The book provides a comprehensive analysis of the advisory role of the International Court of Justice in light of its jurisprudence and overall contribution over a period of more than 55 years. The author highlights the "organic connection" between UN organs and the Court and the Court 's contribution as one of the UN 's principal organs to the Organisation. The basic argument of this study is that the advisory function should be understood as a two-sided process involving the interplay between UN organs and the ICJ. The request for and the giving of an advisory opinion is a collective coordinated process, involving more than one organ or part of the Organisation.

The scandal of this collection lies not just in its equating law and resistance but also in its consequent revision of those critical, realist, social, and even positivist theories that would constitute law in its dependence on sovereign or society, on some surpassing power, or on the state of the judge's digestion. There is as well a further provocation offered by the collection in that the most marginalized of resistances through law are found to be the most destabilizing of standard paradigms of legal authority. Instances of such seeming marginality explored here include the resistances of colonized and indigenous peoples and resistance pursued through international law. What this 'marginal' focus also reveals is the constituent connection between modernism, imperialism and that legalism produced by the ready reduction of law in terms of sovereign, society and such. In all, the collection makes a radical contribution to social, political and postcolonial theories of law.

This is an outline of a coherence theory of law. Its basic ideas are: reasonable support and weighing of reasons. All the rest is commentary.

These words at the beginning of the preface of this book perfectly indicate what On Law and Reason is about. It is a theory about the nature of the law which emphasises the role of reason in the law and which refuses to limit the role of reason to the application of deductive logic.

In 1989, when the first edition of On Law and Reason appeared, this book was ground breaking for several reasons. It provided a rationalistic theory of the law in the language of analytic philosophy and based on a thorough understanding of the results, including technical ones, of analytic philosophy. That was not an obvious combination at the time of the book s first appearance and still is not. The result is an analytical rigor that is usually associated with positivist theories of the law, combined with a philosophical position that is not natural law in a strict sense, but which shares with it the emphasis on the role of reason in determining what the law is. If only for this rare combination, On Law and Reason still deserves careful study.

On Law and Reason also foreshadowed and influenced a development in the field of Legal Logic that would take place in the nineties of the 20th century, namely the development of non-monotonic ( defeasible ) logics for the analysis of legal reasoning. In the new Introduction to this second edition, this aspect is explored in some more detail."

What can we say about justice in a pluralist world? Is there some universal justice? Are there universal human rights? What is the function of the state in the modern world? Such are the problems dealt with by the 20th world congress of the International Association for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy (Amsterdam, June 2001) and published in this book, which is for legal and social philosophers, students of human rights, and political philosophers.

Analytical jurisprudence has been mostly silent on the role of precedent in legal adjudication. What is the content of a judge's precedent ideology,or the rule of precedent-recognition, by means of which the ratio of a case is to be distinguished from mere dicta? In this study, the author identifies six types of judicial precedent-ideology, among them judicial legislation, systemic construction of the underlying reasons of law in the Dworkinian sense, and a radical re-evaluation of the merits of a prior case in later adjudication, as envisioned by the American Realists. These competing models are tested against judicial experiences in the UK, US, France, Italy, Germany and Finland. By this means Lon Fuller's famous 'internal morality of law' is shown to function rather poorly in the context of precedents, and the author therefore suggests a redefinition of the rule which makes it work for precedent. This, in turn leads the author to confront fundamental questions about the normative nature of law. Is Kelsen's grundnorm or Hart's ultimate rule of recognition a valid rule, in the image of legal rules proper, or is it merely a social fact, observable only in the practices and behaviour of judges and other officials? The author claims that Hart is caught between Kelsen and J.L. Borges, the late Argentinian fabulist, in so far as the ontology and epistemology of the rule of recognition are concerned. This leads the author to the conclusion that the two predicaments affecting analytical positivism, namely the threat of endless self-referentiality, or infinite regress, can only be accounted for by means of recourse to the philosophy of deconstruction as posited by Jacques Derrida.

