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Books > Law > Jurisprudence & general issues > Jurisprudence & philosophy of law
The Aboriginal Tent Embassy was established in Canberra in January 1972, when four Aboriginal activists drove from Sydney to Canberra, planted a beach umbrella on the lawns across the road from the Commonwealth Parliament House, and called it an Embassy. They were responding to a speech by conservative Prime Minister William McMahon in which he rejected Aboriginal land rights and reaffirmed the government's commitment to a policy of assimilation. The protestors declared that McMahon's statement effectively relegated indigenous people to the status of 'aliens in our own land', thus as aliens 'we would have an embassy of our own'. The brilliant idea of pitching a Tent Embassy hijacked all the symbolic 'national significance' attached to this small patch of grass by the Australian state and media, and put it to work for radically different purposes. It enacted the kind of land rights that the activists were seeking, and it did so in a way that also drew attention to the living conditions of so many Aboriginal people across Australia. On its twentieth anniversary, the Embassy was permanently established, as part of an on-going struggle for recognition of Aboriginal land rights and sovereignty. It remains today, and celebrates its fortieth anniversary in 2012. This book draws together contributions from an interdisciplinary group of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal scholar, some of whom were participants in the events that they write about, to examine the social, historical and political significance of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy for Australian society and for the struggle for indigenous rights internationally.
There is a memorable line by ancient Greek poet Archilochus: 'The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.' Drawing on this metaphor made popular by Isaiah Berlin, this book sets out to 'think like a fox' about transitional justice in an intellectual environment largely dominated by hedgehogs. Critical of the unitary 'hedgehog-like' vision underlying mainstream discourse, this book proposes a pluralist reading of the field. It asks: What would it mean for transitional justice to constructively deal with conflicts of values and interests in societies grappling with a violent past? And what would it imply to make meaningful room for diversity, to see 'the many' rather than just 'the one'?
Law, Immunization and the Right to Die focuses on the urgent matter of legal appeals and judicial decisions on assisted death. Drawing on key cases from the United Kingdom and Canada, the book focuses on the problematic paternalism of legal decisions that currently deny assisted dying and questions why the law fails to recognize what many describe as "compassionate motives" for assisted death. When cases are analyzed as discourses that are part of a larger socio-political logic of governance, judicial decisions, it is argued here, reveal themselves as relying on the construction of neoliberal fictions - fictions that are here elucidated with reference to Michel Foucault's theoretical insights on pastoral power and Roberto Esposito's philosophical thesis on immunization. Challenging the socio-political logic of neoliberalism, the issue of assisted dying goes beyond the predominant legal concern with protecting - or immunizing - individuals from one another, in favor of minimal interference. This book calls for a new kind of politics: one that might affirm people and their finitude both more collectively, and more compassionately.
In modern liberal democracies, rights-based judicial intervention in the policy choices of elected bodies has always been controversial. For some, such judicial intervention has trivialized and impoverished democratic politics. For others, judges have contributed to a dynamic and healthy dialogue between the different spheres of the constitution, removed from pressures imposed on elected representatives to respond to popular sentiment. This book provides a critical evaluation of ongoing debates surrounding the judicial role in protecting fundamental human rights, focusing in particular on legislative/executive abridgment of a core freedom in western society - namely, liberty of expression. A range of types of expression are considered, including expression related to electoral processes, political expression in general and sexually explicit forms of expression.
The demand for recognition, responsibility, and reparations is regularly invoked in the wake of colonialism, genocide, and mass violence: there can be no victims without recognition, no perpetrators without responsibility, and no justice without reparations. Or so it seems from law's limited repertoire for assembling the archive after 'the disaster'. Archival and memorial practices are central to contexts where transitional justice, addressing historical wrongs, or reparations are at stake. The archive serves as a repository or 'storehouse' of what needs to be gathered and recognised so that it can be left behind in order to inaugurate the future. The archive manifests law's authority and its troubled conscience. It is an indispensable part of the liberal legal response to biopolitical violence. This collection challenges established approaches to transitional justice by opening up new dialogues about the problem of assembling law's archive. The volume presents research drawn from multiple jurisdictions that address the following questions. What resists being archived? What spaces and practices of memory - conscious and unconscious - undo legal and sovereign alibis and confessions? And what narrative forms expose the limits of responsibility, recognition, and reparations? By treating the law as an 'archive', this book traces the failure of universalised categories such as 'perpetrator', 'victim', 'responsibility', and 'innocence,' posited by the liberal legal state. It thereby uncovers law's counter-archive as a challenge to established forms of representing and responding to violence.
