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Books > Law > Jurisprudence & general issues > Jurisprudence & philosophy of law
'A leading figure in critical legal studies and renowned scholar of comparative constitutionalism, Frankenberg urges us forward, offering a new taxonomy for critical work. He illustrates its potential in terrific chapters on recent transnational legal movements: to regulate the veil, provide access to justice and reinvigorate human rights as a language of justification. A methodological tour de force.' - David Kennedy, Harvard University 'One of the most courageous and intellectually earnest legal scholars of our time, Gunter Frankenberg, has devoted his efforts to reconstructing comparative law's internal strength and potential for critical analysis. This book is a masterpiece that should be read by every serious thinker concerned with the need for legal reforms and the politics of globalization.' - Pier Giuseppe Monateri, University of Turin, Italy Presenting a critique of conventional methods in comparative law, this book argues that, for comparative law to qualify as a discipline, comparatists must reflect on how and why they make comparisons. Gunter Frankenberg discusses not only methods and theories but also the ethical implications and the politics of comparative law in order to bring out the different dimensions of the discipline. Comparative Law as Critique offers various approaches that turn on the academic discourse of comparative law, including analysis of a widespread spirit of innocence in terms of method, and critique of human rights narratives. It also analyses how courts negotiate differences between cases regarding Muslim veiling. Gunter Frankenberg presents varied critical projects that discuss methods and theories, ethics and the politics of comparative law to bring out the different dimensions of the discipline. The incisive critiques and comparisons in this book will make essential reading for comparatists working in legal education and research as well as students of comparative law and scholars in comparative anthropology and social sciences.
Whistleblowing is the public disclosure of information with the purpose of revealing wrongdoings and abuses of power that harm the public interest. This book presents a comprehensive theory of whistleblowing: it defines the concept, reconstructs its origins, discusses it within the current ethical debate, and elaborates a justification of unauthorized disclosures. Its normative proposal is based on three criteria of permissibility: the communicative constraints, the intent, and the public interest conditions. The book distinguishes between two forms of whistleblowing, civic and political, showing how they apply in the contexts of corruption and government secrecy. The book articulates a conception of public interest as a claim concerning the presumptive interest of the public. It argues that public interest is defined in opposition to corporate powers and its core content identified by the rights that are all-purposive for the distribution of social benefits. A crucial part of the proposal is dedicated to the impact of security policies and government secrecy on civil liberties. It argues that unrestrained secrecy limits the epistemic entitlement of citizens to know under which conditions their rights are limited by security policies and corporate interests. When citizens are denied the right to assess when these policies are prejudicial to their freedoms, whistleblowing represents a legitimate form of political agency that safeguards the fundamental rights of citizens against the threat of unrestrained secrecy by government power. Finally, the book contributes to shifting the attention of democratic theory from the procedures of consent formation to the mechanisms that guarantee the expression of dissent. It argues that whistleblowing is a distinctive form of civil dissent that contributes to the demands of institutional transparency in constitutional democracies and explores the idea that the way institutions are responsive to dissent determines the robustness of democracy, and ultimately, its legitimacy. What place dissenters have within a society, whether they enjoy personal safety, legal protection, and safe channels for their disclosure, are hallmarks of a good democracy, and of its sense of justice.
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 and examines new perspectives on legal relationships and events, punishment as a literary and philosophical issue, and custom and experience in law and society. The articles published here illuminate some of the exciting work being done in interdisciplinary legal scholarship.
This book develops a responsible and practical method for evaluating the success, failure, or "crisis" of American civil-military relations among its political and uniformed elite. The author's premise is that currently there is no objectively fair way for the public at large or the strategic-level elites to assess whether the critical and often obscured relationships between Generals, Admirals, and Statesmen function as they ought to under the US constitutional system. By treating these relationships-in form and practice-as part of a wider principal (civilian)-agency (military) dynamic, the book tracks the "duties"-care, competence, diligence, confidentiality, scope of responsibility-and perceived shortcomings in the interactions between US civilian political authorities and their military advisors in both peacetime and in war.
This volume offers a collection of articles by leading legal and political theorists. Originally intended as a celebration of MacCormick's work on the occasion of the completion of the four-volume series on "Law, State and Practical Reason," it has turned into a homage and salute after MacCormick's passing. Cast in MacCormick's reflexive spirit, the book presents a critical reconstruction of the Scottish philosopher's work, with the aim of revealing the connections between law and democracy in his writings and furthering his insights in each specific field. Neil MacCormick made outstanding contributions to the understanding of law and democracy under conditions of pluralism. His institutional theory of law has elucidated the close connection between the normative character of law as a means of social integration and legal social practices. This has produced a synthesis of the key insights of the legal and political theories of Kelsen, Hart, Alexy and Dworkin, and has broken new ground by undermining the 'monolithic' and 'nation-state' centered character of standard legal theories."
