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Books > Law > Jurisprudence & general issues > Jurisprudence & philosophy of law
This book is an investigation into Carl Schmitt's critical thinking regarding the alleged deficiencies he identified in modern liberalism. Noted jurist, constitutional scholar, and a fierce critic of liberalism and pluralism, Schmitt mounted a sustained attack on the defects of the Weimar constitution between 1916 and 1934, contending that what Germany needed was a strong decisive leader to maintain political unity. This book provides a concise and clear explanation of Schmitt's disagreements with other constitutional scholars, from his time as a university graduate up until Hitler's rise to power. Although these disagreements were couched in legal terminology, they represented political criticisms that went directly to the heart of modern democracy, culminating in Schmitt's defence of the Reich against Prussia in the constitutional crisis of 1932. The book concludes with a strenuous defence of modern liberalism in response to the Schmittian critique. Thus, this book is not just an exploration of Carl Schmitt's work, but a response to one of the harshest attacks on the modern liberal state, and a blueprint for a renewal of democracy, pluralism, and the rule of law.
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.
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"
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.
This book explores critical questions pertaining to the character and content of the "American People" as posited in the US Supreme Court's interpretation of the fundamental law. What exactly is an American? Who or what comprise the People? What are the constitutive sociocultural, political, and economic ordering principles of the American People and society? How does the Court impact the nationalist character and content of law and policy? From a sociocultural, economic, political, and ideological perspective, the Court's singular proclamations as to what the US Constitution means, what is its purpose, and how it is to be perceived and implemented have profound consequences for representational politics and notions of what exactly constitutes the American polity. This book employs a critical, conceptual, and structural approach, critically examining the notion of the People in constitutional discourse, and its impact on government, politics, law, and society in the present.
This detailed analysis of the content and configuration of civil codes in diverse jurisdictions also examines their relationship with some branches of private law as: family law, commercial law, consumer law and private international law. It analyzes the codification, decodification and recodification processes illuminating the dialogue between current codes - and private law legislation in general - with Constitutions and International Conventions. The commentary elucidates the changing requirements of civil law as it shifted from an early protection of patrimony to a support for commercial and contractual law. It also explains the varying trajectories of civil law, which in some jurisdictions was merged with religious legal tenets in its codification of familial relations, while in others it was fused with commercial law or, indeed, codified from scratch as a discrete legal corpus. Elsewhere, the volume provides material on differing approaches to consumer law, where relevant legislation may be scattered across numerous statutes, and also on private international law, a topic of increasing relevance in a world where business corporations have interests in multiple jurisdictions (and often play one off against another). The volume features invited contributions from leading scholars in the field of private law brought together for an in depth analysis of the current regulatory attitude in this field of the law in jurisdictions with diverse legal systems and traditions. In current times we are witnessing the adoption of diverging regulatory solutions. Through the analysis of the past and present of private law regulation, the volume unveils the underlying trends and relevance of the codification method across the world.
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.
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.
On the eight-hundredth anniversary of the Magna Carta, Women and the Magna Carta investigates what the charter meant for women's rights and freedoms from an historical and legal perspective.
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.
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 . ."
The concept of learning to 'think like a lawyer' is one of the cornerstones of legal education in the United States and beyond. In this book, Jeffrey Lipshaw provides a critique of the traditional views of 'thinking like a lawyer' or 'pure lawyering' aimed at lawyers, law professors, and students who want to understand lawyering beyond the traditional warrior metaphor. Drawing on his extensive experience at the intersection of real world law and business issues, Professor Lipshaw presents a sophisticated philosophical argument that the "pure lawyering" of traditional legal education is agnostic to either truth or moral value of outcomes. He demonstrates pure lawyering's potential both for illusions of certainty and cynical instrumentalism, and the consequences of both when lawyers are called on as dealmakers, policymakers, and counsellors. This book offers an avenue for getting beyond (or unlearning) merely how to think like a lawyer. It combines legal theory, philosophy of knowledge, and doctrine with an appreciation of real-life judgment calls that multi-disciplinary lawyers are called upon to make. The book will be of great interest to scholars of legal education, legal language and reasoning as well as professors who teach both doctrine and thinking and writing skills in the first year law school curriculum; and for anyone who is interested in seeking a perspective on 'thinking like a lawyer' beyond the litigation arena.
"Nothing is more curiously enquired after . . . than the causes of
every phenomenon. . . . We] push on our enquiries, till we arrive
at the original and ultimate principle. . . . This is our aim in
all our studies and reflections."
The close connection between philosophy of language and philosophy of law has been recognized for decades through the work of many influential legal philosophers. This volume brings recent advances in philosophy of language to bear on contemporary debates about the nature of law and legal interpretation. The book builds on recent work in pragmatics and speech-act theory to explain how, and to what extent, legal content is determined by linguistic considerations. At the same time, the analysis shows that some of the unique features of communication in the legal domain - in particular, its strategic nature - can be employed to put pressure on certain assumptions in philosophy of language. This enables a more nuanced picture of how semantic and pragmatic determinants of communication work in complex and large-scale systems such as law. Chapters build on explanations of key elements of statutory language, such as the distinction between what is said and what is implicated, the possibility of ascribing truth-values to legal prescriptions and the structure of legal inferences, the various forms of vagueness in the law, the distinctions between vagueness, ambiguity, and polysemy in legal language, and the distinction between concept and conceptions, mostly in the context of constitutional interpretation. The book demonstrates that paying close attention to the kind of speech acts legal directives are, and how they determine the content of the law, enables a better understanding of the boundaries between normative and linguistic determinants of legal content.
