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Books > Law > Jurisprudence & general issues > Law & society
This volume assembles in one place the work of scholars who are making key contributions to a new approach to the United Nations, and to global organizations and international law more generally. Anthropology has in recent years taken on global organizations as a legitimate source of its subject matter. The research that is being done in this field gives a human face to these world-reforming institutions. Palaces of Hope demonstrates that these institutions are not monolithic or uniform, even though loosely connected by a common organizational network. They vary above all in their powers and forms of public engagement. Yet there are common threads that run through the studies included here: the actions of global institutions in practice, everyday forms of hope and their frustration, and the will to improve confronted with the realities of nationalism, neoliberalism, and the structures of international power.
Global lawmaking by international organizations holds the potential for enormous influence over world trade and national economies. Representatives from states, industries, and professions produce laws for worldwide adoption in an effort to alter state lawmaking and commercial behaviors, whether of giant multi-national corporations or micro, small and medium-sized businesses. Who makes that law and who benefits affects all states and all market players. Global Lawmakers offers the first extensive empirical study of commercial lawmaking within the United Nations. It shows who makes law for the world, how they make it, and who comes out ahead. Using extensive and unique data, the book investigates three episodes of lawmaking between the late 1990s and 2012. Through its original socio-legal orientation, it reveals dynamics of competition, cooperation and competitive cooperation within and between international organizations, including the UN, World Bank, IMF and UNIDROIT, as these IOs craft international laws. Global Lawmakers proposes an original theory of international organizations that seek to construct transnational legal orders within social ecologies of lawmaking. The book concludes with an appraisal of creative global governance by the UN in international commerce over the past fifty years and examines prospective challenges for the twenty-first century.
The dramatic results of the 2014 European Parliament elections have highlighted the European Union's urgent need for a review of the scope and purpose of its social objectives and for a reordering of European priorities. This book advocates a radical and original alternative to the current philosophy that determines the set of rules for the awarding of EU public procurement contracts. It calls for a reordering of the EU's economic and social priorities. In doing so, it advocates for a social dimension to be placed at the core of public procurement, which could elicit a social model of integration in the EU in which the European citizen is the key actor. This is achieved through an analytical approach as well as concise and contextualised explanations relating to free trade theories, poverty and public interest theories. This book will be of key interest to students and scholars of the European Union, political theory, and EU law.
After its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s, many wondered whether the law and literature movement would retain vitality. This collection of essays, featuring twenty-two prominent scholars from literature departments as well as law schools, showcases the vibrancy of recent work in the field while highlighting its many new directions. New Directions in Law and Literature furnishes an overview of where the field has been, its recent past, and its potential futures. Some of the essays examine the methodological choices that have affected the field; among these are concern for globalization, the integration of approaches from history and political theory, the application of new theoretical models from affect studies and queer theory, and expansion beyond text to performance and the image. Others grapple with particular intersections between law and literature, whether in copyright law, competing visions of alternatives to marriage, or the role of ornament in the law's construction of racialized bodies. The volume is designed to be a course book that is accessible to undergraduates and law students as well as relevant to academics with an interest in law and the humanities. The essays are simultaneously intended to be introductory and addressed to experts in law and literature. More than any other existing book in the field, New Directions furnishes a guide to the most exciting new work in law and literature while also situating that work within more established debates and conversations.
Is the government too secret or not secret enough? Why is there simultaneously too much government secrecy and a seemingly endless procession of government leaks? The Transparency Fix asserts that we incorrectly assume that government information can be controlled. The same impulse that drives transparency movements also drives secrecy advocates. They all hold the mistaken belief that government information can either be released or kept secure on command. The Transparency Fix argues for a reformation in our assumptions about secrecy and transparency. The world did not end because Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, and Edward Snowden released classified information. But nor was there a significant political change. "Transparency" has become a buzzword, while secrecy is anathema. Using a variety of real-life examples to examine how government information actually flows, Mark Fenster describes how the legal regime's tenuous control over state information belies both the promise and peril of transparency. He challenges us to confront the implausibility of controlling government information and shows us how the contemporary obsession surrounding transparency and secrecy cannot radically change a state that is defined by so much more than information.