What, precisely, is the relationship between legality and morality? Does legal validity rest upon moral validity? Are legal obligations moral obligations? For some years now schools of jurisprudential Naturalism and Positivism have become increasingly ambiguous in their responses to these questions. Olsen and Toddington argue that equivocation on the central issue here -- that of obligation -- has brought legal theory to the point where leading legal positivists and natural lawyers no longer retain significant differences. Instead, they allege, we are left with the remnant of what has always been, philosophically, a phoney war. The authors of this lucid and refreshing analysis of the concept of law, arguing from the perspectives of social science and political philosophy, show that jurisprudence must acknowledge that the political, the moral, and the legal are located within a continuum of practical reason, and that law's 'autonomy' from morality cannot entail its 'separation' from it.
This book offers educational experiences, including reflections and the resulting essays, from the Roberta Kevelson Seminar on Law and Semiotics held during 2008 - 2011 at Penn State University's Dickinson School of Law. The texts address educational aspects of law that require attention and that also are issues in traditional jurisprudence and legal theory. The book introduces education in legal semiotics as it evolves in a legal curriculum. Specific semiotic concepts, such as "sign", "symbol" or "legal language," demonstrate how a lawyer's professionally important tasks of name-giving and meaning-giving are seldom completely understood by lawyers or laypeople. These concepts require analyses of considerable depth to understand the expressiveness of these legal names and meanings, and to understand how lawyers can "say the law," or urge such a saying correctly and effectively in the context of a natural language that is understandable to all of us. The book brings together the structure of the Seminar, its foundational philosophical problems, the specifics of legal history, and the semiotics of the legal system with specific themes such as gender, family law, and business law.
In recent decades the debate among scholars, lawyers, politicians and others about how societies deal with their past has been constant and intensive. 'Legal Institutions and Collective Memories' situates the processes of transitional justice at the intersection between legal procedures and the production of collective and shared meanings of the past. Building upon the work of Maurice Halbwachs, this collection of essays emphasises the extended role and active involvement of contemporary law and legal institutions in public discourse about the past, and explores their impact on the shape that collective memories take in the course of time. The authors uncover a complex pattern of searching for truth, negotiating the past and cultivating the art of forgetting. Their contributions explore the ambiguous and intricate links between the production of justice, truth and memory. The essays cover a broad range of legal institutions, countries and topics. These include transitional trials as 'monumental spectacles' as well as constitutional courts, and the restitution of property rights in Central and Eastern Europe and Australia. The authors explore the biographies of victims and how their voices were repressed, as in the case of Korean Comfort Women. They explore the role of law and legal institutions in linking individual and collective memories in the transitional period through processes of lustration, and they analyse divided memories about the past and their impact on future reconciliation in South Africa. The collection offers a genuinely comparative approach, allied to cutting-edge theory
In Natural Law and Civil Sovereignty new research by leading international scholars is brought to bear on a single crucial issue: the role of early modern natural law doctrines in reconstructing the relations between moral right and civil authority in the face of profound religious and political conflict. In addition to providing fresh insights into the hard-fought struggle to legitimate a desacralised civil order, the book also shows the degree to which the legitimacy of the modern secular state remains dependent on this decisive set of developments.
This book asserts that the Pacific Islands continue to struggle with the colonial legacy of plural legal systems, comprising laws and legal institutions from both the common law and the customary legal system. It also investigates the extent to which customary principles and values are accommodated in legislation. Focusing on Samoa, the author argues that South Pacific countries continue to adopt a Western approach to law reform without considering legal pluralism, which often results in laws which are unsuitable and irrelevant to Samoa. In the context of this system of law making, effective law reform in Samoa can only be achieved where the law reform process recognises the legitimacy of the two primary legal systems. The book goes on to present a law reform process that is more relevant and suitable for law making in the Pacific Islands or any post-colonial societies.
This timely interdisciplinary work on current developments in ICT and privacy/data protection, coincides as it does with the rethinking of the Data Protection Directive, the contentious debates on data sharing with the USA (SWIFT, PNR) and the judicial and political resistance against data retention. The authors of the contributions focus on particular and pertinent issues from the perspective of their different disciplines which range from the legal through sociology, surveillance studies and technology assessment, to computer sciences. Such issues include cutting-edge developments in the field of cloud computing, ambient intelligence and PETs; data retention, PNR-agreements, property in personal data and the right to personal identity; electronic road tolling, HIV-related information, criminal records and teenager's online conduct, to name but a few.