The legal essays by Michael Bayles in this collection display his commitment to utilitarianism both as a moral theory and an analytical device. A utilitarian must choose between the best of all possible alternatives and so must lay out the alternatives and thus their consequences carefully and completely. As it happens, there is no better way of understanding why something is as it is in the law, and no better way to lay the foundations for criticism and improvement, than to lay out what the alternatives are, carefully distinguishing them, their justifications, and their implications for changing other areas of the law and for changing our relation to the law. Bayles was a master at such work, and each essay thus repays careful study for anyone concerned about the law. The essays cover a wide variety of topics, from contract law to the criminal law, from torts to theory, and form a natural set. Laying out the alternatives in one area makes it much clearer how and why alternatives in other areas are acceptable or required. Interconnections within the legal system as a whole not readily visible when studying one area of the law become obvious when several are laid out side-by-side using the analytical skill required by a good utilitarian.

This volume is a thematic study in legal history that uses past and present landmark court cases to analyze the legal and historical development of moral regulatory policies in America and resulting debates. Using a critical variable approach, the book demonstrates how different elements of the legal process have historically influenced the litigation of various moral issues. Five moral policies are included: abortion, sodomy, pornography, criminal insanity, and the death penalty. The book's framework for analysis uses examples from English legal history and links them to American cases, demonstrating how moral regulatory policies are impacted by the legal process: by laws, by judges and juries, by legal scholars, and by attorneys.

Following a brief introduction, Chapter 1 examines how protagonists in the bitter moral and legal controversy over abortion in America have sought to fortify their positions with the views of prominent English legal authorities. The authors discuss the role of English legal scholars in court opinion and oral arguments in Webster and in Roe v. Wade, and debates Roe's interpretation of the English legalists. Chapter 2 describes how attempts to expand a right of privacy under the federal Constitution to include sodomy failed the test for common law rights (Rights of Englishmen) in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), and includes a history of sodomy in early English and American law. Chapter 3 discusses pornography standards and laws, highlighting the history of legal actions taken against Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure in both England and the U.S., demonstrating the role of precedent in American judicial efforts to define pornography. In Chapter 4, which deals with the criminal insanity defense, the influential role of the defense attorney on case outcomes is illustrated in cases such as England's McNaughton case (1843) and America's Hinckley case (1982). Chapter 5 deals with cruel and unusual punishment throughout U.S. and English history. The book ends with an epilogue which ties together the idea of the American legal process as an inherited English process, reiterating how decisionmakers continually mine the past to find traditions and sources of moral values for justifying or criticizing current laws and policies.

Judge Richard A. Posner's work on the economics of public law is a critical component of the interaction between the new law and economics movement and public choice theory. It exemplifies the parallel influence that these two important intellectual movements have had on the current understanding of legal institutions. Together with an insightful introduction by Francesco Parisi, this volume brings together his most important contributions on areas such as: the economics of constitutional law and legislation the economics of criminal law the economics of labour law and employment discrimination the economics of antitrust. The Economics of Public Law will be essential reading for economists, lawyers and judges alike.

The pioneering work of Judge Richard Posner has brought to light the broad relevance of economics to virtually all areas of law. During the last three decades, Judge Posner has provided seminal contributions to the development of an overarching economic theory of law, with applications including traditional legal subjects, such as torts and contracts, as well as non-standard topics, such as his study of primitive law and ancient customs. This selection of Posner's essays reveals the importance of economic efficiency as a driving force in the formation of private law. The rigorous and insightful introduction by Francisco Parisi discusses Posner's unparalleled influence on the evolution of law and economics and the understanding of the economic foundations of private law. In particular he discusses: * anthropology and the emergence of law * tort law * contract law * family law * the economics of privacy. The Economics of Private Law will be essential reading for economists, lawyers and judges alike.

Drawing on political, legal, national, post-national, as well as American and European perspectives, this collection of essays offers a diverse and balanced discussion of the current arguments concerning deliberative democracy. Its contributions' focus on discontent, provide a critical assessment of the benefits of deliberation and also respond to the strongest criticisms of the idea of democratic deliberation. The essays consider the three basic questions of why, how and where to deliberate democratically. This book will be of value not only to political and democratic theorists, but also to legal philosophers and constitutional theorists, and all those interested in the legitimacy of decision-making in national and post-national pluralistic polities.