Is the government too secret or not secret enough? Why is there simultaneously too much government secrecy and a seemingly endless procession of government leaks? The Transparency Fix asserts that we incorrectly assume that government information can be controlled. The same impulse that drives transparency movements also drives secrecy advocates. They all hold the mistaken belief that government information can either be released or kept secure on command. The Transparency Fix argues for a reformation in our assumptions about secrecy and transparency. The world did not end because Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, and Edward Snowden released classified information. But nor was there a significant political change. "Transparency" has become a buzzword, while secrecy is anathema. Using a variety of real-life examples to examine how government information actually flows, Mark Fenster describes how the legal regime's tenuous control over state information belies both the promise and peril of transparency. He challenges us to confront the implausibility of controlling government information and shows us how the contemporary obsession surrounding transparency and secrecy cannot radically change a state that is defined by so much more than information.
What is the meaning of punishment today? Where is the limit that separates it from the cruel and unusual? In legal discourse, the distinction between punishment and vengeance-punishment being the measured use of legally sanctioned violence and vengeance being a use of violence that has no measure-is expressed by the idea of "cruel and unusual punishment." This phrase was originally contained in the English Bill of Rights (1689). But it (and versions of it) has since found its way into numerous constitutions and declarations, including Article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as the Amendment to the US Constitution. Clearly, in order for the use of violence to be legitimate, it must be subject to limitation. The difficulty is that the determination of this limit should be objective, but it is not, and its application in punitive practice is constituted by a host of extra-legal factors and social and political structures. It is this essential contestability of the limit which distinguishes punishment from violence that this book addresses. And, including contributions from a range of internationally renowned scholars, it offers a plurality of original and important responses to the contemporary question of the relationship between punishment and the limits of law.
The field of socio-legal research has encountered three fundamental challenges over the last three decades – it has been criticized for paying insufficient attention to legal doctrine, for failing to develop a sound theoretical foundation and for not keeping pace with the effects of the increasing globalization and internationalization of law, state and society. This book examines these three challenges from a methodological standpoint. It addresses the first two by demonstrating that legal sociology has much to say about justice as a kind of social experience and has always engaged theoretically with forms of normativity, albeit on its own empirical terms rather than on legal theory’s analytical terms. The book then explores the third challenge, a result of the changing nature of society, by highlighting the move from the industrial relations of early modernity to the post-industrial conditions of late modernity, an age dominated by information technology. It poses the question whether socio-legal research has sufficiently reassessed its own theoretical premises regarding the relationship between law, state and society, so as to grasp the new social and cultural forms of organization specific to the twenty-first century’s global societies.
A leading economist offers a radically new approach to the economic analysis of the law In The Republic of Beliefs, Kaushik Basu, one of the world's leading economists, argues that the traditional economic analysis of the law has significant flaws and has failed to answer certain critical questions satisfactorily. Why are good laws drafted but never implemented? When laws are unenforced, is it a failure of the law or the enforcers? And, most important, considering that laws are simply words on paper, why are they effective? Basu offers a provocative alternative for how the relationship between economics and real-world law enforcement can be understood. Basu summarizes standard, neoclassical law and economics before looking at the weaknesses underlying the discipline. Bringing modern game theory to bear, he develops a "focal point" approach, modeling not just the self-interested actions of the citizens who must follow laws but also the functionaries of the state-the politicians, judges, and bureaucrats-enforcing them. He demonstrates the connections between social norms and the law and shows how well-conceived ideas can change and benefit human behavior. For example, bribe givers and takers will collude when they are treated equally under the law. And in food support programs, vouchers should be given directly to the poor to prevent shop owners from selling subsidized rations on the open market. Basu provides a new paradigm for the ways that law and economics interact-a framework applicable to both less-developed countries and the developed world. Highlighting the limits and capacities of law and economics, The Republic of Beliefs proposes a fresh way of thinking that will enable more effective laws and a fairer society.
Hans Kelsen and Max Weber are conventionally understood as the original proponents of two distinct and opposed processes of concept formation generating two separate and contrasting theoretical frameworks for the study of law. The Reconstruction of the Juridico-Political: Affinity and Divergence in Hans Kelsen and Max Weber contests the conventional understanding of the theoretical relationship between Kelsen's legal positivism and Weber's sociology of law. Utilising the conceptual frame of the juridico-political, the contributors to this interdisciplinary volume analyse central points of affinity and divergence in the work of these two influential figures. Thus, the chapters collected in The Reconstruction of the Juridico-Political offer a comprehensive reconsideration of these affinities and divergences, through a comparison of their respective reconstruction of the notions of democracy, the State, legal rights and the character of law. From this reconsideration a more complex understanding of their theoretical relationship emerges combined with a renewed emphasis upon the continued contemporary relevance of the work of Kelsen and Weber.
