New to English law? Need to know how rules are made, interpreted and applied? This popular and well-established textbook will show you how. It simplifies legal method by combining examples with an account of rules in general: the who, what, why and how of interpretation. Starting with standpoint and context, it identifies factors that give rise to doubts about the interpretation of a rule and recommends a systematic approach to analysing those factors. Questions and exercises integrated in the text and (...) on the accompanying website will help you to develop skills in reading, interpreting and arguing about legal and other rules. The text is fully updated on developments in the legislative process and the judicial interpretation of statutes and precedent. It includes a new chapter on 'The European Dimension' reflecting the changes brought about by the Human Rights Act 1998. (shrink)

The Law of Evidence has traditionally been perceived as a dry, highly technical, and mysterious subject. This book argues that problems of evidence in law are closely related to the handling of evidence in other kinds of practical decision-making and other academic disciplines, that it is closely related to common sense and that it is an interesting, lively and accessible subject. These essays develop a readable, coherent historical and theoretical perspective about problems of proof, evidence, and inferential reasoning in law. (...) Although each essay is self-standing, they are woven together to present a sustained argument for a broad inter-disciplinary approach to evidence in litigation, in which the rules of evidence play a subordinate, though significant, role. This revised and enlarged edition includes a revised introduction, the best-known essays in the first edition, and new chapters on narrative and argumentation, teaching evidence, and evidence as a multi-disciplinary subject. (shrink)

The Rationalist Tradition of evidence scholarship1 The history of the law of evidence is the history of a series of largely isolated responses to particular ...

First published in 1973, Karl Llewellyn and the Realist Movement is a classic account of American Legal Realism and its leading figure. Karl Llewellyn is the best known and most substantial jurist of the group of lawyers known as the American Realists. He made important contributions to legal theory, legal sociology, commercial law, contract law, civil liberties and legal education. This intellectual biography sets Llewellyn in the broad context of the rise of the American Realist Movement and contains an overview (...) of his life before focusing on his most important works, including The Cheyenne Way, The Bramble Bush, The Common Law Tradition and the Uniform Commercial Code. In this second edition the original text is supplemented with a preface by Frederick Schauer and an afterword in which William Twining gives a fascinating account of the making of the book and comments on developments in relevant legal scholarship over the past forty years. (shrink)

This book explores how globalisation influences the understanding of law. Adopting a broad concept of law and a global perspective, it critically reviews mainstream Western traditions of academic law and legal theory. Its central thesis is that most processes of so-called 'globalisation' take place at sub-global levels and that a healthy cosmopolitan discipline of law should encompass all levels of social relations and the legal ordering of these relations. It illustrates how the mainstream Western canon of jurisprudence needs to be (...) critically reviewed and extended to take account of other legal traditions and cultures. Written by the one of the foremost scholars in the field, this important work presents an exciting alternative vision of jurisprudence. It challenges the traditional canon of legal theorists and guides the reader through a field undergoing seismic changes in the era of globalisation. This is essential reading for all students of jurisprudence and legal theory. (shrink)

This work brings together eight linked essays which make the case for a revival of general jurisprudence in response to the challenges of globalisation, explores how far the heritage of Anglo-American jurisprudence and comparative law is adequate to meeting the challenges, and puts forward an agenda for general jurisprudence and comparative law, especially in the English-speaking world in the first ten or twenty years of the millennium. The book is traditional in focussing on the mainstream of Anglo-American intellectual heritage and (...) moderately radical in identifying the need for rethinking basic issues and putting forward a series of provocative propositions as a basis for discussion. (shrink)

This essay examines the use of fictions in the reasoning of the House of Lords and United Kingdom Supreme Court in the context of two recent lines of authority on English tort law. First, the essay explores the relevance of counter-factual scenarios to liability in the tort of false imprisonment, in the light of the Supreme Court decisions in Lumba and Kambadzi. The second series of decisions is on causation in negligence claims arising from asbestos exposure. These cases have revealed (...) fundamental, ongoing judicial disagreement about the nature and extent of the exceptions made to general principles. The cases are also shown to lend force to Del Mar’s argument about the diachronicity of legal fictions. Overall, it is argued that such fictions play an important role in common law reasoning. (shrink)

Scholars in diverse academic disciplines discuss the ways in which evidence is conceived, used, and manipulated in their own fields. They explore the possibilities for cross-disciplinary fertilisation and ask if it is possible or desirable to develop general multidisciplinary criteria and methods for studying and handling evidence.