In 1788 John Adams created a sublime ambition for all nations - 'a government of laws and not of men'. In the intervening years we have come to learn that legislation itself works through the interpretations of the many men and women who work on the inside and the outside of the law. Effective regulation thus depends not only on scrupulous legal analysis, with its appeal to precedent, conceptual clarity and argumentation, but also on sound empirical research, which often reveals diversity in implementation, enforcement and observance of the law in practice. In this outstanding, worldly-wise book Leeuw and Schmeets demonstrate how to bridge the gap between the letter and the delivery of the law. It is packed with examples, cases and illustrations that will have international appeal. I recommend it to students and practitioners engaged across all domains of legislation and regulation.' - Ray Pawson, University of Leeds, UK Empirical Legal Research describes how to investigate the roles of legislation, regulation, legal policies and other legal arrangements at play in society. It is invaluable as a guide to legal scholars, practitioners and students on how to do empirical legal research, covering history, methods, evidence, growth of knowledge and links with normativity. This multidisciplinary approach combines insights and approaches from different social sciences, evaluation studies, Big Data analytics and empirically informed ethics. The authors present an overview of the roots of this blossoming interdisciplinary domain, going back to legal realism, the fields of law, economics and the social sciences, and also to civilology and evaluation studies. The book addresses not only data analysis and statistics, but also how to formulate adequate research problems, to use (and test) different types of theories (explanatory and intervention theories) and to apply new forms of literature research to the field of law such as the systematic, rapid and realist reviews and synthesis studies. The choice and architecture of research designs, the collection of data, including Big Data, and how to analyze and visualize data are also covered. The book discusses the tensions between the normative character of law and legal issues and the descriptive and causal character of empirical legal research, and suggests ways to help handle this seeming disconnect. This comprehensive guide is vital reading for law practitioners as well as for students and researchers dealing with regulation, legislation and other legal arrangements.

This volume is based closely on the lectures delivered by The Hon. Justice W. M. C. Gummow at Oxford University in 1999 as part of the Clarendon law lectures series, sponsored by Oxford University Press. These lectures take up themes of continuity and change in the law, particularly as they appear in the great common law jurisdictions.

Lawyers who write about responsibility tend to focus on criminal law at the expense of civil and public law; while philosophers tend to treat responsibility as a moral concept,and either ignore the law or consider legal responsibility to be a more or less distorted reflection of its moral counterpart. This book aims to counteract both of these biases. By adopting a comparative institutional approach to the relationship between law and morality, it challenges the common view that morality stands to law as critical standard to conventional practice. It shows how law and morality interact symbiotically, and how careful study of legal concepts of responsibility can add significantly to our understanding of responsibility more generally. Central to this project is a distinction between two paradigms of responsibility -- the criminal law paradigm and the civil law paradigm. Whereas theoretical discussions of responsibility tend focus on conduct and agency, taking account of civil law reveals the importance of outcomes and the interests of victims and society to ideas of responsibility. The book examines from a distinctively legal point of view central philosophical questions about responsibility such as its relationship with culpability (challenging the common view that moral responsibility requires fault), causation and personality. It explores the relevance of sanctions and problems of proof and enforcement to ideas of responsibility, as well as the relationship between responsibility and distributive justice, and the role of concepts of responsibility in public law. At the heart of this book lie two questions: what does it mean to say we are responsible? and, what are our responsibilities? Its aim is not to answer these questions but to challenge some traditional approaches to answering them and more importantly, to suggest fruitful alternative approaches that take law seriously.

"Nietzsche and Legal Theory" is an anthology designed to provide legal and socio-legal scholars with a sense of the very wide range of projects and questions in whose pursuit Nietzsche's work can be useful. From medical ethics to criminology, from the systemic anti-Semitism of legal codes arising in Christian cultures, to the details of intellectual property debates about regulating the use of culturally significant objects, the contributors (from the fields of law, philosophy, criminology, cultural studies, and literary studies) demonstrate and enact the sort of creativity that Nietzsche associated with the "free-spirits" to whom he addressed some of his most significant work.