Law moves, whether we notice or not. Set amongst a spatial turn in the humanities, and jurisprudence more specifically, this book calls for a greater attention to legal movement, in both its technical and material forms. Despite various ways the spatial turn has been taken up in legal thought, questions of law, movement and its materialities are too often overlooked. This book addresses this oversight, and it does so through an attention to the materialities of legal movement. Paying attention to how law moves across different colonial and contemporary spaces, this book reveals there is a problem with common law's place. Primarily set in the postcolonial context of Australia - although ranging beyond this nationalised topography, both spatially and temporally - this book argues movement is fundamental to the very terms of common law's existence. How, then, might we move well? Explored through examples of walking and burial, this book responds to the challenge of how to live with a contemporary form of colonial legal inheritance by arguing we must take seriously the challenge of living with law, and think more carefully about its spatial productions, and place-making activities. Unsettling place, this book returns the question of movement to jurisprudence.
Western liberal constitutionalism has expanded recently, with, in East Asia, the constitutional systems of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan based on Western principles, and with even the socialist polities of China and Vietnam having some regard to such principles. Despite the alleged universal applicability of Western constitutionalism, however, the success of any constitutional system depends in part on the cultural values, customs and traditions of the country into which the constitutional system is planted. This book explains how the values, customs and traditions of East Asian countries are Confucian, and discusses how this is relevant to constitutional practice in the region. The book outlines how constitutionalism has developed in East Asia over a long period, considers different scholarly work on the ease or difficulty of integrating Western constitutionalism into countries with a Confucian outlook, and examines the prospects for such integration going forward. Throughout, the book covers detailed aspects of Confucianism and the workings of constitutions in practice.
Arguing about Law introduces philosophy of law in an accessible and engaging way. The reader covers a wide range of topics, from general jurisprudence, law, the state and the individual, to topics in normative legal theory, as well as the theoretical foundations of public and private law. In addition to including many classics, Arguing About Law also includes both non-traditional selections and discussion of timely topical issues like the legal dimension of the war on terror. The editors provide lucid introductions to each section in which they give an overview of the debate and outline the arguments of the papers, helping the student get to grips with both the classic and core arguments and emerging debates in:
Arguing About Law is an inventive and stimulating reader for students new to philosophy of law, legal theory and jurisprudence.
Focusing on the intersection of politics and law in six western European countries and in two supra-national bodies, the contributors here aim to debunk the myth that judges are merely "la bouche de la loi" and analyze similiarities in policy-making of the judiciaries from one nation to the next.
Examining contested notions of indigeneity, and the positioning of the Indigenous subject before and beyond the law, this book focuses upon the animation of indigeneities within textual imaginaries, both literary and juridical. Engaging the philosophy of Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin, as well as other continental philosophy and critical legal theory, the book uniquely addresses the troubled juxtaposition of law and justice in the context of Indigenous legal claims and literary expressions, discourses of rights and recognition, postcolonialism and resistance in settler nation states, and the mutually constitutive relation between law and literature. Ultimately, the book suggests no less than a literary revolution, and the reassertion of Indigenous Law. To date, the oppressive specificity with which Indigenous peoples have been defined in international and domestic law has not been subject to the scrutiny undertaken in this book. As an interdisciplinary engagement with a variety of scholarly approaches, this book will appeal to a broad variety of legal and humanist scholars concerned with the intersections between Indigenous peoples and law, including those engaged in critical legal studies and legal philosophy, sociolegal studies, human rights and native title law.
