At a time when the collective redress landscape is undergoing a period of transformative change, this important and timely research focuses on class actions in England and Wales. The author provides an objective analysis of the costs and benefits of these proceedings from an access to justice perspective. Aiming to promote accessibility, this pioneering work separates fact from fiction in an easily digestible way, offering progressive solutions for reform.

Oil waste was everywhere-on the roads, in the rivers where they fished, and in the water that they used for bathing, cooking, and washing. Children became sick and died, cases of stomach cancer skyrocketed, and women miscarried or gave birth to children with congenital disorders. The American oil company Texaco-now part of Chevron-extracted its first barrel of crude oil from Amazonian Ecuador in 1972. It left behind millions of gallons of spilled oil and more than eighteen million gallons of toxic waste. In Crude, Ecuadorian lawyer and activist Pablo Fajardo gives a firsthand account of Texaco's involvement in the Amazon as well as the ensuing legal battles between the oil company, the Ecuadorian government, and the region's inhabitants. As a teenager, Fajardo worked in the Amazonian oil fields, where he witnessed the consequences of Texaco/Chevron's indifference to the environment and to the inhabitants of the Amazon. Fajardo mobilized with his peers to seek reparations and in time became the lead counsel for UDAPT (Union of People Affected by Texaco), a group of more than thirty thousand small farmers and indigenous people from the northern Ecuadorian Amazon who continue to fight for reparations and remediation to this day. Eye-opening and galvanizing, Crude brings to light one of the least well-known but most important cases of environmental and racial injustice of our time.

The essays in this volume take on the challenge of explaining the current formation of the relation between sovereignty, law and violence in what is termed 'Democracy's Empire'.
Contains a situated discussion of the institution of democracy and related
juridico-political problems
Examines the historical and philosophical legacies which inform Democracy's Empire - such as the Roman Republic, the separation between Church and State in the enlightenment, formations of revolutionary violence, and the relation between norm and exception
Poses the problem of violence and death at the heart of the institution of democracy including examples such as South Africa and Iraq
Offers a mixture of historical and philosophical treatment of democracy as a juridical problem of constitutional violence

This volume of Studies in Law, Politics and Society explores issues around hatred and the law. Built on contributions from an interdisciplinary and expert collection of scholars, topics covered in this volume include the patterns of death penalty bill introductions across all active death penalty states in the USA from 1999 to 2018 (the so-called 'era of abolition'); the myriad factors contributing to America's limited police and persecutorial response to bias-motivated hate crimes; the complex ways in which the Batman and Joker graphic novels legitimize and challenge the countersubversive politics of American law and order through their portrayal of vigilante justice; the role of social media companies in the regulation of online hate speech; and a socio-legal analysis of gender-based victimization, misogyny and the 'hate crime paradigm' in England and Wales. Through its valuable contribution to our understanding of the nexus between hatred and the law, this volume is essential reading for legal scholars worldwide.

In the Xi Jinping era, it has become clear that the rule of law, as understood in the West, will not appear in China soon. But was this ever a likely option? This book argues China's legal system needs to be studied from an internal perspective, to take into account the characteristic architecture of China's Party-state. To do so, it addresses two key elements: ideology and organisation. Part One of the book discusses ideology and the law, exploring how the Chinese Communist Party conceives of the nature of law and its position within its broader range of policy tools. Part Two, on organisation and the law, reviews how these ideological principles manifest themselves in the application of law, as well as the reform of the Party-state. As such, it highlights how the Party's plans and approaches run counter to mainstream theoretical expectations, and advocates a greater attention to the inherent logic of the system itself.

Issues of the Day provides an easy way for students, academics, journalists, policymakers, and the public to learn about a diverse range of policy issues affecting the environment, energy, transportation, and public health. Each commentary gives a short assessment of a topic, summarizing in a non-technical way the current state of analysis or evidence on the issue, along with selected recommendations for further reading. The essays are written by world renowned scholars, mostly economists, and provide useful insights on policy problems that are often complex and poorly understood. Some of the topics covered include air pollution, hazardous waste, voluntary environmental programs, domestic (U.S.) and global climate policy design, fishery management, water quality, endangered species, forest fires, oil security, solar power, road and airport, fuel taxes and fuel economy standards, alternative fuel vehicles, health and longevity, smoking, malaria, tuberculosis, and the environment and development. The objective is to disseminate the findings of sound, objective research on the costs, benefits, and appropriate reform of public policies. The book provides a useful supplement for undergraduate- and graduate-level course reading, a reference guide for professionals, and a way for the general reader to quickly develop an informed perspective on the most important policy problems of the day. Issues of the Day is available to download as a PDF from the Resources for the Future website: www.rff.org/weeklycommentary