This book examines different legal systems and analyses how the judge in each of them performs a meaningful review of the proportional use of discretionary powers by public bodies. Although the proportionality test is not equally deep-rooted in the literature and case-law of France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, this principle has assumed an increasing importance partly due to the influence of the European Court of Justice and European Court of Human Rights. In the United States, different standards of judicial review are applied to review 'arbitrary and capricious' agency discretion. However, do US judges achieve a similar result to the proportionality or reasonableness test? Drawing together a selection of key experts in the field, this book analyses the principle of proportionality in the judicial review of administrative decisions from different perspectives. The principle is first examined in the context of recent developments in the literature and case-law, including the inevitable EU influence, then light shall be shed on the meaning of this principle in the specific case-law of the European Court of Justice and European Court of Human Rights. Finally, the authors go on to explore the ways in which US judges consciously 'sanction' the 'disproportionate' and/or unreasonable' use of agency discretion. In the legal systems where the proportionality test plays a very limited role, Ranchordas and de Waard also try to clarify why this is the case and look at what alternative solutions have been found. This book will be of great interest to scholars of public and administrative law, and EU law.
We live in a world of one-size-fits-all law. People are different, but the laws that govern them are uniform. "Personalized Law"--rules that vary person by person--will change that. Here is a vision of a brave new world, where each person is bound by their own personally-tailored law. "Reasonable person" standards would be replaced by a multitude of personalized commands, each individual with their own "reasonable you" rule. Skilled doctors would be held to higher standards of care, the most vulnerable consumers and employees would receive stronger protections, age restrictions for driving or for the consumption of alcohol would vary according the recklessness risk that each person poses, and borrowers would be entitled to personalized loan disclosures tailored to their unique needs and delivered in a format fitting their mental capacity. The data and algorithms to administer personalize law are at our doorstep, and embryos of this regime are sprouting. Should we welcome this transformation of the law? Does personalized law harbor a utopic promise, or would it produce alienation, demoralization, and discrimination? This book is the first to explore personalized law, offering a vision of law and robotics that delegates to machines those tasks humans are least able to perform well. It inquires how personalized law can be designed to deliver precision and justice and what pitfalls the regime would have to prudently avoid. In this book, Omri Ben-Shahar and Ariel Porat not only present this concept in a clear, easily accessible way, but they offer specific examples of how personalized law may be implemented across a variety of real-life applications.
Terrorism. Why does this word grab our attention so? Propaganda machines have adopted modern technology as a means to always have their content available. Regardless of the hour or time zone, information is being shared by somebody, somewhere. Social media is a game changer influencing the way in which terror groups are changing their tactics and also how their acts of terror are perceived by the members of the public they intend to influence. This book explores how social media adoption by terrorists interacts with privacy law, freedom of expression, data protection and surveillance legislation through an exploration of the fascinating primary resources themselves, covering everything from the Snowden Leaks, the rise of ISIS to Charlie Hebdo. The book also covers lesser worn paths such as the travel guide that proudly boasts that you can get Bounty and Twix bars mid-conflict, and the best local hair salons for jihadi brides. These vignettes, amongst the many others explored in this volume bring to life the legal, policy and ethical debates considered in this volume, representing an important part in the development of understanding terrorist narratives on social media, by framing the legislative debate. This book represents an invaluable guide for lawyers, government bodies, the defence services, academics, students and businesses.
From the late 20th Century, a catalogue of high profile disasters and controversies has drawn attention to the changing relationship between corporations and society. This is taking place against the context of globalisation and this change has become the driving force for demands that corporations become socially responsible. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has therefore emerged as a concept which attempts to encapsulate these demands for social responsibility. Yet at the heart of CSR is the debate about the role and relevance of law. This book will explore the proposition that CSR is a valid legal enquiry and will suggest a law-jobs approach which offers a potential general analytical perspective for examining such fluid concepts such as CSR in law. This approach is innovative because of the insistence of some users of CSR on placing law outside the parameters of CSR or giving it a very limited role; however, Okoye argues here that the very nature of CSR as seeking legitimacy for corporate power pushes to the fore the question of what role law can play. Law is an essential and important aspect of legitimacy and thus this work explores a legal theoretical approach that holds potential for a legal framework of CSR. This interdisciplinary book will be of great interest to students and scholars of corporate law and business studies in general.
