This chapter examines three approaches to applied political and legal philosophy: standard activism, extreme activism, and conceptual activism. They differ from one another in their target audiences, how directly the arguments seek to advance change in the world, and what they take as their measure(s) of success. Standard activism is primarily addressed to other philosophers, adopts an indirect and coincidental role in creating change, and counts articulating sound arguments as success. Extreme activism, in contrast, is a form (...) of applied philosophy directly addressed to policy‐makers, with the goal of bringing about a particular outcome, and measures success in terms of whether it makes a direct causal contribution to that goal. Finally, conceptual activism (like standard activism), primarily targets an audience of fellow philosophers, bears a distant, non‐direct, relation to a desired outcome, and counts success in terms of whether it encourages a particular understanding and adoption of the concepts under examination. (shrink)

This chapter examines three approaches to applied political and legal philosophy: Standard activism is primarily addressed to other philosophers, adopts an indirect and coincidental role in creating change, and counts articulating sound arguments as success. Extreme activism, in contrast, is a form of applied philosophy directly addressed to policy-makers, with the goal of bringing about a particular outcome, and measures success in terms of whether it makes a direct causal contribution to that goal. Finally, conceptual (...) activism (like standard activism), primarily targets an audience of fellow philosophers, bears a distant, non-direct, relation to a desired outcome, and counts success in terms of whether it encourages a particular understanding and adoption of the concepts under examination. (shrink)

What principles explain or justify legal institutions or decisions, thereby transforming coercion to authority? Are there or could there be any such universal principles? Can any philosophical theory account for such principles? How, if at all, do philosophical theories of law and politics apply to particular issues? And finally, what, if any, do such practical applications tell us about general theories and principles? The essays in this volume represent the efforts of an international group of scholars to understand these (...) general aspects of legal philosophy. (shrink)

This is an introductory book on African legal philosophy. The book claims that African legal philosophy exists and is intelligible in the context of African culture, just as every other legal philosophy has its cultural foundation. What law is, how it is thought, how it is interpreted, and how it is applied takes place with thing the parameters of African culture. At a time when the imposition of Western culture on Africans has to (...) be reckoned with, African legal philosophy is, in part, a response to this imposition. It ought to have a liberating effect. (shrink)

Basic jurisprudence and legal philosophy (Laws of the South Pacific series, no. 3) - Pub: University of the South Pacific, Institute of Justice & Applied Legal Studies, Suva.

