In Mourning Becomes the Law, Gillian Rose takes us beyond the impasse of post-modernism or 'despairing rationalism withour reason'. Arguing that the post-modern search for a 'new ethics' and ironic philosophy are incoherent, she breathes new life into the debates concerning power and domination, transcendence and eternity. Mourning Becomes the Law is the philosophical counterpart to Gillian Rose's highly acclaimed memoir Love's Work. She extends similar clarity and insight to discussions of architecture, cinema, painting and poetry, through which relations (...) between the formation of the individual and the theory of justice are connected. At the heart of this reconnection lies a reflection on the significance of the Holocaust and Judaism. Mourning Becomes the Law reinvents the classical analogy of the soul, the city and the sacred. It returns philosophy, Nietzsche's 'bestowing virtue', to the pulse of our intellectual and political culture. (shrink)

The goal of improving public health involves the use of different tools, with the law being one way to influence the activities of institutions and individuals. Of the regulatory mechanisms afforded by law to achieve this end, criminal law remains a perennial mechanism to delimit the scope of individual and group conduct. However, criminal law may promote or hinder public health goals, and its use raises a number of complex questions that merit exploration. This examination of the interface between criminal (...) law and public health brings together international experts from a variety of disciplines, including law, criminology, public health, philosophy and health policy, in order to examine the theoretical and practical implications of using criminal law to improve public health. (shrink)

_Contributions to Law, Philosophy and Ecology: Exploring Re-Embodiments_ is a preliminary contribution to the establishment of re-embodiments as a theoretical strand within legal and ecological theory and philosophy. Re-embodiments are all those contemporary practices and processes that exceed the epistemic horizon of modernity. As such, they offer a plurality of alternative modes of theory and practice that seek to counteract the ecocidal tendencies of the Anthropocene. The collection is comprised of eleven contributions approaching re-embodiments from a multiplicity of (...) fields, including legal theory, eco-philosophy, eco-feminism and anthropology. The contributions are organized in three parts, ‘Beyond Modernity, ‘The Sacred Dimension’ and ‘The Legal Dimension’. The collection is opened by a comprehensive introduction that situates re-embodiments in theoretical context. Whilst closely bound with embodiment and new materialist theory, this book_ _contributes a unique voice that echoes diverse political processes contemporaneous to our times. Written in an elegant and accessible language, the book will appeal to undergraduates, postgraduates and established scholars alike seeking to understand and take re-embodiments further, both politically and theoretically. (shrink)

This text is a kind of sketch and presents some simple ideas. The aim of this article is to carry out a critical and reflexive analysis of Roman Ingarden's philosophy of responsibility. Being a member of the phenomenological current, Ingarden mainly studied the ontological bases or conditions of responsibility by identifying different situations of responsibility. In this paper situations of responsibility have been analysed in the semantic contexts in which the word "responsibility" appears. Legally, the prescriptive contexts of using (...) the word "responsibility" are particularly important since they are usually either ignored or inadequately separated from descriptive contexts. Roman Ingarden's views were supplemented by Alf Ross's aspects of responsibility. As a result, the elementary ways of understanding responsibility have been reconstructed; they are the basis for reflections on moral responsibility as well as legal responsibility. (shrink)

Aus dem Inhalt: Views from the North: Hans Petter Graver: Law, Justice and the State: Nordic Perspectives u Jacob Dahl Rendtorff: The Danish Welfare State: Philosophical Ideals and Systemic Reality u Sigri!Dur *orgeirsdottir: Feminist Ethics and Feminist Politics u Kuellike Lengi: The Situation of Human Rights in Estonia u Einar Palsson: Pythagoras and Early Icelandic Law u Law, Discourse and Rationality: Mats Flodin: Internal and External Rationality of Legal Systems u Logi Gunnarsson: A Discourse About Discourse u Hjordi!s Hakonardottir: Legal (...) Language: A Tool of Justice u Ghita Holmstrom-Hintikka: On the Use of Expert Witness in Legal Reasoning and Inquiry u Law, State and Nation: Agust H. Ing*orsson: Democracy, Bureaucracy and Marginalization of the State u Aleksander Peczenik: Law-State, Legal Certainty and Legitimacy of Law u Ove K. Pedersen/Sverre Raffnsoe: Reorganizing Society u Juha Raikka: Mill on National Sentiment u Pall Skulason: Concepts of the State and Classes of Value u Problems of Law and Rights: Britt-Mari Blegvad: How to Cope With Uncertainty: Trust and Law u Jon Wetlesen: Animal Rights or Human Duties?. (shrink)