This book provides a theoretical and practical exploration of the constitutional bar against cruel and unusual punishments, excessive bail, and excessive fines. It explores the history of this prohibition, the current legal doctrine, and future applications of the Eighth Amendment. With contributions from the leading academics and experts on the Eighth Amendment and the wide range of punishments and criminal justice actors it touches, this volume addresses constitutional theory, legal history, federalism, constitutional values, the applicable legal doctrine, punishment theory, prison conditions, bail, fines, the death penalty, juvenile life without parole, execution methods, prosecutorial misconduct, race discrimination, and law & science.

Combining interdisciplinary techniques with original ethnographic fieldwork, Christoph Sperfeldt examines the first attempts of international criminal courts to provide reparations to victims of mass atrocities. The observations focus on two case studies: the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, where Sperfeldt spent over ten years working at and around, and the International Criminal Court's interventions in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Enriched with first-hand observations and an awareness of contextual dynamics, this book directs attention to the 'social life of reparations' that too often get lost in formal accounts of law and its institutions. Sperfeldt shows that reparations are constituted and contested through a range of practices that produce, change, and give meaning to reparations. Appreciating the nature and effects of these practices provides us with a deeper understanding of the discrepancies that exist between the reparations ideal and how it functions imperfectly in different contexts.

Why are we so concerned with belonging? In what ways does our belonging constitute our identity? Is belonging a universal concept or a culturally dependent value? How does belonging situate and motivate us? Joseph E. David grapples with these questions through a genealogical analysis of ideas and concepts of belonging. His book transports readers to crucial historical moments in which perceptions of belonging have been formed, transformed, or dismantled. The cases presented here focus on the pivotal role played by belonging in kinship, law, and political order, stretching across cultural and religious contexts from eleventh-century Mediterranean religious legal debates to twentieth-century statist liberalism in Western societies. With his thorough inquiry into diverse discourses of belonging, David pushes past the politics of belonging and forces us to acknowledge just how wide-ranging and fluid notions of belonging can be.

This book critically examines the development and current structure of European Union agri-environmental measures at a substantive level. Examining the measures in an integrated manner, showing how they interrelate linking different aspects of European Union agricultural law and policy, this volume examines the legislation adopted at European Union level as well as the impact of particular national measures to implement that legislation. Where appropriate, comparisons are drawn between the manner in which European Union legislation has been implemented among various Member States. Critically assessing European Union and national measures, in the light of other policy pressures such as the influence of world trade agreements and the political pressures exerted by the agricultural sector within the national legal systems of individual Member States, this volume is a valuable resource for academics researching and practitioners working in the areas of European Union environmental and agricultural law.

Legal Practice and Cultural Diversity considers how contemporary cultural and religious diversity challenges legal practice, how legal practice responds to that challenge, and how practice is changing in the encounter with the cultural diversity occasioned by large-scale, post-war immigration. Locating actual practices and interpretations which occur in jurisprudence and in public discussion, this volume examines how the wider environment shapes legal processes and is in turn shaped by them. In so doing, the work foregrounds a number of themes principally relating to changing norms and practices and sensitivity to cultural and religious difference in the application of the law. Comparative in approach, this study places particular cases in their widest context, taking into account international and transnational influences on the way in which actors, legal and other, respond.

This book explores how small businesses respond to the law. By detailing the intricate ways in which businesses come to comply with or violate legal regulations, it shows a very different picture of compliance that completely changes the way we think about how businesses respond to the law, how we can capture such responses, and what explains their behaviors. The book moves us beyond a static and single-perspective approach to compliance, where firms are seen as obeying or breaking a specific rule at a specific point in time. Instead, it offers a dynamic view of compliance as it manifests in daily business, where firms must comply with a host of legal rules and must do so over a long period of time. This timely book is especially valuable to three main groups: to compliance practitioners and regulatory enforcement agents, who are increasingly forced to consider how compliance management and enforcement practices actually affect compliance; to regulatory governance scholars (in public administration, law, sociology, and management science), for whom compliance is a central aspect; and to scholars of Chinese law, who realize that compliance is a central challenge that the Chinese legal system must overcome.

