This book brings together academics and practitioners from a range of disciplines from more than twenty countries to reflect on the growing importance of transparency, power and control in our international community and how these concerns and ideas have been examined, used and interpreted in a range of national and international contexts. Contributors explore these issues from a range of overlapping concerns and perspectives, such as semiotic, sociolinguistic, psychological, philosophical, and visual in diverse socio-political, administrative, institutional, as well as legal contexts. The collection examines the ways in which 'actors' in our society - legislators, politicians, activists, and artists - have provoked public discourses to confront these issues.

Capturing a unique historical moment, this book examines the changes in urban life since the collapse of the Soviet Union from an ethnographic perspective, thus addressing significant gaps in the literature on cities, Central Asia and post-socialism.

It encompasses Tashkent, Almaty, Astana and Ulan-Ude: four cities with quite different responses to the fall of the Soviet Union. Each chapter takes a theme of central significance across this huge geographical terrain, addresses it through one city and contextualizes it by reference to the other sites in this volume. The structure of the book moves from nostalgia and memories of the Soviet past to examine how current changes are being experienced and imagined through the shifting materialities, temporalities and political economies of urban life. Privatization is giving rise to new social geographies, while ethnic and religious sensibilities are creating emergent networks of sacred sites. But, however much ideologies are changing, cities also provide a constant lived mnemonic of lost configurations of ideology and practice, acting as signposts to bankrupted futures. Urban Life in Post-Soviet Asia provides a detailed account of the changing nature of urban life in post-Soviet Asia, clearly elucidating the centrality of these urban transformations to citizens understandings of their own socio-economic condition.

Private Law in Theory and Practice explores important theoretical issues in tort law, the law of contract and the law of unjust enrichment and relates the theory to judicial decision-making in these areas of private law. Topics covered include the politics and philosophy of tort law reform, the role of good faith in contract law, comparative perspectives on setting aside contracts for mistake and the theory and practice of proprietary remedies in the law of unjust enrichment. Contributors to the book bring a variety of theoretical approaches to bear on the analysis of private law. They include: economic analysis, corrective justice theory, comparative analysis of law, socio-legal inquiry, social history, political theory as well as doctrinal analysis of the law. In all cases the theoretical approaches are applied to recent case law developments in England, Australia and Canada, or, in the case of tort law, proposals in all these jurisdictions to reform the law. The book presents the theory of private law and the application of theory to practical legal problems in an accessible form to teachers and students of tort, contract and the law of unjust enrichment, legal researchers and law reformers.

Adjudication in Action describes the moral dimension of judicial activities and the judicial approach to questions of morality, observing the contextualized deployment of various practices and the activities of diverse people who, in different capacities, find themselves involved with institutional judicial space. Exploring the manner in which the enactment of the law is morally accomplished, and how practical, legal cognition mediates and modulates the treatment of cases dealing with sexual morality, this book offers a rich, praxeological study that engages with 'living' law as it unfolds in action. Inspired by Wittgenstein's later thought and engaging with recent developments in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, Adjudication in Action challenges approaches that reduce the law to mere provisions of a legal code, presenting instead an understanding of law as a resource that stands in need of contextualization. Through the close description of people's orientation to and reification of legal categories within the framework of institutional settings, this book constitutes the first comprehensive study of law in context and in action.

The aim of the book is to outline and discuss a way of thinking about the limits of juristic power. In terms of research methodology, the authors' approach entails relating the topography of such limits to selected theoretical frameworks developed within the Polish sociological tradition. The argument draws, above all, on the works of Leon Petraz ycki, Jerzy Lande, Bronislaw Wroblewski, Adam Podgorecki, Florian Znaniecki, Jacek Szmatka, and Piotr Sztompka. Striving to have each aspect shed light on the other, the authors seek out theoretical arguments which support their account of these limits. They present their model of the limits of juristic power, which includes the following constitutive factors: 1) politico-legal culture, 2) legal texts, 3) juristic culture, and 4) subjective factors (i.e. an individual, axiological sense rooted in ethical and aesthetic judgments)