One might legitimately ask what reasons other than vanity could prompt an author to issue a collection of his previously published essays. The best reason, I think, is the belief that the essays hang together in such a way that, as a book, they produce a whole which is in a sense greater than the sum of its parts. When this happens, as I hope it does in the present case, it is because the essays pursue related themes in such a way that, together, they at least form a start toward the development of a systematic theory on the common foundations supporting the particular claims in the particular articles. With respect to this collection, the essays can all be read as particular ways of pursuing the following general pattern of thought: that a commitment to justice and a respect for rights (and not social utility) must be the foundation of any morally acceptable legal order; that a social contractarian model is the best way to illuminate this foundation; that a retributive theory of punish ment is the only theory of punishment resting on such a foundation and thus is the only morally acceptable theory of punishment; that the twentieth century's faddish movement toward a "scientific" or therapeutic response to crime runs grave risks of undermining the foundations of justice and rights on which the legal order ought to rest; and, finally, that the legitimate worry about the tendency of the behavioral sciences to undermine the values of"
Discussing classical legal positivists this book comprises a study of their work which is situated in relation to the modern tradition in legal philosophy. In this way, it is demonstrated that the theorists adhered closely to the natural law standpoint in legal philosophy, while also defending the particular view of the proper functions of law and the state that distinguished the tradition of modern liberalism. The author has also written "The Redefinition of Conservatism".
Can private law assume an ecological meaning? Can property and contract defend nature? Is tort law an adequate tool for paying environmental damages to future generations? This book explores potential resolutions to these questions, analyzing the evolution of legal thinking in relation to the topics of legal personality, property, contract and tort. In this forward thinking book, Mattei and Quarta suggest a list of basic principles upon which a new, ecological legal system could be based. Taking private law to represent an ally in the defence of our future, they offer a clear characterization of the fundamental legal institutions of common law and civil law, considering the challenges of the Anthropogenic era, technological tools of the Internet era, and the global rise of the commons. Summarizing the fundamental institutions of private law: property rights, legal personality, contract, and tort, the authors reveal the limits of these legal institutions in relation to historical international evolution and their regulation in the contexts of catastrophic ecological issues and technological developments. Engaging and thoughtful, this book will be interesting reading for legal scholars and academics of private law and, in particular, those wishing to understand the role of law when facing technological and ecological challenges.
An Approach to Rights contains fifteen previously published but mostly inaccessible papers that together show the development of one of the more important contemporary theories of the nature, grounds and practical implications of rights. In a long retrospective essay, Carl Wellman explains what he was trying to accomplish in each paper, how far he believes that he succeeded and where he failed. Thus the author provides a critical perspective both on his own theory and on alternative theories from which he borrows, or that he rejects. These essays identify the problems any adequate theory of rights must solve, describe the more plausible solutions and weigh the merits of each. They will be of special interest to any reader concerned with legal theory, moral philosophy or any branch of applied ethics or social policy in which appeals to rights are frequently made but seldom rationally satisfactory.
* John Connor describes and evaluates the results of his extensive
survey of reports of cartel overcharges.
Gans ranks at the head of that important group of Hegelian thinkers that bridged the generations of Hegel and Marx. ! Yet there is a large gap between Gans 's historical importance and the scholarship on him. Despite a renewal of interest in Gans's work on the Continent,2 Gans remains almost completely unknown to English-Ianguage scholars, and almost none ofhis work has been 3 previously translated. His Prefaces to his posthumous editions of Hegel's writings are inaccessib1e to English speakers, despite the fact that they shed important light on the authenticity of the so-called Additions to those texts. His Preface to Hegel's Philosophy ofLaw has never been translated before, while his Preface to the Philosophy of History has been omitted from reprintings 4 for generations. Moreover, the recent scholarship on the Continent has focused on Gans 's political and philosophical rather than his legal writings. There is little dis cussion in any language ofhis system oflaw, which is the focus ofthe present study. Some of the reasons for the neglect of Gans are obvious. Gans cannot be a hero for most readers today. He accepted apostasy as a means to profes sional advancement. And though more liberal than Hegel, Gans nonetheless accommodated himself to the results of the Restoration and evaded political persecution that might have kindled the sympathy of later generations.
In this book the practical dimension of social justice is explained using the analysis and discussion of a variety of well-known topics. These include: the relation between theory and practice in normative political philosophy;the issue of justice under uncertainty; the question of whether we can and should unmask social injustices by means of conspiracy theories; the issues of privacy and the right to privacy; the issue of how certain psychological states may affect our moral obligations, in particular the obligation to treat others fairly; and finally the concepts of morality, fairness, and self-deception. The primary goal of the book is to provide readers with an updated discussion of some important and practical social justice issues. These issues are presentedfrom anew perspective, based on the authors research. It is hoped that bringing these topics together in a single book will promote the emergence of new insights and challenges for future research. Juha Raikka is a professor at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Turku, Finland. His research focuses on ethics and political philosophy. "
In this book a theory of reasoning with evidence in the context of criminal cases is developed. The main subject of this study is not the law of evidence but rather the rational process of proof, which involves constructing, testing and justifying scenarios about what happened using evidence and commonsense knowledge. A central theme in the book is the analysis of ones reasoning, so that complex patterns are made more explicit and clear. This analysis uses stories about what happened and arguments to anchor these stories in evidence. Thus the argumentative and the narrative approaches from the research in legal philosophy and legal psychology are combined. Because the book describes its subjects in both an informal and a formal style, it is relevant for scholars in legal philosophy, AI, logic and argumentation theory. The book can also appeal to practitioners in the investigative and legal professions, who are interested in the ways in which they can and should reason with evidence.