"Nietzsche and Legal Theory" is an anthology designed to provide legal and socio-legal scholars with a sense of the very wide range of projects and questions in whose pursuit Nietzsche's work can be useful. From medical ethics to criminology, from the systemic anti-Semitism of legal codes arising in Christian cultures, to the details of intellectual property debates about regulating the use of culturally significant objects, the contributors (from the fields of law, philosophy, criminology, cultural studies, and literary studies) demonstrate and enact the sort of creativity that Nietzsche associated with the "free-spirits" to whom he addressed some of his most significant work.

It gives me great pleasure to offer this foreword to the present work of my admired friend and respected colleague Ota Weinberger. Apart from the essays of his which were published in our joint work An Institutional Theory of Law: New Approaches to Legal Positivism in 1986, relatively little of Wein berger's work is available in English. This is the more to be regretted, since his is work of particular interest to jurists of the English-speaking world both in view of its origins and in respect of its content As to its origins, Weinberger war reared as a student of the Pure Theory of Law, a theory which in its Kelsenian form has aroused very great interest and has had considerable influence among anglophoone scholars -perhaps even more than in the Germanic countries. Less well known is the fact that the Pure Theory itself divided into two schools, that of Vienna and that of Brno. It was in the Brno school of Frantisek Weyr that Weinberger's legal theory found its early formation, and perhaps from that early influence one can trace his continuing insistence on the dual character of legal norms -both as genuinely normative and yet at the same time having real social existence."

Law is traditionally conceived as consisting of norms of conduct and power-conferring norms. This conception, however, is unable to account for a variety of elements of modern legal systems that differ significantly from the classical notions. This book concerns the problem of which results of human activity can obtain legal validity. The author makes use of recent findings in speech act theory, especially John R. Searle and Daniel Vanderveken's illocutionary logic. He sets out a theory of legal norms conceived as institutional legal facts resulting from performances of speech acts specified in power-conferring norms. The theory provides a classification of acts-in-the-law and of legal norms resulting from performances of these. Finally, the transition is made from institutional legal facts to legal institutions. The book is a contribution to the institutional theory of law as developed by N. MacCormick and O. Weinberger.

With a Foreword by the Rt Hon Lord Wilberforce The practical and theoretical policy underpinning the use of judicial remedies on private international law are now assuming great importance within the framework of increasing cross-border litigation. This book is designed to treat these remedies in an analytical and systematic fashion. The forms of relief available,interlocutory and final, have developed into a category of their own, with distinctive principles and considerations. Arising out of a blend of international conventions, national legislation and the jurisprudence of the courts, the remedies have developed their own character quite distinct from the remedies available in national courts under domestic law. Divided into ten chapters, the book provides an analysis of each remedy in theoretical and policy terms, and a practical discussion of the remedies in personam and in rem. Written primarily from the perspective of English law the text also makes use of plentiful comparative examples and will be useful to academics and practitioners alike.

This title examines the political role of courts in new democracies in Latin America and Africa, focusing on their ability to hold political power-holders accountable when they act outside their constitutionally defined powers. The book also issues a warning: there are problems inherent in the current global move towards strong constitutional government, where increasingly strong powers are placed in the hands of judges who themselves are not made accountable.

How are law and morality connected, how do they interact, and in what ways are they distinct? In Part I of this book, Matthew Kramer argues that moral principles can enter into the law of any jurisdiction. He contends that legal officials can invoke moral principles as laws for resolving disputes, and that they can also invoke them as threshold tests which ordinary laws must satisfy. In opposition to many other theorists, Kramer argues that these functions of moral principles are consistent with all the essential characteristics of any legal system. Part II reaffirms the legal positivist argument that law and morality are separable, arguing against the position of natural-law theory, which portrays legal requirements as a species of moral requirements. Kramer contends that even though the existence of a legal system in any sizeable society is essential for the realization of fundamental moral values, law is not inherently moral either in its effects or in its motivational underpinnings. In the final part, Kramer contests the widespread view that people whose conduct is meticulously careful cannot be held morally responsible for harmful effects of their actions. Through this argument, he reveals that fault-independent liability is present even more prominently in morality than in the law. Through a variety of arguments, Where Law and Morality Meet highlights both some surprising affinities and some striking divergences between morality and law.