Security Games: Surveillance and Control at Mega-Events addresses the impact of mega-events - such as the Olympic Games and the World Cup - on wider practices of security and surveillance. "Mega-Events" pose peculiar and extensive security challenges. The overwhelming imperative is that "nothing should go wrong." There are, however, an almost infinite number of things that can "go wrong"; producing the perceived need for pre-emptive risk assessments, and an expanding range of security measures, including extensive forms and levels of surveillance. These measures are delivered by a "security/industrial complex" consisting of powerful transnational corporate, governmental and military actors, eager to showcase the latest technologies and prove that they can deliver "spectacular levels of security". Mega-events have thus become occasions for experiments in monitoring people and places. And, as such, they have become important moments in the development and dispersal of surveillance, as the infrastructure established for mega-events are often marketed as security solutions for the more routine monitoring of people and place. Mega-events, then, now serve as focal points for the proliferation of security and surveillance. They are microcosms of larger trends and processes, through which - as the contributors to this volume demonstrate - we can observe the complex ways that security and surveillance are now implicated in unique confluences of technology, institutional motivations, and public-private security arrangements. As the exceptional conditions of the mega-event become the norm, Security Games: Surveillance and Control at Mega-Events therefore provides the glimpse of a possible future that is more intensively and extensively monitored.

Recent significant developments in the European space sector have had an impact on business and the growth of national and European commercial space law. This book analyses and assesses the legal issues and key factors influencing the space sector in Europe. It is an up-to-date guide to the regulatory background of space projects and examines the typical legal problems which need to be solved by practitioners in the field. Taking into account public and commercial international law and practice, this book examines substantive issues of law specific to launchers, satellite manufacturers and space service providers with contributions from leading experts and practitioners in the field of European space law and policy.

The challenge of thinking about the place of constitutionalism beyond the conventional categories of the nation state has become a principal concern for legal and political scholars. This book casts this issue in a different light by exploring the implications for the constitutionalism of legal integration in the European Union's 'area of freedom, security and justice'. In doing so it makes a novel contribution to an understanding of the European Union as a political community beyond the state, but in addition explores how this entails thinking differently about what is essential concerning constitutionalism. The book argues that instead of seeking to theorise constitutional foundations we actually begin to encounter the constitutional life implied by political and legal practices in the European Union and as exemplified here by 'the area of freedom, security and justice'.

Addressing three central questions of legal policy, this is an interesting and comprehensive analysis of the need to control and regulate tobacco consumption. The core issues of the book are litigation vs. regulation with a comparative analysis of the US and European approaches; the challenge to regulate tobacco as a lawful product within constitutional limits to promote the reduction of risks to health and the extent to which consumers should be entrusted with information to make their own informed choices. Suggesting dialogue and transparency in policy development, this book covers advertising, psychology, ethics, economics and health in addition to the central debate about the litigation and regulation of tobacco and the role of consumer protection law and private law.

Law and Sociology contains a broad range of essays by scholars interested in the interactions between law and sociology. In common with earlier volumes in the Current Legal Issues series, it seeks both a theoretical and methodological focus. The volume includes amongst other topics, a sociology of jurisprudence, an examination of the social dynamics of regulatory interactions, and a consideration of the place of legal culture in the sociology of law.

In the wake of Guantanamo Bay, extraordinary renditions, and secret torture centres in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, Revenge versus Legality addresses the relationship between law and wild or vigilante justice; between the power to enforce retribution and the desire to seek revenge. Taking up a variety of narratives from the eras of Romanticism, Realism, Modernism and the Contemporary period, and including new theories to explain the interactions that occur between legalistic courtroom justice and the vigilante variety, Revenge versus Legality analyzes some of the main obstacles to justice, ranging from judicial corruption, to racism and imperialism. The book culminates in a consideration of that form of crime or lawlessness that poses the most serious threat to the rule of law: vigilante justice masquerading as legality. With its mixture of politics, literature, law, and film, this lively and accessible book offers a timely reflection on the enduring phenomenon of revenge.

This book examines 'The Espoo Convention on Environmental Impact Assessment in a Transboundary Context', which celebrates the twentieth anniversary of its adoption in 2011, and its 'Kiev Protocol on Strategic Environmental Assessment' which came into force in July 2010. In addition to contributing to international environmental law, the Convention has prompted significant changes to European environmental law. The chapters in this collection explain the role of transboundary environmental impact assessment in international and European law, and explore the relationship between international and European law in the context of potential application of the Convention. They also examine examples of the Convention in practice, and consider the potential application of the Protocol. While the focus of the book is on the situation in the European Union, reference is made to the relationship between EU and non-EU member states, notably in connection with important cases in the Arctic, the Danube Delta and the Baltic Sea.