The war between natural law philosophy and legal positivism is an ancient one. For a time the stunning victories of Bentham and Austin virtually drove the forces of natural law from the battlefield. However, upon the collapse of Germany and Japan at the end of the Second World War, natural law became a useful tool in attempting to resolve the practical difficulties of trying war criminals. This fact and the rise of two able antagonistic generals, H. L. A. Hart (...) and Lon Fuller, have sparked a new series of battles. (shrink)

The war between natural law philosophy and legal positivism is an ancient one. For a time the stunning victories of Bentham and Austin virtually drove the forces of natural law from the battlefield. However, upon the collapse of Germany and Japan at the end of the Second World War, natural law became a useful tool in attempting to resolve the practical difficulties of trying war criminals. This fact and the rise of two able antagonistic generals, H. L. A. Hart (...) and Lon Fuller, have sparked a new series of battles. (shrink)

In this arresting book, Wai Chee Dimock takes on the philosophical tradition from Kant to Rawls, challenging its conception of justice as foundational, self-evident, and all-encompassing. The idea of justice is based on the premise that the world can be resolved into commensurate terms: punishment equal to the crime, redress equal to the injury, benefit equal to the desert. Dimock focuses, however, on what remains unexhausted, unrecovered, and noncorresponding in the exercise of justice. To honor these "residues," she turns to (...) literature, which, in its linguistic density, transposes the clean abstractions of law and philosophy into persistent shadows, the abiding presence of the incommensurate. Justice can only be a partial answer to the phenomenon of human conflict. In arguing for justice as an _incomplete_ virtue, Dimock draws upon legal history, political philosophy, linguistics, theology, and feminist theory; she discusses Aristotle and Augustine, Locke and Luther, Marx and Durkheim, Michael Sandel and Carol Gilligan, Noam Chomsky and Mary Ann Glendon. She also examines an unusual configuration of nineteenth-century American authors, pairing figures such as Herman Melville and Rebecca Harding Davis, Walt Whitman and Susan Warner. The result is a book both passionate and scholarly. It invites us to rethink the meanings of literature, law, and philosophy, and to imagine a language of community more supple and more nuanced than the language of justice. (shrink)

In this arresting book, Wai Chee Dimock takes on the philosophical tradition from Kant to Rawls, challenging its conception of justice as foundational, self-evident, and all-encompassing. The idea of justice is based on the premise that the world can be resolved into commensurate terms: punishment equal to the crime, redress equal to the injury, benefit equal to the desert. Dimock focuses, however, on what remains unexhausted, unrecovered, and noncorresponding in the exercise of justice. To honor these "residues," she turns to (...) literature, which, in its linguistic density, transposes the clean abstractions of law and philosophy into persistent shadows, the abiding presence of the incommensurate. Justice can only be a partial answer to the phenomenon of human conflict. In arguing for justice as an _incomplete_ virtue, Dimock draws upon legal history, political philosophy, linguistics, theology, and feminist theory; she discusses Aristotle and Augustine, Locke and Luther, Marx and Durkheim, Michael Sandel and Carol Gilligan, Noam Chomsky and Mary Ann Glendon. She also examines an unusual configuration of nineteenth-century American authors, pairing figures such as Herman Melville and Rebecca Harding Davis, Walt Whitman and Susan Warner. The result is a book both passionate and scholarly. It invites us to rethink the meanings of literature, law, and philosophy, and to imagine a language of community more supple and more nuanced than the language of justice. (shrink)