This volume is the first to showcase the interdisciplinary nature of Terror Management Theory, providing a detailed overview of how rich and diverse the field has become since the late 1980s, and where it is going in the future. It offers perspectives from psychology, political science, communication, health, sociology, business, marketing and cultural studies, among others, and in the process reveals how our existential ponderings permeate our behavior in almost every area of our lives. It will interest a wide range of upper-level students and researchers who want an overview of past and current TMT research and how it may be applied to their own research interests.
This volume is the first to showcase the interdisciplinary nature of Terror Management Theory, providing a detailed overview of how rich and diverse the field has become since the late 1980s, and where it is going in the future. It offers perspectives from psychology, political science, communication, health, sociology, business, marketing and cultural studies, among others, and in the process reveals how our existential ponderings permeate our behavior in almost every area of our lives. It will interest a wide range of upper-level students and researchers who want an overview of past and current TMT research and how it may be applied to their own research interests.
This challenging book on jurisprudence begins by posing questions in the post-modern context,and then seeks to bridge the gap between our traditions and contemporary situation. It offers a narrative encompassing the birth of western philosophy in the Greeks and moves through medieval Christendom, Hobbes, the defence of the common law with David Hume, the beginnings of utilitarianism in Adam Smith, Bentham and John Stuart Mill, the hope for enlightenment with Kant, Rousseau, Hegel and Marx, onto the more pessimistic warnings of Weber and Nietzsche. It defends the work of Austin against the reductionism of HLA Hart, analyses the period of high modernity in the writings of Kelsen, Hart and Fuller, and compares the different approaches to justice of Rawls and Nozick. The liberal defence of legality in Ronald Dworkin is contrasted with the more disillusioned accounts of the critical legal studies movement and the personalised accounts of prominent feminist writers.
"Max Weber: The Lawyer as Social Thinker" aims to relate the categories of Weber's social thinking to the intellectual context of legal thinking and theory in which he was educated. Its interpretive aim is to show how knowledge of these relations illuminates our understanding of Weber's own intentions. By comparing Weber's social theory of the teleological kind favoured by his contemporaries, which sought to identify social purposes and their effects and realization in history, but rather to radically undermine the project of teleological social theory by replacing categories of description that are amenable to or dependent upon teleological interpretations with categories that are specifically constructed to strip away teleology. The book identifies some of the key sources of Weber's thought in the legal tradition, notably the jurisprudential theorist Rudolph von Ihering, who was a classic teleological thinker, influenced by Bentham as well as by neo-Kantianism. Weber's famous definition of social action should be adequate on the level of meaning and adequate on the level of cause is shown to be a variant of Ihering's purposive definition of social action.
Advances in the field of Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) have been revolutionary. This book focuses on the use of ARTs in the context of families who seek to conceive a matching sibling donor as a source of tissue to treat an existing sick child. Such children have been referred to as 'saviour siblings'. Considering the legal and regulatory frameworks that impact on the accessibility of this technology in Australia and the UK, the work analyses the ethical and moral issues that arise from the use of the technology for this specific purpose. The author claims the only justification for limiting a family's reproductive liberty in this context is where the exercise of reproductive decision-making results in harm to others. It is argued that the harm principle is the underlying feature of legislative action in Western democratic society, and as such, this principle provides the grounds upon which a strong and persuasive argument is made for a less-restrictive regulatory approach in the context of 'saviour siblings'. The book will be of great relevance and interest to academics, researchers, practitioners and policy makers in the fields of law, ethics, philosophy, science and medicine.