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 volume provides a critical roadmap through the major historical sources of legal semiotics as we know them today. The history of legal semiotics, now at least a century old, has never been written (a non-event itself pregnant with semiotic possibility). As a consequence, its sources are seldom clearly exposed and, as word, object and meaning change, are sometimes lost. They reach from an English translation of the 1916 inaugural lecture of the first Chair in Legal Significs at the Amsterdam University, via mid 20th century studies on "property" or "contract," to equally fascinating essays on contemporary semiotic problems produced by former students of the Roberta Kevelson Semiotics Roundtable Seminar at Penn State University 2012 and 2013. Together, the materials in this book weave the fabric of semiotics and significs, two names for the unfolding of semiotics in law and legal discourse at least until the second half of the 20th century, and both of which covered a lawyer's focus on sign and meaning in law. The latter is embedded within the cultural imperatives of the civilization that gave these terms meaning and made them an effective tool for the dissection of law, its reconstitution as an instrument to be used by the lawyer to advance the interests of her clients, and for judges as a means to restructure language as a narrative of law whose power could bend behavior to its strictures. Legal semiotics has become an indispensible part of the elite lawyer's toolkit and a fundamental approach to analysis of legal texts. Two previous volumes published in 2011 and 2012 explored the conceptual, methodological and epistemological progress in the field of legal semiotics, the modern forms of semiotics study, and the mechanics of meaning making processes by lawyers. Yet the great lessons of semiotics requires a focus on the origins of the concepts and frameworks that would become contemporary legal semiotics, its origins as an object of the consciousness of meaning making-one whose roots, as lessons for the oracular conversations of law, are expanded in this volume.
This book defends an event-causal theory of libertarian free will and argues that the belief in such free will plays an important, if not essential, role in supporting certain important values. In the first part of the book, the author argues that possession of libertarian free will is necessary for deserved praise and blame and reward and punishment. He contends that his version of libertarian free will-the indeterministic weightings view- is coherent and can fit with a scientific, naturalistic understanding of human nature. However, the author also notes that we don't have sufficient evidentiary grounds to believe that human beings have this kind of free will. Despite this, he argues there are sufficiently strong value-based/axiological reasons to believe we have such free will and to live an act as if we have it. In the second part of the book, the author makes the case that the belief in such libertarian, desert-grounding free will is very important to defending human dignity in the context of criminal justice, making sense of justified pride and its value, and adding value to our relationships. Free Will's Value will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, action theory, ethics, and the philosophy of law.
This book is an updated and revised edition of Fundamentals of Legal Argumentation published in 1999. It discusses new developments that have taken place in the past 15 years in research of legal argumentation, legal justification and legal interpretation, as well as the implications of these new developments for the theory of legal argumentation. Almost every chapter has been revised and updated, and the chapters include discussions of recent studies, major additions on topical issues, new perspectives, and new developments in several theoretical areas. Examples of these additions are discussions of recent developments in such areas as Habermas' theory, MacCormick's theory, Alexy's theory, Artificial Intelligence and law, and the pragma-dialectical theory of legal argumentation. Furthermore it provides an extensive and systematic overview of approaches and studies of legal argumentation in the context of legal justification in various legal systems and countries that have been important for the development of research of legal argumentation. The book contains a discussion of influential theories that conceive the law and legal justification as argumentative activity. From different disciplinary and theoretical angles it addresses such topics as the institutional characteristics of the law and the relation between general standards for moral discussions and legal standards such as the Rule of Law. It discusses patterns of legal justification in the context of different types of problems in the application of the law and it describes rules for rational legal discussions. The combination of the sound basis of the first edition and the discussions of new developments make this new edition an up-to-date and comprehensive survey of the various theoretical influences which have informed the study of legal argumentation. It discusses salient backgrounds to this field as well as major approaches and trends in the contemporary research. It surveys the relevant theoretical factors both from various continental law traditions and common law countries.
Once the stuff of science fiction, recent progress in artificial intelligence, robotics, and machine learning means that these rapidly advancing technologies are finally coming into widespread use within everyday life. Such rapid development in these areas also brings with it a host of social, political and legal issues, as well as a rise in public concern and academic interest in the ethical challenges these new technologies pose. This volume is a collection of scholarly work from leading figures in the development of both robot ethics and machine ethics; it includes essays of historical significance which have become foundational for research in these two new areas of study, as well as important recent articles. The research articles selected focus on the control and governance of computational systems; the exploration of ethical and moral theories using software and robots as laboratories or simulations; inquiry into the necessary requirements for moral agency and the basis and boundaries of rights; and questions of how best to design systems that are both useful and morally sound. Collectively the articles ask what the practical ethical and legal issues, arising from the development of robots, will be over the next twenty years and how best to address these future considerations.
This volume brings together papers that offer conceptual analyses, highlight issues, propose solutions, and discuss practices regarding privacy and data protection. The first section of the book provides an overview of developments in data protection in different parts of the world. The second section focuses on one of the most captivating innovations of the data protection package: how to forget, and the right to be forgotten in a digital world. The third section presents studies on a recurring, and still important and much disputed, theme of the Computers, Privacy and Data Protection (CPDP) conferences : the surveillance, control and steering of individuals and groups of people and the increasing number of performing tools (data mining, profiling, convergence) to achieve those objectives. This part is illustrated by examples from the domain of law enforcement and smart surveillance. The book concludes with five chapters that advance our understanding of the changing nature of privacy (concerns) and data protection.
Within contemporary society the themes of globalization, health and regulation interlock in complex patterns, changing in response to the mix of cultural differences, regulatory preferences and available resources. To turn the kaleidoscope and to change the mix is to change the pattern. This book is about those patterns as they arise in the contemporary legal, health and ethical context, exploring the transformations and challenges brought by technological change and the regulatory options in the contemporary global village.
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. |
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