In this article the paradoxical role of legal science in legal practice is discussed. On the one hand, legal scientists do not agree on the criterions of the scientific character of legal science. On the other hand, even in the legal cases that are especially complicated it is possible to arrive at theoretically unquestionable decisions. The author of the article concludes that legal practice is based on fundamental theoretical insights; however, in legal practice (...) these insights are used more intuitively than reflectively. Therefore, the aim of the article is to rationally reconstruct these theoretical insights with reference to the ideas of modern schools of legal philosophy. For this purpose the ideas of the theory of natural law are discussed. It is concluded that in legal practice two provisions of natural law are applied: legal decisions ought to be reasonable and must include existential ends (basic values). The evolution of the legal positivism is discussed in the article and it is concluded that legal positivism offers the criterions of the scientific character of legal science by framing the procedural rules of the democratic process of lawmaking. These rules anticipate such conditions: consensus concerning decision making; equal participation of all members of legal discourse confirming normative decisions; the acceptability of consequences after the realisation of normative decisions; the possibility to reaffirm normative decisions, if necessary. The ideas of virtue jurisprudence are discussed and it is claimed that virtue jurisprudence as a criterion of the scientific character of law proposes such theoretical position: the decisions concerning human rights must supply the value system (hierarchy) and the virtues which are formed and justified in the long legal tradition. The article represents the use of these criterions of the scientific character of legal science by Jurgen Habermas to debate about legal prohibition of the improvement of the human genome by using modern technologies of genome engineering in the Convention of Human Rights and Biomedicine (Oviedo, 1997). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.2 (2003) 308-311 [Access article in PDF] Joseph Hamburger. John Stuart Mill on Liberty and Control. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Pp. xx + 239. Cloth, $35.00. C. L. Ten, editor. Mill's Moral, Political and Legal Philosophy. Aldershot: Dartmouth Publishing Company, 1999. Pp. xxiii + 498. Cloth, $180.00. John Stuart Mill's On Liberty is commonly viewed as the classic defense (...) of individual liberty, and Mill himself as the grandfather of modern liberalism. In John Stuart Mill on Liberty and Control Joseph Hamburger seeks to dislodge this orthodox interpretation [End Page 308] of Mill. As the title of the work suggests, Hamburger, who died shortly before this work came to press, seeks to convince the reader that a proper understanding of Mill's account of individual liberty needs to be nuanced by an appreciation of those substantial controls that Mill was willing to place upon individuals.Hamburger suggests that the association of Mill with modern liberalism results from viewing the arguments presented in On Liberty in isolation from the context in which they were written. Hamburger argues that Mill's real purpose in writing On Liberty is neither self-evident nor is it one that is easily assimilated to modern libertarian ideals. Hamburger interprets "Mill as making an esoteric argument in On Liberty" (xvii). There are two additional pieces that Hamburger claims one needs in order to properly decipher the puzzle, and thus grasp the true import of Mill's claims concerning liberty. First, Hamburger argues that Mill's desire to bring about cultural reform was dependent upon his rejection of Christianity. Mill's unpublished writings reveal that he was far more antagonistic to the influence of Christian religion than is often recognized. Hamburger argues that for Mill initiating true moral reform depended upon overcoming the old social order of which Christianity was a primary constituent. In order for this to occur, one needed "to establish liberty for those who would implement his plan for moral reformation" (86). Second, Hamburger argues that we must also grasp Mill's view of history if we are to properly understand his project of moral reform and the place of On Liberty within this project. Hamburger claims that Mill's vision of history was strongly influenced by thinkers such as Comte and St. Simon. From them, Mill adopted the view that societies alternate between transitional and natural states, and that the values that are applicable in these states are quite different. Hamburger claims that "Mill easily recognized his own age as being transitional," and that this influences all of his arguments in On Liberty (111).Putting the above together, Hamburger concludes that Mill's arguments are specifically directed toward securing the liberty of those who would combat the influence of Christianity and the old moral order, and that "the liberty recommended in On Liberty was especially valued because it would hasten the undermining of old doctrines and institutions which occurred in transitional periods" (212). Hamburger argues that the liberty that Mill meant to secure in this work was not intended to apply equally to all persons or in all periods. Thus, Hamburger argues that Mill was quite willing to advocate strong forms of social control in other contexts.The latter claim, which Hamburger argues provides a more coherent interpretation of On Liberty, does not necessarily follow from Mill's view of religion and history. Here, I think there is room for two distinct judgments regarding Hamburger's achievement in this book. Hamburger has undoubtedly provided a great service in examining the often neglected areas of Mill's corpus and their relevance to his more prominent works. Philosophers who view On Liberty as an isolated piece of argument, or at best only consider it in relation to Mill's Utilitarianism, thus would profit much from reading this work. I am less convinced, however, of Hamburger's claim that heeding these aspects of Mill's thought will lead one to form a radically different understanding of Mill's claims concerning... (shrink)

Applied analytical political philosophy has not been a thriving enterprise in the United States in recent years. Certainly it has made little discernible impact on public culture. Political philosophers absorb topics and ideas from the Zeitgeist, but it shows little inclination to return the favor. After the publication of his monumental work A Theory of Justice back in 1971, John Rawls became a deservedly famous intellectual, but who has ever heard political critics or commentators refer to the difference (...) principle or fair equality of opportunity in discussions aimed at a wide audience? Writing philosophically astute and beautifully accessible prose, often in not strictly academic journals of opinion, Ronald Dworkin has been in some ways the very model of a public intellectual, but the only reference to his opinions that I have seen in any newspaper occurred in a New York Times review of a restaurant near London along the Thames (as I recall, Dworkin was quoted as saying it was at the very least the best restaurant in the northern hemisphere). You might chalk up the situation to the fact that political philosophers tend to be liberal and the public political culture in the United States has been growing decidedly conservative, but that mismatch can hardly be the whole story. Right-wing libertarianism is a popular doctrine, but Robert Nozick’s classical and never superseded 1974 exploration of that view in his brilliant Anarchy, State, and Utopia is not cited. Nor is there a significant literature that seeks to derive practical policy recommendations from Nozick’s theory and relevant factual claims. Moreover, the isolation of political philosophy stands in marked contrast to the wide influence of theory in some disciplines. For example, consider the enormous germinating impact of Richard Posner’s ideas on law and economics over the past thirty years on academic and extra-academic American legal culture. (shrink)

