This book offers an examination of physician-assisted death, but it also extends the discussion to a broader range of end-of-life decisions including suicide, palliative care and sedation until death.

The focus of this book is on the epistemological and hermeneutic implications of data science and artificial intelligence for democracy and the Rule of Law. How do the normative effects of automated decision systems or the interventions of robotic fellow 'beings' compare to the legal effect of written and unwritten law? To investigate these questions the book brings together two disciplinary perspectives rarely combined within the framework of one volume. One starts from the perspective of 'code and law' and the other develops from the domain of 'law and literature'. Integrating original analyses of relevant novels or films, the authors discuss how computational technologies challenge traditional forms of legal thought and affect the regulation of human behavior. Thus, pertinent questions are raised about the theoretical assumptions underlying both scientific and legal practice.

In this wide-ranging investigation of many prominent issues in contemporary legal, political, and moral philosophy, Matthew Kramer combines penetrating critiques with original theorising as he examines the writings of numerous major theorists (including Ronald Dworkin, H.L.A. Hart, Alan Gewirth, Ronald Coase and Richard Posner). Among the many topics covered by Kramer's essays are the relative merits of legal positivism and natural-law theory, the appropriate understanding of justice, the role of consequences in moral decision-making, and the ultimate foundations of moral judgements.

This book illuminates methodology in legal research by bringing together interdisciplinary scholars, who employ a diverse set of methodologies, to address a specific shared research challenge: 'the body'. The contributors were asked a question: if you were invited to contribute to an edited book on 'the body', where would you start and then where would you go? The result is a self-reflective discussion of how and where researchers engage with methodological practices. The contributors draw on their own interdisciplinary research experiences to explore how 'the body' might be addressed in their work, and the resources they would deploy in order to carry out the task. This 'book within a book' is innovative in both content and format. It provides a rare insight into how top interdisciplinary legal scholars go about making decisions about their research. The shared device of 'the body' allows the volume to trace a number of rich approaches into the process of research as practiced by these diverse scholars. In presenting thinking and research in action, the volume offers a new, self-reflective view on the much-addressed theme of the body, as well as taking a fresh approach to the historically vexed problem of research methodology in legal studies.

While it has many connections to other topics in normative and applied ethics, discrimination is a central subject in philosophy in its own right. It plays a significant role in relation to many real-life complaints about unjust treatment or unjust inequalities, and it raises a number of questions in political and moral philosophy, and in legal theory. Some of these questions include: what distinguishes the concept of discrimination from the concept of differential treatment? What distinguishes direct from indirect discrimination? Is discrimination always morally wrong? What makes discrimination wrong? How should we eliminate the effects of discrimination? By covering a wide range of topics, and by doing so in a way that does not assume prior acquaintance, this handbook enables the reader to get to grips with the omnipresent issue. The Routledge Handbook of the Ethics of Discrimination is an outstanding reference source to this exciting subject and the first collection of its kind. Comprising over thirty chapters by a team of international contributors the handbook is divided into six main parts: * conceptual issues * the wrongness of discrimination * groups of 'discriminatees' * sites of discrimination * causes and means * history of discrimination. Essential reading for students and researchers in applied ethics and political philosophy the handbook will also be very useful for those in related fields, such as law, sociology and politics.

Freedom of thought is one of the great and venerable notions of Western thought, often celebrated in philosophical texts - and described as a crucial right in American, European, and International Law, and in that of other jurisdictions. What it means more precisely is, however, anything but clear; surprisingly little writing has been devoted to it. In the past, perhaps, there has been little need for such elaboration. As one Supreme Court Justice stressed, "[f]reedom to think is absolute of its own nature" because even "the most tyrannical government is powerless to control the inward workings of the mind." But the rise of brain scanning, cognition enhancement, and other emerging technologies make this question a more pressing one. This volume provides an interdisciplinary exploration of how freedom of thought might function as an ethical principle and as a constitutional or human right. It draws on philosophy, legal analysis, history, and reflections on neuroscience and neurotechnology to explore what respect for freedom of thought (or an individual's cognitive liberty or autonomy) requires.

This volume offers a new theoretical approach to the analysis of the law/revenge binary, and attempts to dismantle the common idea of revenge as lacking any legal, moral or rational dimension. In contrast, the book puts forward a model of a complex system of justice-which it terms 'vindicatory'-wherein vendetta constitutes an authorized action, the core of which does not (just) lie in vengeance but also in settlement procedures for peace-or 'composition.' The first part of the book ("Vindicatory Justice: Conceptual Analyses and Forerunners") seeks to identify the nature of vindicatory justice and to shed light on the structure of so-called vindicatory systems. In turn, the second part ("Mapping Vindicatory Justice") illustrates, using examples gathered from a range of sociolegal contexts, the dynamic relationship between composition and authorized revenge in vindicatory systems. Taken as a whole, the volume shows that applying a longue duree historical perspective to the study of revenge systems allows us to clearly recognize composition and authorized revenge as features of the same legal system, even though one of them may seem predominant (or more eye-catching) than the other in certain cultural settings.