Why should sovereign states obey international law? What compels them to owe allegiance to a higher set of rules when each country is its own law of the land? What is the basis of their obligations to each other? Conventional wisdom suggests that countries are too different from one another culturally to follow laws out of mere loyalty to each other or a set of shared moral values. Surely, the prevailing view holds, countries act simply out of self-interest, and they (...) eventually consent to norms of international law to regulate matters of common interest.In this groundbreaking book, Fernando Tesón goes against this prevailing thought by arguing, in the Kantian tradition, that a shared respect for individual human rights underpins not just the obligation countries feel to follow international law but also international laws themselves and even the very legitimacy of nations in the eyes of the international community. Tesón, both a lawyer and a philosopher, proposes that an overlapping respect for human rights has created a moral common ground among the countries of the world; and moreover, that such an outlook is the only one that is rationally defensible. It is this common set of values rather than self-interest that ultimately provides legitimacy to international law. Using the tools of moral philosophy, Tesón analyzes the concepts of sovereignty, intervention, and national interest; the contributions of social contact theory, game theory, and feminist theory; and the puzzles of self-determination and group rights.More than simply outlining his theory, Tesón goes on to give detailed examples of international laws, international institutions, and their human rights foundations, putting his ideas to work and addressing legal reforms called for by the theory. He suggests that treaties, for example, should be considered binding if, and only if, the consent to the treaty was given by a genuinely representative government, one that acts out of interest for the human rights of its citizens. Although the theoretical achievement of this book is to challenge received wisdom on the foundation of international law, the practical ambition is a call to reform the international legal system for the post–Cold War era, to substitute for the old order one that gives primacy to human dignity and freedom over state power. (shrink)

The present religious constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany is the product of protracted historical conflicts and political settlements that began in the sixteenth century. The mediation of these conflicts and settlements and the piecemeal establishment of the constitution was the achievement of imperial public law and diplomacy. Germany’s religious constitution—a secular and relativistic juridical framework protecting a plurality of confessional religions—pre-dated liberalism and democracy, and owes nothing to normative philosophical constructions of individual freedoms and rights, or social justice (...) and moral community. Rather, it was the product of a political compromise between warring confessional blocs, and of the institutions of public law that were the instruments and effects of this compromise. (shrink)

The perennial question posed by the philosophically-inclined lawyer is 'What is law?' or perhaps 'What is the nature of law?' This book poses an associated, but no less fundamental, question about law which has received much less attention in the legal literature. It is: 'Who is law for?' Whenever people go to law, they are judged for their suitability as legal persons. They are given or refused rights and duties on the basis of ideas about who matters. These ideas are (...) basic to legal-decision making; they form the intellectual and moral underpinning of legal thought. They help to determine whether law is essentially for rational human beings or whether it also speaks to and for human infants, adults with impaired reasoning, the comotose, foetuses and even animals. Are these the right kind of beings to enter legal relationships and so become legal persons. Are they, for example, sufficiently rational, or sacred or simply human? Is law meant for them? This book reveals and evaluates the type of thinking that goes into these fundamental legal and metaphysical determinations about who should be capable of bearing legal rights and duties. It identifies and analyses four influential ways of thinking about law's person, each with its own metaphysical suppositions. One approach derives from rationalist philosophy, a second from religion, a third from evolutionary biology while the fourth is strictly legalistic and so endeavours to eschew metaphysics altogether. The book offers a clear, coherent and critical account of these complex moral and intellectual processes entailed in the making of legal persons. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: 1. Introduction; 2. International law and postcolonial Africa; 3. Violence and conflicts in Africa; 4. Institutional responses to conflicts; 5. Genesis of the African Union; 6. Structures and philosophy of the African Union; 7. The African Union's peacebuilding travails in Burundi; 8. The African Union and peace initiatives in post-state Somalia; 9. Towards an African Union philosophy on peacebuilding?.