Visualizing Law in the Age of the Digital Baroque explores the profound impact that visual digital technologies are having on the practice and theory of law. Today, lawyers, judges, and lay jurors face a vast array of visual evidence and visual argument. From videos documenting crimes and accidents to computer displays of their digital simulation, increasingly, the search for fact-based justice inside the courtroom is becoming an offshoot of visual meaning making. But when law migrates to the screen it lives there as other images do, motivating belief and judgment on the basis of visual delight and unconscious fantasies and desires as well as actualities. Law as image also shares broader cultural anxieties concerning not only the truth of the image but also the mimetic capacity itself, the human ability to represent reality. What is real, and what is simulation? This is the hallmark of the baroque, when dreams fold into dreams, like immersion in a seemingly endless matrix of digital appearances. When fact-based justice recedes, laws proliferate within a field of uncertainty. Left unchecked, this condition of ontological and ethical uneasiness threatens the legitimacy of law s claim to power. Visualizing Law in the Age of the Digital Baroque offers a jurisprudential paradigm that is equal to the challenge that current cultural conditions present."

In the urgency to respond to the challenges posed by diversity in contemporary societies, the discussion of normative foundations is often overlooked. This book takes that important first step, and offers new ways of thinking about diversity. Its contribution to an ongoing dialogue in this field lies in the construction of a normative framework which endeavours to better understand the challenges of justice in diverse societies. By applying this normative framework to specific and broader examples of injustices in the spheres of religion, culture, race, ethnicity, gender and nationality, the book demonstrates how constitutional pluralist discourses can contribute both to new and legal responses to diversity. The book will be of interest to legal professionals, policy makers, law students and scholars concerned with exploring diversity in the 21st century.

The current Syrian crisis has its roots in the sectarian nature of the country's multi-religious society. Since Ottoman times, the different religious communities have enjoyed the right to regulate and administer their own family relations. Matters of personal status including marriage, divorce, child custody and inheritance continue to be managed by a variety of religious laws and courts operating simultaneously within the legal system of the state. However, this complex system of competing jurisdictions has also affected inter-communal relations and has been used to deepen communal divides. Esther van Eijk discusses socio-legal practices in Syria by focusing on three courts: a shar'iyya, a Catholic court and a Greek-Orthodox court. While the plurality of Syrian family law is clear, she shows how - irrespective of religious affiliation - it is nevertheless characterised by the prevalence of shared cultural or patriarchal views and norms on marital relations, family and gender. Based on extensive fieldwork, Family Law in Syria offers a detailed analysis of a country that has in recent years been inaccessible to researchers.The book is a vital contribution to the growing literature on personal status laws in the Middle East and sheds light on the historical, socio-political and religious complexities and fault-lines that mark contemporary Syria.

Visualizing Law in the Age of the Digital Baroque explores the profound impact that visual digital technologies are having on the practice, theory, and teaching of law. Today, lawyers, judges, and lay jurors face a vast array of visual evidence and visual argument. From videos documenting injuries, crimes, and accidents, to computer displays of their digital simulation, increasingly, the search for fact-based justice inside the courtroom is becoming an offshoot of visual meaning- making'. But when law migrates to the screen it lives there as other images do, motivating belief and judgment on the basis of visual delight and unconscious fantasies and desires as well as actualities. Law as image also reflects current cultural anxieties concerning not only the truth of the image, but also the mimetic capacity itself, the human ability to represent reality. What is real, and what is simulation? This is the hallmark of the baroque, when dreams fold into dreams, like an all too vivid video game or immersion in a seemingly endless matrix of digital appearances. As the reality of fact-based justice recedes, laws proliferate within a field of uncertainty and longing. Left unchecked, this condition of ontological and ethical uneasiness threatens the legitimacy of law's claim to power. To meet this crisis, Visualizing Law in the Age of the Digital Baroque offers both a cultural diagnostic, identifying the contemporary cultural conditions in which law lives as a digital image on the screen, and a normative response, arguing for an affirmative, post-positivist jurisprudential paradigm that is adequate to the challenge these conditions present.