This book presents papers that deal with Hans Kelsen's legal philosophy, and includes contributions from Hedley Bull, J.W. Harris, Phillip Pettit, Joseph Raz, Jes Bjarup, and Stanley L. Paulson.

Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, made a powerful impact on several major areas of thought and policy: ethics, jurisprudence, political and constitutional theory, and social and administrative reform. Yet from the start his ideas have been subject to misunderstanding and caricature. John Dinwiddy's _Bentham_ is regarded as the best introduction to this important jurist and reformer. Dinwiddy examines the various components of Bentham's philosophy and shows how each was shaped by the radical rethinking entailed by the utilitarian approach. He (...) also discusses interpretations of Benthamism and its contemporary significance and the controversial question of Bentham's influence on reform. _Bentham_ is reproduced here in full together with three classic essays that deal with key issues in understanding Bentham: his conversion to political radicalism, the relations between private and public ethics, and his theory of adjudication. A new introduction and select bibliography by William Twining set the context and survey the developments in Bentham studies since the book's original publication in 1989. (shrink)

However little that various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences might seem to have in common, they share certain interests in methodological problems relating to evidence, inference, and interpretation. By pursuing these shared interests across divergent topics and fields, the contributors to this book advance our understanding of how such truth-seeking, proof-finding methods work, and of what it means to prove something in a range of contexts. Coedited by William Twining, one of the world's outstanding evidence scholars, and Lain (...) HempsherMonk, a leading political theorist, the volume considers intriguing questions from different realms--Assyriology, theatre iconography, musicology, criminology, the history of ideas and colonial history--as it reveals how particular concepts, lines of questioning, and techniques of reasoning and analysis developed in one context can be fruitfully applied in others. (shrink)

This volume brings together leading theoretical writings on legal fact-finding which are dispersed and not readily accessible.

A just international order and a healthy cosmopolitan discipline of law need to include perspectives that take account of the standpoints, interests, concerns and beliefs of non-Western people and traditions. The dominant scholarly and activist discourses about human rights have developed largely without reference to these other viewpoints. Claims about universality sit uneasily with ignorance of other traditions and parochial or ethnocentric tendencies. The object of the book is to make accessible the ideas of four jurists who present distinct 'Southern' (...) perspectives on human rights. (shrink)

La disciplina del Derecho, tal y como está institucionalizada en la tradición angloamericana y, de manera general, en Occidente, responde de diversas maneras a los desafíos de la llamada “globalización” (utilizada aquí en un sentido amplio). Estas respuestas son dinámicas, fragmentadas, emocionantes y amenazadoras. Una de las tareas de la teoría del Derecho es dar sentido y evaluar estos avances. Los especialistas necesitamos preguntarnos: “¿cuáles son las implicaciones de la globalización para mi especialidad o en este tema de investigación?” El (...) propósito de este trabajo es sugerir una aproximación a esta cuestión, a través de un examen auto-crítico de las hipótesis del trabajo propio, desde una perspectiva global, utilizando “tipos ideales” ilustrativos de las tendencias y asunciones que sustentan (a) las tradiciones occidentales de la Ciencia del Derecho; (b) la tradición occidental y “territorial” del clásico Derecho micro-comparativo y (c) un modelo ingenuo de escritos legales sobre transmisión/recepción/difusión. Estas construcciones indican que nuestras culturas académicas han tendido a estar orientadas, por lo general, hacia el Estado y a ser seculares, positivistas, “de arriba hacia abajo”, norte-céntricas, ignorantes de otras tradiciones, no-empíricas y universalistas respecto a la moral. Es decir, y por supuesto, una caricatura. Pero en la medida en que estas asunciones y tendencias se mantienen, estos modelos ideales ponen de relieve algunos puntos cruciales con los que son desafi ados, mediante la adopción de una perspectiva global. Tales puntos incluyen la importancia del Derecho no-estatal, el pluralismo legal y normativo, las explicaciones acerca de la convergencia, la armonización y la difusión (¿se refi eren estos informes sólo a “al Derecho de superficie”?), las concepciones cambiantes de los límites territoriales y de la soberanía, la “caja negra” de la teoría del Derecho (por ejemplo, Hart) y de la justicia (por ejemplo, Rawls), el etnocentrismo, la falacia de que vivimos en “una era secular”, la importancia del pluralismo de creencias, y la escasez en nuestro stock de conceptos analíticos que trasciendan las culturas y tradiciones jurídicas. (shrink)