Rule-applying legal arguments are traditionally treated as a kind of syllogism. Such a treatment overlooks the fact that legal principles and rules are not statements which describe the world, but rather means by which humans impose structure on the world. Legal rules create legal consequences, they do not describe them. This has consequences for the logic of rule- and principle-applying arguments, the most important of which may be that such arguments are defeasible. This book offers an extensive analysis of the role of rules and principles in legal reasoning, which focuses on the close relationship between rules, principles, and reasons. Moreover, it describes a logical theory which assigns a central place to the notion of reasons for and against a conclusion, and which is especially suited to deal with rules and principles.

You are at a dinner with someone attractive. She suddenly kisses you. Or he leans unexpectedly across the table and caresses your thigh. Whatever. You know the kind of encounter and the range of possible responses. Consider the kiss. What does it mean, and where does it lead? Does kissing necessarily imply more, and if so how much? These and similar questions of amorous ethics and erotic disquisition are the central to our everyday intimate public lives and they are the lost object of the law of love, the "lex amatoria" collated and presented here.

This book provides an epistemological study of the great Islamic scholar of Banjarese origin, Syeikh Muhammad Arsyad al-Banjari (1710-1812) who contributed to the development of Islam in Indonesia and, in general, Southeast Asia. The work focuses on Arsyad al-Banjari's dialectical use and understanding of qiyas or correlational inference as a model of parallel reasoning or analogy in Islamic jurisprudence. This constituted the most prominent instrument he applied in his effort of integrating Islamic law into the Banjarese society.This work studies how Arsyad al-Banjari integrates jadal theory or dialectic in Islamic jurisprudence, within his application of qiyas. The author develops a framework for qiyas which acts as the interface between jadal, dialogical logic, and Per Martin-Loef's Constructive Type Theory (CTT). One of the epistemological results emerging from the present study is that the different forms of qiyas applied by Arsyad al-Banjari represent an innovative and sophisticated form of reasoning. The volume is divided into three parts that discuss the types of qiyas as well their dialectical and argumentative aspects, historical background and context of Banjar, and demonstrates how the theory of qiyas comes quite close to the contemporary model of parallel reasoning for sciences and mathematics developed by Paul Bartha (2010). This volume will be of interest to historians and philosophers in general, and logicians and historians of philosophy in particular.

This book analyses gender-based offences on the Internet from the perspective of international human rights law, interwoven with rights theories and feminist legal theories. It investigates whether international human rights law is applicable in regulating harmful online conduct and speech, with a focus on sexual violence, various forms of harassment, sexist hate speech and harmful pornography. This involves assessing whether gender-based online offences are considered violations of international human rights law and - if they are recognised as such explicitly or by way of interpretation - the extent of state obligations. The book reviews a range of international law sources, such as selected international human rights law treaties, case law, soft-law documents and academic scholarship. The application of general human rights law provisions to the online sphere is evaluated by considering the online/offline coherence of provisions as well as potential gaps, inconsistencies and disadvantages that exist in the regulation of online gender-based offences. The makeup, aim and effect of social spheres, areas of law and legal principles are thus assessed in relation to gender and the Internet. Aspects discussed include the architecture of the Internet, the structure of public international law, the harm principle as employed in domestic law and international human rights law, and the scope of particular rights, mainly involving the freedom of expression and the right to privacy. Working from the premise that the transposition of international human rights law to the Internet must ensure the former's functionality and effectiveness, the book argues that a contextual application of rights is called for. This requires assessing what is harmful online - including the effects of online speech and conduct - and what are effective means of regulating liability on the Internet. In turn, such assessments require a gender-sensitive approach.

Ronald Dworkins work on equality has shaped debates in the field of distributive justice for nearly three decades. In this book Alexander Brown attempts to provide a critique but also a defence of that work, and to extend equality of resources globally.

Divided into three parts, this book examines the relationship between law and culture from various perspectives, both theoretical and empirical. Part I outlines the framework for further considerations and includes new, innovative conceptualizations of two ideas that are essential to the topic of law and culture: legal culture and customary law. Both of these reappear later in the more empirically oriented chapters of Parts II and III. Part II includes chapters on the relationships between law, customs, and culture, drawing heavily on the tradition and achievements of the anthropology of law and touching on important problems of multiculturalism, legal pluralism, and cultural defense. It focuses on the more intangible meaning of culture, while Part III addresses its more material, tangible aspects and the issue of cultural production, as well as its intersection with law.