The process of economic globalization, as product and capital markets have become increasingly integrated since WWII, has placed huge, and it is argued by some, irresistible pressures on the world's 'insider' stakeholder oriented corporate governance systems. Insider corporate governance systems in countries such as Germany, so the argument goes, should converge or be transformed by global product and capital market pressures to the 'superior' shareholder oriented 'outsider' corporate governance model prevalent in the UK and the US. What these pressures from globalization are, how they manifest themselves, whether they are likely to cause such a convergence/transformation and whether these pressures will continue, lie at the heart of the exploration in this volume. The Globalization of Corporate Governance provides a detailed analysis of the evolution of the key corporate governance systems in the UK, the US and Germany from the perspective of the development of economic globalization. As such it is a valuable resource for those interested in how economic and legal reforms interact to produce change within corporate governance systems.

Taking its cue from theoretical and ideological calls to challenge globalisation as a dynamic of homogenisation - and resistance - as led from, and directed against, the Global North, this volume asks: what can we see when we shift the lens beyond a North-South binary? Based on empirical studies of 'frontier-zones' of legal globalisation in India, Pakistan and Latin America, the book adopts an original format. Framed as a relational dialogue between newer as well as more prominent scholars within the field, from various cores through to postcolonial academic peripheries, it questions structural variables in the shadows of legal globalisation and how we as scholars build a space for critique.

This book shows how Rwanda's transitional courts that tried genocide crimes - the gacaca - produced social complicity and cemented authoritarian rule. It is unique for its in-depth investigation of the courts' legal operations: confessions, denunciation, and lay judging, and shows how targeted incentives such as grants of clemency, opportunities for private gain, and career advancement drew the masses into the orbit of the ethnic minority-dominated regime. Using previously untapped data, it illustrates how a decade of mass trials constructed a tacit patronage-driven relationship in which the interests of the citizenry became tied to the authoritarian elite that had discretionary power to grant or withdraw those benefits at will. The operation of law in individual behavior and authoritarian control presented in this volume will be of use to students and scholars in the social sciences, and practitioners interested in criminal law and transitional justice.

Cultural rights promote cultural and scientific creativity. Transformative and empowering, they also enable the pursuit of knowledge and understanding, thereby working as atrocity prevention tools. The Transforming Power of Cultural Rights argues that this gives these rights a central role to play in promoting the full human personality and in realizing all other human rights. Looking at the work of the UN Special Rapporteurs in the field of cultural rights as well as UNESCO's efforts, Helle Porsdam addresses the question of how a universal human rights agenda can include a dialogue that recognizes the importance of cultural diversity without sliding into cultural relativism. She argues that cultural rights offer a useful international arena and discourse in which to explain and negotiate cultural meanings when controversies arise. This places them at the center of human rights - and at the center of law and humanities.

Catholic social teaching (CST) refers to the corpus of authoritative ecclesiastical teaching, usually in the form of papal encyclicals, on social matters, beginning with Pope Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum (1891) and running through Pope Francis. CST is not a social science and its texts are not pragmatic primers for social activists. It is a normative exercise of Church teaching, a kind of comprehensive applied - although far from systematic - social moral theology. This volume is a scholarly engagement with this 130-year-old documentary tradition. Its twenty-three essays aim to provide a constructive, historically sophisticated, critical exegesis of all the major (and some of the minor) documents of CST. The volume's appeal is not limited to Catholics, or even just to those who embrace, or who are seriously interested in, Christianity. Its appeal is to any scholar interested in the history or content of modern CST.

As the first woman to be appointed President of the UK Supreme Court, Brenda Hale was one of the UK's most high profile and influential judges, and she is among the most powerful women leaders of our time. For almost half a century, she pioneered as an educator, reformer, and decision-maker, leaving a distinct mark on the law and the lives of many. In commemoration of her recent retirement from the Supreme Court, this collection celebrates her long and illustrious career. Organised by thematic chapters and featuring original research from leading academics, judges and lawyers, this book offers a comprehensive account of Lady Hale's achievements and enduring impact. The contributors, many of whom were her peers and colleagues, demonstrate how Hale forged her own path within male-dominated institutions, carved a space for herself and others, and, ultimately, endeavoured to promote justice for everyone.

The last few decades have witnessed dramatic changes affecting the institutions of family and parenthood. If, in the past, the classic family was defined sociologically as a pair of heterosexual parents living together under one roof along with their children, different sociological changes have led to a rapid and extreme transformation in the definitions of family, marital relations, parenthood, and the relationship between parents and children. Dr Yehezkel Margalit explores whether and to what extent there is room, legally and ethically, for the use of modern contractual devices and doctrines to privately regulate the establishment of legal parentage. This book offers intentional parenthood as the most appropriate and flexible normative doctrine for resolving the dilemmas which have surfaced in the field of determining legal parentage. By using the certainty of contract law, determining the legal status of parenthood will be seen as the best method to sort out ambiguities and assure both parental and children rights.