There is something visceral about ownership. This is mine; you can't have it. This is mine; you can share it. This is ours. Try to find it. Contemporary literature and investigative journalism are showing that the scale of the problem of tax evasion, money laundering, organised crime, terrorism, bribery, corruption and gross human rights abuses is vast. Ownership - specifically, the quest to identify beneficial owners - has been chosen by national and international regulators as the touchstone, the litmus test in the fight back. An owner by definition must possess something for which they are financially accountable. But what is meant by "ownership"? This book explains why ownership is pivotal to accountability, and what ownership means in common law, civil law and Shariah law terms. It looks in detail at State, regional and international transparency strategies and at an equally powerful global private counter-initiative to promote beneficial ownership avoidance through the use of so-called "orphan structures". Where there is no owner, there is no accountability. The distinction between privacy and legitimate confidentiality on the one hand, and concealment on the other is explained with reference to commercial and trade law and practice, principles of corporate governance and applicable business human rights. This book introduces one further counter initiative: the phenomenon of transient ownership made possible through the use of cryptocurrency and the blockchain. The study concludes with a blueprint for action with recommendations addressed to states, international organisations, practitioners and other stakeholders.
This book introduces the thought of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) into the discussion about natural law. For many critics, natural law is not natural but a facade behind which lurks the supernatural - that is, revealed religion. While current notions of natural law are based on either Aristotelian/Thomistic principles or on Enlightenment rationalism, the book shows how Vico was the only natural law thinker to draw on the Roman legal tradition, rather than on Greek or Enlightenment philosophy. Specifically, the book addresses how Vico, drawing his inspiration from Roman history, incorporated both rhetoric and religion into a dynamic concept of natural law grounded in what he called the sensus communis: the entire repertoire of values, images, institutions, and even prejudices that a community takes for granted. Vico denied that natural law could ever furnish a definitive answer to moral problems in the social/public sphere. Rather he maintained that such problems had to be debated in the wider arena of the sensus communis. For Vico, as this book argues, natural law principles emerged from these debates; they did not resolve them.
This book explains why we should stop thinking of freedom as limited to a right to be left alone. It explores how Kantian philosophy and Jewish thought instead give rise to a concept of positive freedom. At heart, freedom is inextricably linked to the obligation to respect the autonomy and dignity of others. Freedom thus requires relationships with others and provides an important source of meaning in liberal democratic societies. While individualism is said to foster detachment, positive freedom fosters relations. Moving from moral theory to law, duties are seen as intrinsic to rights. The book considers test cases involving the law of expression, regarding authorial rights and women's prayer at Jerusalem's holy site of the Western Wall. Affirmative duties of respect are essential. Rights held by copyright owners require that all authors - including so-called users - are shown respect. Moreover, rights held by the authorities at the Western Wall require that all worshippers - including those whose interpretation of Jewish law differs from that adopted by the authorities - are respected.
This title was first published in 2002: This book is an analysis of the ways in which mental states ground attributions of responsibility to persons. Particular features of the book include: attention to the agent's epistemic capacity for beliefs about the foreseeable consequences of actions and omissions; attention to the essential role of emotions in prudential and moral reasoning; a conception of personal identity that can justify holding persons responsible at later times for actions performed at earlier times; an emphasis on neurobiology as the science that should inform our thinking about free will and responsibility; and the melding of literature on free will and responsibility in contemporary analytic philosophy with legal cases, abnormal psychology, neurology and psychiatry, which offers a richer texture to the general debate on the relevant issues.
This handbook provides a toolbox of definitions and typologies to develop a theory of multilevel constitutionalism and subnational constitutions. The volume examines systems with subnational entities that have full subnational constituent autonomy and systems where subnational constituent powers, while claimed by subnational governments, are incomplete or non-existent. Understanding why complete subnational constituent power exists or is denied sheds significant light on the status and functioning of subnational constitutions. The book deals with questions of how constitutions at multiple levels of a political system can co-exist and interact. The term 'multilevel constitutionalism', recognized as explaining how a supranational European constitution can exist alongside those of the Member States, is now used to capture dynamics between constitutions at the national, subnational and, where applicable, supranational levels. Broad in scope, the book encompasses many different types of multi-tiered systems world-wide to map the possible meanings, uses and challenges of subnational or state constitutions in a variety of political and societal contexts. The book develops the building blocks of an explanatory theory of subnational constitutionalism and as such will be an essential reference for all those interested in comparative constitutional law, federalism and governance.