How is religion, particularly non-Christianness, conceptualised and represented in English law? What is the relationship between religion, race, ethnicity and culture in these conceptualisations? What might be the socio-political effects of conceptualising religion in particular ways? This book addresses these key questions in two areas of law relating to children. The first case study focuses on child welfare cases and reveals how the boundaries between race and theological notions of religion as belief and practice are blurred. Non-Christians are also often perceived as uncivilized but also, at times, racial otherness can be erased and assimilated. The second examines religion in education and the increasing focus on 'common values'. It demonstrates how non-Christian faith schools are deemed as in need of regulation, while Christian schools are the benchmark of good citizenship. In addition, values discourse and citizenship education provide a means to 'de-racialise' non-Christian children in the ongoing construction of the nation. Central to this analysis is a focus on religion as a socio-political, contingent, fluid and invented concept.
This book provides a critical assessment of the problem of internet child pornography and its governance through legal and non-legal means, including a comparative assessment of laws in England and Wales, the United States of America and Canada in recognition that governments have a compelling interest to protect children from sexual abuse and exploitation. The internet raises novel and complex challenges to existing regulatory regimes. Efforts towards legal harmonization at the European Union, Council of Europe, and United Nations level are examined in this context and the utility of additional and alternative methods of regulation explored. This book argues that effective implementation, enforcement and harmonization of laws could substantially help to reduce the availability and dissemination of child pornography on the internet. At the same time, panic-led policies must be avoided if the wider problems of child sexual abuse and commercial sexual exploitation are to be meaningfully addressed.
This groundbreaking book offers in-depth analysis of the modern Islamic state, applying a quantitative measurement of how Muslim majority nations meet the definition. Content for the book was developed through extensive debate among a panel of distinguished Sunni and Shia Muslim scholars over seven years.
Although international arbitration has emerged as a credible means of resolution of transnational disputes involving parties from diverse cultures, the effects of culture on the accuracy, efficiency, fairness, and legitimacy of international arbitration is a surprisingly neglected topic within the existing literature. The Culture of International Arbitration fills that gap by providing an in-depth study of the role of culture in modern day arbitral proceedings. It contains a detailed analysis of how cultural miscommunication affects the accuracy, efficiency, fairness, and legitimacy in both commercial and investment arbitration when the arbitrators and the parties, their counsel and witnesses come from diverse legal traditions and cultures. The book provides a comprehensive definition of culture, and methodically documents and examines the epistemology of determining facts in various legal traditions and how the mixing of traditions influences the outcome. By so doing, the book demonstrates the acute need for increasing cultural diversity among arbitrators and counsel while securing appropriate levels of cultural competence. To provide an accurate picture, Kidane conducted interviews with leading international jurists from diverse legal traditions with first-hand experience of the complicating effects of culture in legal proceedings. Given the insights and information on the rules and expectations of the various legal traditions and their convergence in modern day international arbitration practice, this book challenges assumptions and can offer a unique and useful perspective to all practitioners, academics, policy makers, students of international arbitration.
Countries which take spatial planning seriously should take planning law and property rights also seriously. There is an unavoidable logical relationship between planning, law, and property rights. However, planning by law and property rights is so familiar and taken for granted that we do not think about the theory behind it. As a result, we do not think abstractly about its strengths and weaknesses, about what can be achieved with it and what not, how it can be improved, how it could be complemented. Such reflections are essential to cope with current and future challenges to spatial planning. This book makes the (often implicit) theory behind planning by law and property rights explicit and relates it to those challenges. It starts by setting out what is understood by planning by law and property rights, and investigates - theoretically and by game simulation - the relationships between planning law and property rights. It then places planning law and property rights within their institutional setting at three different scales: when a country undergoes enormous social and political change, when there is fundamental political debate about the power of the state within a country, and when a country changes its legislation in response to European policy. Not only changing institutions, but also global environmental change, pose huge challenges for spatial planning. The book discusses how planning by law and property rights can respond to those challenges: by adaptive planning), by adaptable property rights, and by public policies at the appropriate geographical level. Planning by law and property rights can fix a local regime of property rights which turns out to be inappropriate but difficult to change. It questions whether such regimes can be changed and whether planning agencies can make such undesirable lock-ins less likely by reducing market uncertainty and, if so, by what means.
