyses of agent responsibility and of standards of criminal liability. In these chapters, I argue for the comparative superiority of the capacities model of responsibility and offer recommendations for changes in current legal conceptions and standards of liability. Each chapter centers on an element of individual responsibility and related legal concerns. The final chapter, Chapter 8, comprises an overview of the integrated theory of responsibility and liability and its comparison with the traditional view.

Who presupposes Kelsen's basic norm? Is it possible to defend the presupposition in a way that is convincing? And what difference does the presupposition make? Endeavouring to highlight the role of basic assumptions in the law, the author argues that the verb "to presuppose', with Kelsen, has not only a conceptual but also a normative dimension; and that the expression 'presupposing the basic norm'is adequate in so far as it marks the descriptive-normative nature of utterances made in specifically legal speech-situations.
Addressed to legal theorists in general, the treatise purports to show that Kelsen's doctrine lends itself to an interpretation according to which the very act of "presupposing" the Grundnorm can be understood as a Grund, i.e. normative source of all positive law; and, what is more, that this interpretation admits of addressing the issue of the (formal) legitimacy of supra-national and directly applicable rules and other norms.