Legisprudence

practical reason in legislation

This book establishes legisprudence, in contrast to jurisprudence, as a legal theory of rational law-making. It suggests that by rejecting the common wisdom about the nature of political law-making, legislation could be improved and streamlined. Using the methods, theoretical insights and tools of current legal ...

Constitucional life and Europe's area of freedom, security and justice

The challenge of thinking about the place of constitutionalism beyond the conventional categories of the national 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 ...

The vantage of Law

its role in thinking about Law, judging and bills of rights

The premise of this book is that a shift of vantage will help elucidate various important issues of law related to judging, to bills of rights and to more abstract questions of legal philosophy. This work begins by focussing on the jurisprudential issue of whether ...

Basic equality and discrimination

reconciling theory and Law

The focus of this book is the idea of equality as a moral, political and jurisprudential concept. The author is motivated primarily by a concern to better understand the conundrums which arise in the justification, interpretation and application of discrimination law. Nicholas Smith aims to ...

The right not to be criminalized

demarcating criminal Law's authority

This book presents arguments and proposals for constraining criminalization, with a focus on the legal limits of the criminal law. This book approaches the issue by showing how the moral criteria for constraining unjust criminalization can and has been incorporated into constitutional human rights and ...

The concept of Law from a transnational perspective

This book brings together the fruits of different traditions in legal philosophy and draws on them to develop a systematic thesis on the concept of law. The respective strengths of each tradition can thus be used to elucidate the phenomenon in question. The work explores ...

Ratio and voluntas

the tension between reason and wild in Law

From the ancient beginnings of Western legal tradition, law has been conceived as traversed by a fundamental tension between power (will) and reason. This volume examines the tension between these two poles, 'ratio and voluntas' in modern law. Part I focuses on three instructive phases ...

Legal evidence and proof

statistics, stories, logic

As a result of recent scandals concerning evidence and proof in the administration of criminal justice - ranging from innocent people on death row in the United States to misuse of statistics leading to wrongful convictions in The Netherlands and elsewhere - inquiries into the logic of ...

Cultural difference on trial

the nature and limits of judicial understanding

"Cultural Difference on Trial: The Nature and Limits of Judicial Understanding" comprises a sustained philosophical exploration of the capacity of the modern liberal democratic legal system to understand the thought and practice of those culturally different minorities who come before it as claimants, defendants or ...

Health Law's Kaleidoscope

health Law rights in a global age

Within contemporary society, a number of themes (globalisation, health and regulation) interlock in complex patterns, changing in response to the mix of cultural differences, regulatory preferences and available resources. To turn the kaleidoscope and to change the mix, is to change the pattern. This book ...

Law at the vanishing point

a philosophical analysis of international Law

Two central questions are at the core of international legal theory: 'What is international law?', and the reality of international law, and, 'Is international law really law?'.This volume examines these critical questions and the philosophical foundations of modern international law using the tools of ...

Law's task

the tragic circle of Law, justice and human suffering

What is the ultimate task of law? This deceptively simple question guides this volume towards a radically original philosophical interpretation of law and justice. Weaving together the philosophical, jurisprudential and ethical problems suggested by the general terms thinking, human suffering, legal meaning, time and tragedy ...

Epistemic uncertainty and legal theory

This volume explicitly connects the on-going Methodology Debate within Legal Philosophy to constitutional adjudication in charter systems. By drawing out the implications of this debate and the challenge of giving a proper account of constitutional adjudication in a general theory of law, the study shows ...

The constitutional corporation

rethinking corporate governance

Share ownership has become a major aspect of western economies and there are diverse views on its role. While corporate law is based on the idea that shareholders are the primary concern of company directors, more radical writers have suggested that public company shareholders are ...

The idea of authorship in copyright

From positivism to idealism

a study of the moral dimensions of legality

Examining the emergence and development of legal positivism as a distinctive and particularly powerful tradition in legal thought, this book places particular emphasis on its relationship to traditional understandings of the common law and on forms of idealism. The focus throughout is on the consequences ...

Architectures of justice

legal theory and the idea of institutional design

Law can be seen to consist not only of rules and decisions, but also of a framework of institutions providing a structure that forms the conditions of its workable existence and acceptance. In this book, Olsen and Toddington conduct a philosophical exploration and critique of ...

Deliberative democracy and its discontents

Deliberative democracy tends to suffer from a lack of literature from the perspective of legal theory. In this book, scholars from Europe and the United States look at the three fundamental questions raised in current deliberative theory: why deliberate, who deliberates and where to deliberate ...