__ _Philosophy of Law: An Introduction_ provides an ideal starting point for students of philosophy and law. Setting it clearly against the historical background, Mark Tebbit quickly leads readers into the heart of the philosophical questions that dominate philosophy of law today. He provides an exceptionally wide-ranging overview of the contending theories that have sought to resolve these problems. He does so without assuming prior knowledge either of philosophy or law on the part of the reader. The (...) book is structured in three parts around the key issues and themes in philosophy of law: What is the law? – the major legal theories addressing the question of what we mean by law, including natural law, legal positivism and legal realism. The reach of the law – the various legal theories on the nature and extent of the law’s authority, with regard to obligation and civil disobedience, rights, liberty and privacy. Criminal law – responsibility and _mens rea_, intention, recklessness and murder, legal defences, insanity and philosophies of punishment. This new third edition has been thoroughly updated to include assessments of important developments in philosophy and law in the early years of the twenty-first century. Revisions include a more detailed analysis of natural law, new chapters on common law and the development of positivism, a reassessment of the Austin–Hart dispute in the light of recent criticism of Hart, a new chapter on the natural law–positivist controversy over Nazi law and legality, and new chapters on criminal law, extending the analysis of the dispute over the viability of the defences of necessity and duress. (shrink)

Does criminal liability require an act? -- Motive and criminal liability -- The costs to criminal theory of supposing that intentions are irrelevant to permissibility -- Transferred intent -- The nature and justifiability of nonconsummate offenses -- Strict liability, justice, and proportionality -- The sequential principle of relative culpability -- Willful ignorance, knowledge, and the equal culpability thesis : a study of the significance of the principle of legality -- Rapes without rapists : consent and reasonable mistake -- Mistake of (...) law and culpability -- On the supposed priority of justification to excuse -- Partial defenses -- The "but everybody does that!" defense -- The de minimis "defense" to criminal liability -- Why punish the deserving -- Malum prohibitum and retributivism -- Already punished enough. (shrink)

This brief essay critiques the torture memoranda's use of the necessity defense from the perspectives of criminal law doctrine, criminal law theory, and moral philosophy.

The other contributions address philosophical problems arising in specific domains of international law, such as human rights law, international economic law, ...

Accounting for the Commandments in Medieval Judaism explores the discursive formation of the commandments as a generative matrix of Jewish thought and life in the posttalmudic period. Each study sheds light on how medieval Jews crafted the commandments out of theretofore underdetermined material. By systematizing, representing, or interrogating the amorphous category of commandment, medieval Jewish authors across both the Islamic and Christian spheres of influence sought to explain, justify, and characterize Israel's legal system, divine revelation, the cosmos, and even the (...) divine order. This volume correlates bodies of knowledge-such as jurisprudence, philosophy, ethics, pietism, and kabbalah-that are normally treated in isolation into a single conversation about a shared constitutional concern. (shrink)

The middle of the second until the middle of the first century BCE is one of the most creative periods in the history of human thought, and an important part of this was the interaction between Roman jurists and Hellenistic philosophers. In this highly original book, René Brouwer shows how jurists transformed the study of law into a science with the help of philosophical methods and concepts, such as division, rules and persons, and also how philosophers came to share the (...) jurists' preoccupations with cases and private property. The relevance of this cross-fertilization for present-day law and philosophy cannot be overestimated: in law, its legacy includes the academic study of law and the Western models of dispute resolution, while in philosophy, the method of casuistry and the concept of just property. (shrink)

Kant's Master Work Published in 1797, The Philosophy of Law [Rechtslehre] stands as one of the most significant late works by the great Prussian philosopher. Though he lived in an atmosphere of political and social repression, it is evident that Kant was sensitive to the revolutionary spirit that was spreading throughout Europe in the wake of Napoleon's armies. Claiming that man is born with reason and an innate desire for freedom, he argued that the union of these natural gifts (...) could bring about a new sense of order and harmony in future generations. This edition also reprints Kant's later Supplementary Explanations (1797), which was added to the second edition (1798). Immanuel Kant [1724-1804] was the foremost thinker of the late Enlightenment and one of the greatest figures in the history of Western philosophy. Concerned principally with epistemology, ethics and aesthetics, his work synthesized trends initiated by Rationalism and Empiricism; it has been a significant influence in the subsequent development of philosophy, religion and law. (shrink)

Echoing the debate about the nature of law that has dominated legal philosophy for several decades, this volume includes essays on the nature of law and on law not as it is but as it should be. Wherever possible, essays have been chosen that have provoked direct responses from other legal philosophers, and in two cases these responses are included. Contributors include H.L.A. Hart, R.M. Dworkin, Lord Patrick Devlin, John Rawls, J.J. Thomson, J. Finnis, and T.M. Scanlon.