This book offers an introduction to the language of law from the perspective of logical semantics. As a logical tool, Boguslaw Wolniewicz's formal ontology of situations is adapted. The central issue addressed is the meaning of normative statements, primarily legal norms. The main outcome of the book consists in explications of several legal notions (including legal events, legal acts and legal rules) in terms of the formal ontology of situations. In addition, the book concludes that legal norms are sentences in a logical sense, so some are true, while others are false, and that their logical value does not depend on whether or not they were adopted in the law-making process. Lastly, the book contends that there are semantic relations between orders that are similar to entailment, contradiction, opposition, and sub-opposition, despite the fact that orders are not sentences in a logical sense, i.e., they are neither true nor false.The book also presents some original Wittgenstein-style deontic logics built on the first order logic. The formal results are applied to selected problems in the theory of law, including the problem of the possibility of algorithmic application of legal norms.

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the presumption of innocence from both a practical and theoretical point of view. Throughout the book a framework for the presumption of innocence is developed. The book approaches the right to presumption of innocence from an international human rights perspective using specific examples drawn from international criminal law. The result is a framework for understanding the right that is grounded in human rights law. This framework can then be applied across different national and international systems. When applied, it can help determine when the presumption of innocence is being infringed upon, eroded, violated, and ensure that the presumption of innocence is protected. The book is an essential resource for students, academics and practitioners working in the areas of human rights, criminal law, international criminal law, and evidence. The themes also have a more general application to national jurisdictions and legal theory.

The book focuses the openness of Chinese copyright law and patent law, namely the right limitation and exception rules (as the IP-internal balancing mechanism) and the right enforcement and protection (as the IP-external balancing mechanism). It examines the highlights of the 3rd and 4th amendments to the Chinese copyright law, patent law and the trademark law, addressing the most debated questions during these amendments. This book also takes a comparative approach to study the legislations and case laws in the USA, EU and China. The comparison covers the legislation, case decisions, which could offer useful clues for legislators to revise the current law, for judges to decide the cases about relevant topics and lay down their market plans. Moreover, this study also provides several recommendations for the right holders who are currently operating or planning to operate in China, regarding the de facto protection levels of their IP rights, the risks of right infringement and litigation costs as well as the trend of the goalsetting in their intellectual property strategy.

This book points out the legal roots of the alignment of Cross-Strait political relations and the issues of Taiwan's participation in international space, and the Treaty of San Francisco and the "Undetermined Status of Taiwan". Based on an academic standpoint, the book studies the legal theories related to the alignment of Cross-Strait political relations and the issues of Taiwan's participation in international space from the Mainland Chinese perspective. It focuses on the different descriptions and regulations of the alignment of Cross-Strait political relations between the Mainland of China and Taiwan and discusses the status, forms, problems, and prospects of the coexistence of the two sides in the international space. Compared with the policy oaths used in current studies, the book systematically discusses the alignment of Cross-Strait political relations and the issues of Taiwan's participation in international space with a theoretical interpretation. It uses detailed historical materials, especially valuable policy documents and excerpts of speeches cited of the Mainland of China. This book puts forward a series of important propositions, such as the construction of a mechanism for Taiwan's orderly participation in the international space and means of existence of the Taiwan region in the international space.

This book brings together leading legal theorists to present original philosophical work on the concept of law - the central question of jurisprudence. It covers five broad topics: firstly it addresses debates concerning the methodology of jurisprudence. In Part II it focuses on the notion of a legal system and its coercive nature, while Part III explores the relationships between law and morality, the traditional point of contention between positivist and non-positivist theories of law. Part IV then examines questions regarding law's normative character and relationships with practical reason. Lastly, the final part introduces two novel theoretical approaches to conceptual jurisprudence.

This book deals with Vitoria, Charles V and Erasmus. Vitoria's ideas had a major influence on Charles V and his European and American policy. In turn, Erasmus' humanism was decisive in the formation of a new international order intellectually discussed by Vitoria and put into practice by the Emperor. Shedding new light on the influence of Francisco de Vitoria and Erasmus on Charles V's imperial policy, the book's goal is to explore the impact of Vitoria's thought with regard to the history of, and contemporary issues in, international law, while also comparing his thinking with that of the well-known humanist Erasmus and assessing their respective influences on the imperial policy of Charles V.