This book offers a new theory of property and distributive justice derived from Talmudic law, illustrated by a case study involving the sale of organs for transplant. Although organ donation did not exist in late antiquity, this book posits a new way, drawn from the Talmud, to conceive of this modern means of giving to others. Our common understanding of organ transfers as either a gift or sale is trapped in a dichotomy that is conceptually and philosophically limiting. Drawing on Maussian gift theory, this book suggests a different legal and cultural meaning for this property transfer. It introduces the concept of the 'divine lien', an obligation to others in need built into the definition of all property ownership. Rather than a gift or sale, organ transfer is shown to exemplify an owner's voluntary recognition and fulfilment of this latent property obligation.

This title was first published in 2003:The problem of legitimacy and legality is one of the key issues of modern thought and nowhere more intensely debated than in the countries of the former Soviet bloc. Under the communist system, symbols of modern government had been supplemented and changed in order to serve the totalitarian domination of the Party and all spheres of life, including law, were subsumed within this framework of ideological legitimation. Following the anti-communist revolutions of 1989, former communist societies started the historically unprecedented process of transformation from the totalitarian into liberal democratic society, a transformation which has produced much soul-searching and heated debate. In this book, the author sets out to prove that concern with legitimacy belongs neither exclusively to the legal system nor to a political system separated and distanced from the legal system. The topic of legitimacy and legitimation is inseparable from legality and every legitimation eventually looks for its transformation into legal legitimacy. At the same time, the author claims, legitimacy is not an issue internal to law, for it emerges rather from the tension and difference between positive law and its social environment. The author uses different theoretical approaches to the problem of legitimation, mainly the social systems and post-structural theories. Another important topic analyzed in this book is the role of legal theory in analysis of the legitimacy of legal rational political domination, specifically as it arises in the development of the legal and political systems of post-communist societies. This leads to the main argument of the book, which might be summarised as a new understanding of the social contract: that the social contract requires that the legitimacy of any system of law and political domination must be constantly re-negotiated. This process is the unconditional responsibility of those living, or wishing to live, under the contemporary liberal democratic rule of law. The extraordinary force of this responsibility is manifested principally in the strategy of dissent.

What role does linguistic diversity play in European democratic and legal processes? Is it an obstacle to deliberative democracy and a hindrance to legal certainty, or a cultural and economic asset and a prerequisite for the free movement of citizens? This book examines the tensions and contradictions of European language laws and policy from a multi-disciplinary perspective. With contributions from leading researchers in EU law and legal theory, political science, sociology, sociolinguistic and cognitive linguistics, it combines mutually exclusive and competing perspectives of linguistic diversity. The work will be a valuable resource for academics and researchers in the areas of European law, legal theory and linguistics.

Security Games: Surveillance and Control at Mega-Events addresses the impact of mega-events -- such as the Olympic Games and the World Cup -- on wider practices of security and surveillance. "Mega-Events" pose peculiar and extensive security challenges. The overwhelming imperative is that "nothing should go wrong." There are, however, an almost infinite number of things that can "go wrong"; producing the perceived need for pre-emptive risk assessments, and an expanding range of security measures, including extensive forms and levels of surveillance. These measures are delivered by a "security/industrial complex" consisting of powerful transnational corporate, governmental and military actors, eager to showcase the latest technologies and prove that they can deliver "spectacular levels of security." Mega-events have thus become occasions for experiments in monitoring people and places. And, as such, they have become important moments in the development and dispersal of surveillance, as the infrastructure established for mega-events are often marketed as security solutions for the more routine monitoring of people and place. Mega-events, then, now serve as focal points for the proliferation of security and surveillance. They are microcosms of larger trends and processes, through which -- as the contributors to this volume demonstrate -- we can observe the complex ways that security and surveillance are now implicated in unique confluences of technology, institutional motivations, and public-private security arrangements. As the exceptional conditions of the mega-event become the norm, Security Games: Surveillance and Control at Mega-Events therefore provides the glimpse of a possible future that is more intensively and extensively monitored.