Throughout Latin America, the idea of "justice" serves as the ultimate goal and rationale for a wide variety of actions and causes. In the Chilean Atacama Desert, residents have undertaken a prolonged struggle for their right to groundwater. Family members of bombing victims in Buenos Aires demand that the state provide justice for the attack. In Colombia, some victims of political violence have turned to the courts for resolution, while others reject the state's ability to fairly adjudicate their grievances and have constructed a non-state tribunal. In each of these examples, the protagonists seek one main thing: justice. A Sense of Justice ethnographically explores the complex dynamics of justice production across Latin America. The chapters examine (in)justice as it is lived and imagined today and what it means for those who claim and regulate its parameters, including the Brazilian police force, the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal in Colombia, and the Argentine Supreme Court. Inextricable as "justice" is from inequality, violence, crime, and corruption, it emerges through memory, in space, and where ideals meet practical limitations. Ultimately, the authors show how understanding the dynamic processes of constructing justice is essential to creating cooperative rather than oppressive forms of law.
Overwhelmingly, critical practitioners working across a range of human service fields, who are committed to emancipatory and progressive social change ideals, report feeling powerless, alienated from the means of change, and hopeless about their capacities to make a difference in the lives of the individuals, groups or communities with whom they work because of restrictive contexts that ultimately determine the nature and parameters of their work. This ground-breaking book addresses this dilemma by demonstrating how critical reflection as an educational tool enables practitioners to envision possibilities for change. The legal system, particularly in its response to sexual assault provides a perfect example of this type of context and this volume explores the work of sexual assault practitioners that are engaged in supporting victims/survivors of sexual assault through the legal process. By reshaping ideas that have previously been considered as predominantly theoretical and abstract, Morley's work provides an innovative framework that enables social work and human services practitioners to find hope, agency and practical strategies to work towards change, despite operating in contexts that appear immutably oppressive.
This profound and scholarly treatise develops a critical version of legal positivism as the basis for modern legal scholarship. Departing from the formalism of Hart and Kelsen and blending the European tradition of Weber, Habermas and Foucault with the Anglo-American contributions of Dworkin and MacCormick, Tuori presents the normative and practical faces of law as a multilayered phenomenon within which there is an important role for critical legal dogmatics in furthering law's self-understanding and coherence. Its themes also resonate with importance for the development of the European legal system.
Personereg in Suid-Afrika bied 'n ryke bron van vakkundigheid, asook 'n lewendige en toeganklike inleiding tot die beginsels van die personereg. Deur die gemeenregtelike, statutere en grondwetlike komponente van die personereg saam te snoer, dek hierdie werk op deeglike en leersame wyse die allernuutste stof wat noodsaaklik is vir 'n voorgraadse LLB-kursus in die personereg, met inbegrip van sleutelontwikkelinge wat teweeggebring is deur: Die Children's act (Kinderwet) 38 van 2005 ; Die Child justice act (Wet op kindergeregtigheid) 75 van 2008. Personereg in Suid-Afrika is 'n ryke, pedagogies gegronde leerboek. Die teks is daarop toegespits om die ontwikkeling van noodsaaklike begripsmatige en akademiese vaardighede in die hand te werk, soos kritiese denke, besinning, logika en analise - vaardighede waaroor 'n mens moet beskik ten einde onafhanklik en oordeelkundig met regsbeginsels om te gaan.
The book examines the extent to which Chinese cyber and network security laws and policies act as a constraint on the emergence of Chinese entrepreneurialism and innovation. Specifically, how the contradictions and tensions between data localisation laws (as part of Network Sovereignty policies) affect innovation in artificial intelligence (AI). The book surveys the globalised R&D networks, and how the increasing use of open-source platforms by leading Chinese AI firms during 2017-2020, exacerbated the apparent contradiction between Network Sovereignty and Chinese innovation. The drafting of the Cyber Security Law did not anticipate the changing nature of globalised AI innovation. It is argued that the deliberate deployment of what the book refers to as 'fuzzy logic' in drafting the Cyber Security Law allowed regulators to subsequently interpret key terms regarding data in that Law in a fluid and flexible fashion to benefit Chinese innovation.
This interdisciplinary study explores the interaction between memory and transitional justice in post-dictatorship Argentina and Uruguay and develops a theoretical framework for bringing these two fields of study together through the concept of critical junctures. |
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