The classical concept ofInternationalLa w, as developed by Gentilis, Gro tius and their successors, accepted as its starting point the sovereignty of states, from which it followed that (r) the rules of International Law were based upon the general consent of those states; and (2) that, since state sovereignty was not capable of limitation, otherwise than by the consent of the state itself, in the last resort, International Law must accept the fact of war. Two world wars within the space of thirty years, and the development of nuclear weapons of unlimited potential, have compelled statesmen and lawyers to take a fresh look at the foundations of international relations. The First World War was followed by the creation of the League of Nations, and by the establish ment of the Permanent Court of International Justice. The failure of both, insofar as the preservation of peace was concerned, was apparent in the continuance of international insecurity, culminating in World War II. This again was followed by the establishment of a new inter national organisation, the United Nations, with its auxiliary, the International Court of Justice. Nevertheless, international security seems further away than ever, and it may be suggested that it is the devastating potential of nuclear weapons, rather than the strength of international machinery, which has so far prevented a third general conflict far more disastrous than either of the two World Wars which have already taken place."

This book explores the ambit of the notion of persecution in international law and its relevance in the current geopolitical context, more specifically for refugee women. The work analyses different models for interpreting the notion of persecution in international refugee law through a comparative lens. In particular, a feminist approach to refugee law is adopted to determine to what extent the notion of persecution can apply to gender related forms of violence and what are the challenges in doing so. It proposes an interpretive model that would encourage decision makers to interpret the notion of persecution in a manner that is sufficiently protective and relevant to the profiles of refugees in the 21st century, most particularly to refugee women. The book will be of interest to academics and students in the field of public international law, international human rights law, international humanitarian law, immigration law, European law, and refugee law as well as those working in the areas of international relations.

Philosopher Kings? The Adjudication of Conflicting Human Rights and Social Values, by George C. Christie, examines the attempts by courts to sort out conflicts involving freedom of expression, including religious expression, on the one hand, and rights to privacy and other important social values on the other. It approaches the subject from a comparative perspective, using principally cases decided by European and United States courts.
A significant part of this book analyzes conflicts between freedom of expression and the right to privacy. In a world in which, freedom of expression and privacy are said to be of equal value, the book explores whether it is possible to develop, through case-by-case adjudication, a legal regime which can give clear direction as to what expression is or is not permitted. Otherwise, if such a regime proves impossible, in the guise of recognizing the equal value of expression and privacy, privacy may become de facto the preferred value.

As neuroscientific technologies continue to develop and inform our understanding of the mind, the opportunities for applying neuroscience in legal proceedings have also increased. Cognitive neuroscientists have deepened our understanding of the complex relationship between the mind and the brain by using new techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG). The inferences drawn from these findings and increasingly sophisticated technologies are being applied to debates and processes in the legal field, from lie detection in criminal trials to critical legal doctrines surrounding the insanity defense or guilt adjudication. In Minds, Brains, and Law: The Conceptual Foundations of Law and Neuroscience, Michael S. Pardo and Dennis Patterson assess the philosophical questions that arise when neuroscientific research and technology are applied in the legal system. They examine the arguments favoring the increased use of neuroscience in law, the means for assessing its reliability in legal proceedings, and the integration of neuroscientific research into substantive legal doctrines. The authors use their explorations to inform a corrective inquiry into the mistaken inferences and conceptual errors that arise from mismatched concepts, such as the mental disconnect of what constitutes "lying" on a lie detection test. The empirical, practical, ethical, and conceptual issues that Pardo and Patterson seek to redress will deeply influence how we negotiate and implement the fruits of neuroscience in law and policy in the future.