Transparency is a fundamental principle of justice. A cornerstone of the rule of law, it allows for public engagement and for democratic control of the decisions and actions of both the judiciary and the justice authorities. This book looks at the question of transparency within the framework of transitional justice. Bringing together scholars from across the disciplinary spectrum, the collection analyses the issue from socio-legal, cultural studies and practitioner perspectives. Taking a three-part approach, it firstly discusses basic principles guiding justice globally before exploring courts and how they make justice visible. Finally, the collection reviews the interface between law, transitional justice institutions and the public sphere.
This book explores topical issues in military ethics by according peace a central role within an interdisciplinary framework. Whilst war and peace have traditionally been viewed through the lens of philosophical enquiry, political issues and theological ideas - as well as common sense - have also influenced people's understanding of armed conflicts with regards to both the moral issues they raise and the policies and actions they require. Comprised of fourteen essays on the role and application of peace, the book places emphasis on it's philosophical, moral, theological, technological, and practical implications. Starting with an overview of Kantian perspectives on peace, it moves to discussions of the Just War debates, religious conceptualizations of peace, and the role of peace in modern war technology and cyber-security. Finally concluding with discussions of the psychological and medical impacts of war and peace on both the individual and the larger society, this collection offers a contribution to the field and will be of interest to a wide audience. Chapters 4, 6 and 10 of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com.
Plessy v Ferguson (1897) established racial segregation in American constitutional law for over fifty years and its moral and political legacy lives on, despite attempts in the United States to counter its devastating effects during the last half century. Ironically, in the current debate over affirmative action, Justice Harlan's eloquent dissent has been used to justify attacks on government affirmative action programs. In this book, five distinguished philosophers and constitutional theorists, working from very different theoretical positions, take a fresh critical look at the moral and political principles underlying this historic decision and Harlan's dissent. They also explore the nature and extent of law's complicity in perpetuating Plessy's racialist aims. Emerging from their varied but complementary analyses is a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the social injustice of racial segregation in its historic and contemporary forms and of resources of the law to reverse it.
This volume discusses EU criminal justice from three perspectives. The first concerns fundamental rights following the adoption of the directives that have progressively reinforced the cornerstone of procedural rights of suspects and defendants in national criminal proceedings in the EU member states so as to facilitate judicial cooperation. The second perspective relates to transnational criminal investigations and proceedings, which are seen as a cross section of the current state of judicial cooperation in the area of freedom, security and justice, with the related issues of efficiency, coordination, settlement of conflicts of jurisdiction, and guarantees. The third perspective concerns the development of a supranational justice system in the light of the recently established European Public Prosecutor's Office, whose European judicial nature still coexists with strong national components.
This book investigates whether national courts could and should import innovative solutions from abroad in the adjudication of complex legal disputes. Special attention is paid to the concept of "legally relevant damage" and its importance in overcoming the deadlock created by the category of "pure economic loss" in the Portuguese and German tort law systems. These systems are essentially based on the concept of unlawfulness ("Rechtswidrigkeit"), which limits the compensation for pure economic loss to where a protective rule is infringed. These losses have nevertheless been compensated for through the extensive interpretation of rules and the appeal to near-contractual devices, which has been detrimental to legal certainty, the equality before the law, and subjects' freedom of action. This book explains why courts can and should take a proactive role and apply DCFR-based solutions in order to compensate for every loss that is worthy of legal protection.
Ours is an age of growing doubt about constitutional theory and of outright hostility to any theory that defends judicial review. Why should a tiny number of unelected judges be able to validate or invalidate laws on such politically controversial issues as abortion, religion, gender, and sex-or even determine how the president is elected? In this provocative book, a leading constitutional theorist offers an entirely original defense of judicial review. Louis Michael Seidman argues that judicial review is defensible if we set aside common but erroneous assumptions-that constitutional law should be independent from our political commitments and that the role of constitutional law is to settle political disagreement. Seidman develops a theory of "unsettlement." A constitution that unsettles, that destabilizes outcomes produced by the political process, creates no permanent losers nursing deep-seated grievances, he says. An "unsettling" constitution helps to build a community founded on consent by enticing losers into a continuing conversation. The author applies this theory to an array of well-known cases heard by the Supreme Court over the past several decades, including the fall 2000 election decision. |
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