Religious freedom is one of the most debated and controversial human rights in contemporary public discourse. At once a universally held human right and a flash point in the political sphere, religious freedom has resisted scholarly efforts to define its parameters. Taliaferro explores a different way of examining the tensions between the aims of religion and the needs of political communities, arguing that religious freedom is a uniquely difficult human right to uphold because it rests on two competing conceptions, human and divine. Drawing on classical natural law, Taliaferro expounds a new, practical theory of religious freedom for the modern world. By examining conceptions of law such as Sophocles' Antigone, Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed, Ibn Rushd's Middle Commentary on Aristotle's Rhetoric, and Tertullian's writings, The Possibility of Religious Freedom explains how expanding our notion of law to incorporate such theories can mediate conflicts of human and divine law and provide a solid foundation for religious liberty in modernity's pluralism.

Speaking to today's flourishing conversations on both law, morality, and religion, and the religious foundations of law, politics, and society, Common Law and Natural Law in America is an ambitious four-hundred-year narrative and fresh re-assessment of the varied American interactions of 'common law', the stuff of courtrooms, and 'natural law', a law built on human reason, nature, and the mind or will of God. It offers a counter-narrative to the dominant story of common law and natural law by drawing widely from theological and philosophical accounts of natural law, as well as primary and secondary work in legal and intellectual history. With consequences for today's natural-law proponents and critics alike, it explores the thought of the Puritans, Revolutionary Americans, and seminal legal figures including William Blackstone, Joseph Story, Christopher Columbus Langdell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the legal realists.

The problems of entrenched poverty and economic underdevelopment in American urban cores involve multiple overlapping challenges that have stymied consistent and long-term progress for many decades. Although inadequate and misguided laws are not solely responsible for this state of affairs, good laws - and good lawyering - can contribute enormously to overcoming the challenges of the urban cores. By showcasing a range of scholarly analyses, covering a broad spectrum of legal issues and methodologies, this book demonstrates how law and lawyers can and do respond to the challenges of the urban cores. It provides paths forward at the local level in the face of federal political paralysis and inattention and lays a foundation for new paradigms and new approaches to intransigent problems. Modeling engaged legal scholarship as a pragmatic response to contemporary challenges, this book is for anyone concerned about the current state of American urban cores.

Malcolm Feeley, one of the founding giants of the law and society field, is also one of its most exciting, diverse, and contemporary scholars. His works have examined criminal courts, prison reform, the legal profession, legal professionalism, and a variety of other important topics of enduring theoretical interest with a keen eye for the practical implications. In this volume, The Legal Process and the Promise of Justice, an eminent group of contemporary law and society scholars offer fresh and original analyzes of his work. They asses the legacy of Feeley's theoretical innovations, put his findings to the test of time, and provide provocative historical and international perspectives for his insights. This collection of original essays not only draws attention to Professor Feeley's seminal writings but also to the theories and ideas of others who, inspired by Feeley, have explored how courts and the legal process really work to provide a promise of justice.

The North-South global divide is as much about perception and prejudice as it is about economic disparities. Latin America is no less ruled by hegemonic misrepresentations of its national legal systems. The European image of its laws mostly upholds legal legitimacy and international comity. By contrast, diagnoses of excessive legal formalism, an extraordinary gap between law and action, inappropriate European transplants, elite control, pervasive inefficiencies, and massive corruption call for wholesale law reform. Misrepresented to the level of becoming fictions, these ideas nevertheless have profound influence on US foreign policy, international agency programs, private disputes, and academic research. Jorge L. Esquirol identifies their materialization in global governance - mostly undermining Latin American states in legal geopolitics - and their deployment by private parties in transnational litigation and international arbitration. Bringing unrelenting legal realism to comparative law, this study explores new questions in international relations, focusing on the power dynamics among national legal systems.

Convening leading scholars to reflect on the practical and philosophical implications of religious values, this volume is an accessible introduction to Catholic social thought on contemporary affairs. Its gracefully written chapters cover three themes - direct environmental policy implications of Laudato Si', philosophical alternatives to dominant policy discourse, and renewed political economy based on robust conceptions of human flourishing. Care for the World offers learned reflections on what it would mean to express an ethic of compassion in an era of climate crises.