This volume reflects the breadth of Alexy's philosophy, identifies new areas of inquiry and offers a new impetus to the discourse theory of law.

This major contribution to the history of philosophy provides the most comprehensive guide to modern natural law theory available, sets out the full background to liberal ideas of rights and contractarianism, and offers an extensive study of the Scottish Enlightenment. The time span covered is considerable: from the natural law theories of Grotius and Suarez in the early seventeenth century to the American Revolution and the beginnings of utilitarianism. After a detailed survey of modern natural law theory, the book (...) focuses on the Scottish Enlightenment and its European and American connections. Knud Haakonssen explains the relationship between natural law and civic humanist republicanism, and he shows the relevance of these ideas for the understanding of David Hume and Adam Smith. The result is a completely revised background to modern ideas of liberalism and communitarianism. (shrink)

Tenth annual conference at the University of Manchester, 8th-10th April 1983.

In this revised edition, two distinguished philosophers have extended and strengthened the most authoritative text available on the philosophy of law and jurisprudence. While retaining their comprehensive coverage of classical and modern theory, Murphy and Coleman have added new discussions of the Critical Legal Studies movement and feminist jurisprudence, and they have strengthened their treatment of natural law theory, criminalization, and the law of torts. The chapter on law and economics remains the best short introduction to that difficult, controversial, (...) and influential topic.Students will appreciate the careful organization and clear presentation of complicated issues as well as the emphasis on the relevance of both law and legal theory to contemporary society. (shrink)

This volume of his Collected Essays shows the full range and power of his contributions to the philosophy of law.

The concept of law lies at the heart of our social and political life. Legal philosophy, or jurisprudence, explores the notion of law and its role in society, illuminating its meaning and its relation to the universal questions of justice, rights, and morality. In this Very Short Introduction Raymond Wacks analyses the nature and purpose of the legal system, and the practice by courts, lawyers, and judges. Wacks reveals the intriguing and challenging nature of legal philosophy with clarity (...) and enthusiasm, providing an enlightening guide to the central questions of legal theory. In this revised edition Wacks makes a number of updates including new material on legal realism, changes to the approach to the analysis of law and legal theory, and updates to historical and anthropological jurisprudence. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.Readership: Students of law, philosophy, politics, and social sciences, as well as general readers interested in the foundations of justice and its role in society. (shrink)

This edition also reprints Kant's later Supplementary Explanations (1797), which was added to the second edition (1798).

Law, Human Agency and Autonomic Computing interrogates the legal implications of the notion and experience of human agency implied by the emerging paradigm of autonomic computing, and the socio-technical infrastructures it supports. The development of autonomic computing and ambient intelligence âe" self-governing systems âe" challenge traditional philosophical conceptions of human self-constitution and agency, with significant consequences for the theory and practice of constitutional self-government. Ideas of identity, subjectivity, agency, personhood, intentionality, and embodiment are all central to the functioning of modern (...) legal systems. But once artificial entities become more autonomic, and less dependent on deliberate human intervention, criteria like agency, intentionality and self-determination, become too fragile to serve as defining criteria for human subjectivity, personality or identity, and for characterizing the processes through which individual citizens become moral and legal subjects. Are autonomic âe" yet artificial âe" systems shrinking the distance between (acting) subjects and (acted upon) objects? How âe~distinctively humanâe(tm) will agency be in a world of autonomic computing? Or, alternatively, does autonomic computing merely disclose that we were never, in this sense, âe~humanâe(tm) anyway? A dialogue between philosophers of technology and philosophers of law, this book addresses these questions, as it takes up the unprecedented opportunity that autonomic computing and ambient intelligence offer for a reassessment of the most basic concepts of law. (shrink)