In the last two decades, the philosophy of criminal law has undergone a vibrant revival in Canada. The adoption of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms has given the Supreme Court of Canada unprecedented latitude to engage with principles of legal, moral, and political philosophy when elaborating its criminal law jurisprudence. Canadian scholars have followed suit by paying increased attention to the philosophical foundations of domestic criminal law. Because of Canada's leadership in international criminal law, both at the level of the International Criminal Court and of specific war crimes tribunals, they have also begun to turn their attention to international criminal law per se. This collection seeks to bring all these Canadian voices together for the first time, and evidence the fact that criminal law theory is no longer to be associated exclusively with the older British, German and American traditions. The topics covered include questions of philosophical methodology, the legitimate scope of domestic and international criminalization, rationales for criminal law defences in both domestic and international law, the philosophical underpinnings of specific crimes and forms of joint responsibility, as well as the theorization of criminal procedure and evidence law. ENDORSEMENTS "In continental Europe, academic commentary on the criminal law has long manifested large philosophical ambitions. Less so in common-law countries, where the dominance of jury trial and the piecemeal development of case-law, together with the famously robust attitudes of common lawyers, have militated against detailed philosophical engagement with doctrine. Over the last 20 years or so, however, new generations of philosophically-literate lawyers and legally-informed philosophers have overcome the historic resistance. Nowhere more so, it seems, than in Canada, where the common law and civilian traditions meet. In 'Rethinking Criminal Law Theory', Francois Tanguay-Renaud and James Stribopoulos have joined with 14 talented Canadian colleagues to showcase the tremendous breadth and depth of their contemporary national contribution to the subject. Ranging across topics as diverse as emergency, obscenity, and insanity, these essays - without exception insightful and penetrating -set a high standard for the rest of us to aspire to.'' John Gardner, University of Oxford "'Rethinking Criminal Law Theory' is an excellent collection of essays demonstrating the vigour, creativity and range of Canadian criminal justice scholarship. It covers a wide range of problems and issues both in the domestic and the international context. Core questions are examined in depth and new questions are brought to the fore. I recommend it very highly to criminal lawyers and philosophers of the criminal law." Professor Victor Tadros, University of Warwick "'Rethinking Criminal Law Theory 'is packed with outstanding contributions from criminal law theorists who are among the best not only in Canada, but in the whole English-speaking world. Broad and deep in its coverage, the collection offers fresh approaches to a wide range of cutting-edge issues in the field. It provides a resource readers will come back to repeatedly." Stuart Green, Professor of Law and Justice Nathan L Jacobs Scholar, Rutgers University

How do social institutions exist? How do they direct our conduct? The Opposite Mirrors defends the thesis that the existence of institutions is a conventional matter. Ultimately they exist because we believe in their existence, and because they play a role in our practical reasoning. Human action necessarily has an unpredictable aspect; human institutions perform an important task by reducing uncertainty in our interactions. The author applies this thesis to the most important institutions: the law and the monetary system. In his analysis he connects many traditional topics of the philosophy of law, social philosophy and the philosophy of social sciences in a new way. He discusses the nature of rules, authority, and power and analyzes the Hobbesian presuppositions which have been dominant in legal theory and in the economic analyses of the state. The book is written for legal theorists as well as for political and social philosophers, and theoretically oriented social scientists.

First published in 1986. Western law is normally regarded as universal when considered from the fact that it has been received and utilized by non-Western countries as the basis of their own state legal systems. The reception of Western law by non-Western countries in modern times is the most influential encounter of non-Western law with foreign law. The major portion of this book is a collection of descriptions of typical non-Western countries from this viewpoint by native scholars.

Hans Kelsen's efforts in the areas of legal philosophy and legal theory are considered by many scholars of law to be the most influential thinking of this century. This volume makes available some of the best work extant on Kelsen's theory, including papers newly translated into English. The book covers such topics as competing philosophical positions on the nature of law, legal validity, legal powers, and the unity of municipal and international law. It also throws much light on Kelsen's intellectual milieu--as well as his intellectual debts.

The Free Speech Discussion Forum is an annual event that is designed to bring together prominent scholars from all over the world to discuss cutting-edge free speech issues. The 2021 meeting was hosted by the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. Two major topics were discussed at the 2021 forum: "Robotic Speech" and "Contemporary Threats to Speech." The "Robotic Speech" topic included examination of such things as "chatbots," data-driven speech, "deep fakes," and the potential for internet speech to interfere with democratic elections. The "Contemporary Threats to Speech" focused on a variety of topics, including the growth and power of social media platforms. This compendium includes selected articles that were discussed at the Forum. It also honors the long-standing faculty exchange of the University of Mainz's School of Law and die Louis D. Brandeis School of Law at the University of Louisville, Kentucky.