First published in 1997, this volume delves into the most influential theories of economic justice, which ground themselves in utilitarian or related contractarian ideas about the self. These ideas take self-interest to be transparent and unproblematic. Favoured assumptions about the self also make scarcity the primary reality with which economic justice must deal. Much is lost in consideration of the justness of economic arrangements when we take the wants and interests of the self for granted in this way, and treat scarcity as a premise. In this book the author places the discussion of economic justice on a sounder foundation as regards the nature and ends of the self. The book begins with a discussion of the self as a structure, and proceeds to consider aspects of self-interest, public ends, economic welfare, needs and wants, the limits of the market, economic democracy, global inequality, and justice as the end of development.
This collection brings together legal scholars and Christian theologians for an interdisciplinary conversation responding to the challenges of global migration. Gathering 14 leading scholars from both law and Christian theology, the book covers legal perspectives, theological perspectives, and key concepts in migration studies. In Part 1, scholars of migration law and policy discuss the legal landscape of migration at both the domestic and international level. In Part 2, Christian theologians, ethicists, and biblical scholars draw on the resources of the Christian tradition to think about migration. In Part 3, each chapter is co-authored by a scholar of law and a scholar of Christian theology, who bring their respective resources and perspectives into conversation on key themes within migration studies. The work provides a truly interdisciplinary introduction to the topic of migration for those who are new to the subject; an opportunity for immigration lawyers and legal scholars to engage Christian theology; an opportunity for pastors and Christian theologians to engage law; and new insights on key frameworks for scholars who are already committed to the study of migration.
Presenting feminist readings of texts from the legal philosophical and jurisprudential canon, the papers collected here offer an interdisciplinary and critical challenge to established modes of reading law. Feminist approaches to law usually take the form of either critical engagements with legal doctrine, legal concepts and ideas, or critical assessments of the effects that specific areas of law have upon the lives of women. This collection, however, although rooted in feminist legal scholarship, takes the established canon of legal texts as the object of inquiry. Taking as their common starting point the fact that legal texts are plural and open to multiple readings, all the contributions in this collection offer subversive, but supplementary, interpretations of the legal canon. In this respect, however, they do not merely sustain an array of feminist styles and theories of reading; revealing and re-appropriating the plural space of legal interpretation, they seek to open a hitherto unexplored arena for a feminist politics of law. Feminist Encounters with Legal Philosophy is a thoroughly researched interdisciplinary collection that will interest students and scholars of Law, Philosophy, and Feminism.
Sovereignty marks the boundary between politics and law. Highlighting the legal context of politics and the political context of law, it thus contributes to the internal dynamics of both political and legal systems. This book comprehends the persistence of sovereignty as a political and juridical concept in the post-sovereign social condition. The tension and paradoxical relationship between the semantics and structures of sovereignty and post-sovereignty are addressed by using the conceptual framework of the autopoietic social systems theory. Using a number of contemporary European examples, developments and paradoxes, the author examines topics of immense interest and importance relating to the concept of sovereignty in a globalising world. The study argues that the modern question of sovereignty permanently oscillating between de iure authority and de facto power cannot be discarded by theories of supranational and transnational globalized law and politics. Criticising quasi-theological conceptualizations of political sovereignty and its juridical form, the study reformulates the concept of sovereignty and its persistence as part of the self-referential communication of the systems of positive law and politics. The book will be of considerable interest to academics and researchers in political, legal and social theory and philosophy.
Considering general philosophical and theoretical questions about the nature, purpose and operation of law as a whole, this book introduces students to contemporary debates in jurisprudence and encourages them to think in a theoretical and critical way about the nature of law, legal reasoning and adjudication. Discussing wider issues of morality, politics and society with reference to legal cases and examples, it provides as broad a perspective on the law as possible. Key features of this textbook include: introductions to each chapter analysis of how jurisprudential issues can arise in everyday life a wide range of cases to ground the theoretical discussion in-depth discussion of the relationship of law to force, morality and politics, as well as of rights, justice and feminist jurisprudence. The text provides a concise treatment of all the major topics typically covered in an undergraduate course on jurisprudence and succinctly explains the arguments for and against the different approaches to the issues that are raised. |
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