This is the engaging and accessible intellectual memoir of a leading jurist. It tells the story of the development of his thoughts and writings over sixty years in the context of three continents and addresses the complexities of decolonisation, the troubles in Belfast, the contextual turn in legal studies, rethinking evidence and the implications of globalisation which have been central to his life and research. In propounding his original views as an enthusiastic self-styled 'legal nationalist', Twining maps his ideas of (...) law as a unique discipline, which pervades all spheres of social and political life while combining theory and practice, concepts and values, facts and rules in uniquely fascinating ways. Addressed to academic lawyers generally and to other non-specialists, this story brings out the importance and fascinations of a discipline that has changed, expanded and diversified in the post-War years, with an eye to its future development and potential. (shrink)

En reseña de:Schum, David, Los fundamentos probatorios del razonamiento probabilístico, traducción y edición a cargo de Orión Vargas, Xpress Estudio Gráfico y Digital, 2016, 665 páginas.

The central theme of Twining's book is that law is a marvellous subject of study, but to do justice to its potential requires an enlargement of vision, multiple perspectives, and a radical reappraisal of the role, culture, and practices of law schools. Treating theory, education, scholarship,publishing, and professional practice as complementary activities, the author explores the history, philosophy, and practical problems of attempts to broaden the study of law in a disciplined way. He draws upon his personal experience of law (...) schools throughout the common law world and his specialknowledge of jurisprudence, evidence,torts and legal method to examine a wide range of topics in depth. These include, for example, the nature and tasks of legal theory, different kinds of legal literature, and access to legal education and the profession. This provocative and readable book willappeal to all those with an interest in the roles of legal theory, law schools, and lawyers in a changing world. (shrink)

This chapter examines critically both the idea of ‘a multidisciplinary field’ or ‘an integrated science’ of evidence, and scepticism about and resistance to this idea from the standpoint of a jurist who has been involved with interdisciplinary work on evidence in law for many years. The chapter is organized as follows. Part I presents an overview of the intellectual history of the academic study of evidence in law in the Anglo‐American tradition and shows how important aspects of the field came (...) to be recognised as inherently multidisciplinary. Part II identifies some limitations of legal perspectives on evidence, especially when the focus is on contested trials. It recounts the story of attempts to move beyond law in the direction of constructing a general field of evidence that formed part of the background of the UCL programme. Part III examines some of the reasons for suspicion of and resistance to the idea of ‘an integrated science of evidence’. Part IV restates the case for recognition and institutionalisation of evidence as a special focus of attention at the present time and puts forward a personal agenda of general questions that still need to be tackled. (shrink)

This paper sets out a view of a General Jurisprudence that is needed to underpin the institutionalised discipline of law as it becomes more cosmopolitan in the context of “globalisation”, and considers its implications. Part I restates a position on the mission and nature of the discipline of law and of the role of jurisprudence, as its theoretical part, in contributing to the health of the discipline. Part II clarifies some questions that have been raised about this conception of General (...) Jurisprudence: (i) the implications of “globalisation”; (ii) The meaning of “General Jurisprudence” in this context; (iii) The relationship between Jurisprudence, Legal Philosophy, and social scientific approaches to law; and (iv) The significance of the idea of “non-state law”. Part III illustrates through concrete examples some implications for possible agendas and issues suggested by this model within the areas roughly characterised as analytical, normative, empirical, and critical jurisprudence, including critical analysis of the assumptions and presuppositions typically underpinning mainstream work in fields such ascomparative law, public international law, religious law, and socio-legal studies. (shrink)

Some law students find jurisprudence daunting, impersonal, dry and seemingly detached from practical affairs. Building on a pragmatic view of jurisprudence, The Great Juristic Bazaar explores different ways of reading and using Juristic texts, to set them in context, to bring them to life and to engage with the reader's own concerns.