This book approaches law as a process embedded in transnational personal, religious, communicative and economic relationships that mediate between international, national and local practices, norms and values. It uses the concept "living law" to describe the multiplicity of norms manifest in transnational moral, social or economic practices that transgress the territorial and legal boundaries of the nation-state. Focusing on transnational legal encounters located in family life, diasporic religious institutions and media events in countries like Norway, Sweden, Britain and Scotland, it demonstrates the multiple challenges that accelerated mobility and increased cultural and normative diversity is posing for Northern European law. For in this part of the world, as elsewhere, national law is challenged by a mixture of expanding human rights obligations and unprecedented cultural and normative pluralism enhanced by expanding global communication and market relations. As a consequence, transnationalization of law appears to create homogeneity, fragmentation and ambiguity, expanding space for some actors while silencing others. Through the lens of a variety of important contemporary subjects, the authors thus engage with the nature of power and how it is accommodated, ignored or resisted by various actors when transnational practices encounter national and local law.

Law and medicine can be caught in a tight embrace. They both play a central role in the politics of harm, making decisions regarding what counts as injury and what might be the most suitable forms of redress or remedy. But where do law and medicine converge and diverge in their responses to and understandings of harm and suffering? Using empirical case studies from Europe, the Americas and Africa, The Clinic and the Court brings together leading medical and legal anthropologists to explore this question.

Bringing together an international range of academics, Gender, Sexualities and Law provides a comprehensive interrogation of the range of contemporary issues both topical and controversial raised by the gendered character of law, legal discourse and institutions. The gendering of law, persons and the legal profession, along with the gender bias of legal outcomes, has been a fractious, but fertile, focus of reflection. It has, moreover, been an important site of political struggle. This collection of essays offers an unrivalled examination of its various contemporary dimensions, focusing on: issues of theory and representation; violence, both national and international; reproduction and parenting; and partnership, sexuality, marriage and the family. Gender, Sexualities and Law will be invaluable for all those engaged in research and study of the law (and related fields) as a form of gendered power.

Merciful Judgments in Contemporary Society: Legal Problems/Legal Possibilities explores the tension between law's need for and dependence on merciful judgments and suspicions that regularly accompany them. Rather than focusing primarily on definitional questions or the longstanding debate about the moral worth and importance of mercy, this book focuses on mercy as a part of, and problem, for law. Whether one starts from a worry about rules and discretion, about the attitudes of citizens and their leaders, or ways to undo the past, merciful judgments challenge and perplex, just as they help to sustain, our legal system. Charting these possibilities and problems is the work that this book seeks to do. Here we ask what challenges merciful judgments pose for law? When and why do those judgments encourage and nurture legal ingenuity and resourcefulness? When and why do they precipitate crises and breakdowns in legal authority? This book is a product of The University of Alabama School of Law symposia series on Law, Knowledge & Imagination. This series explores the ways law is known and imagined in a diverse array of disciplines, including political science, history, cultural studies, philosophy, and science. In addition, books produced through the Alabama symposia explore various conjunctions of law, knowledge, and imagination as they play out in debates about theory and policy and speak to venerable questions as well as contemporary issues.

This book investigates the multifaceted conflicts of sovereignty in the recent crises in the European Union. Although the notion of sovereignty has been central in the contentious debates triggered by the recent crises in the European Union, it remains strikingly under-researched in political science. This book bridges this gap by providing both theoretical reflections and empirical analyses of today's conflicts of sovereignty in the EU. More particularly, it investigates conflicts between four types of sovereignty. First, national sovereignty referring to the autonomy of the Westphalian Nation-State to rule on a territory delimited by borders; second, the supranational sovereignty acquired by the EU in a fragmentary fashion in a number of scattered internal and external policy fields; third, parliamentary sovereignty understood as the autonomy of parliaments (at the regional, national and European levels) to take part in the decision making process and control the executive in the name of the principles of election and representation; fourth, popular sovereignty whereby the body politic confers legitimacy to decision makers in a democratic system. Through an analysis of the various crises (rule of law, Brexit, migration, Eurozone crisis), the chapters look at how sovereignty is framed and contested by different types of actors, and how the strengthening or the weakening of certain types of sovereignty contribute to shape preferences regarding policies and governance structures in the multi-level EU. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of European Integration.