In this article applied and theoretical epistemologies benefit each other in a study of the British legal case of R. vs. Clark. Clark's first infant died at 11 weeks of age, in December 1996. About a year later, Clark had a second child. After that child died at eight weeks of age, Clark was tried for murdering both infants. Statisticians and philosophers have disputed how to apply Bayesian analyses to this case, and thereby arrived at different judgments about (...) it. By dwelling on this applied case, I make theoretical gains: clarifying and defending pragmatic principles of inference that are important for estimating key probabilities in a range of cases. Then, partly by drawing on such principles, and uncovering overlooked data on post-partum psychosis, I make applied gains: improving the rationality of judgments about the Sally Clark case in particular, judgments important to future similar cases. (shrink)

This collection of readings in the philosophy of law is divided into two parts. The first is focused on discussions of the nature of law, law’s relations to morality, and how law works as a social institution to protect individual liberty and promote citizens’ opportunities for self-determination and participation in government. The second part selects some contemporary issues so that the reader may see how the more general considerations and concerns of the first part apply to specific problems and (...) concrete situations. Legal cases are included throughout in order to illustrate a point or focus a debate. The book is designed to speak to a Canadian audience; the appendices include the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and a brief overview of the Canadian legal system, prepared by the editors; and the main text includes Waluchow’s fine paper on legal reasoning as it relates to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, entitled “Charter Challenges: A Test Case for Theories of Law?” as well as discussions of several important Canadian legal decisions, such as Morgentaler, Smolling and Scott v. The Queen, R. v. Keegstra, and R. v. Butler. In addition to this focus, the selection and arrangement of readings reflects, to a degree, the editors’ view that “questions about morality and the law are at root questions of political philosophy”. (shrink)

The article takes up the difficult problem of the so-called disobedience of judges against the background of the experiences of the Polish departure from constitutional democracy in 2015–2020. The special role and responsibility of a judge in the state imposes restrictions on her freedom of opinion in the public sphere. Openly manifesting opposition to government policy, which in the case of an ordinary citizen is only the implementation of human rights and freedoms, may be described as controversial and contrary to (...) applicable ethical regulations. The main thesis of this paper is the assertion that although judges who act as impartial arbitrators in disputes should generally refrain from ostentatiously opposing the actions of political authorities, they are not deprived of the possibility of protest. Also in the exercise of office, and not outside the sphere of their duties, judges should take into account overriding moral values that should be implemented by the legal order, and not the values or declarations guiding the government policies. The integrity of the judge, which prescribes restraint in statements and actions in the public sphere, as well as the care for the dignity of the office held, should not be confused with absolute subordination to the legislature or the executive, even if the judge is obliged to apply the law. The traditional attitude of the members of the judiciary, consisting in focusing only on the application of the law in individual cases and the lack of any political involvement, is being reviewed in the face of the spread of majoritarianism and the law abuse as normal techniques of exercising public authority. The disobedience of judges—although difficult to defend at first sight—may seem to be the only possible way to draw public attention to the corruption of the state system. The ‘disobediant’ judges can even be assigned the role of ‘whistleblowers’, which should help to ease their legal liability or their future rehabilitation. (shrink)

Applied naturalism -- Natural rights -- Applied positivism -- A concept of interpretive methodology -- Application of principles of public policy -- Interpretative sources of law -- The formulation of legal principles -- The formulation and application of principles of interpretative construction -- The formulation and application of principles of constructive interpretation -- Application of appropriate equitable principles -- The formulation and application of determinant legal tests and criteria by the courts -- The practical adoption of (...) the jurisprudential process of conceptualisation -- Legal factors and formulae determining correct motion procedures -- The usefulness of templates and principles in maintaining integrity of law in legal practice. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to provide an adequate theoretical framework to understand the biological basis of human rights. We argue that the skepticism about human rights is increasing especially among the most rational, innovative and productive community of intellectuals belonging to the applied sciences. By using examples of embryonic stem cell research, a clash between applied scientists and legal scientists cum human rights activists has been highlighted. After an extensive literature review, this paper concludes that the (...) advances in applied sciences proven by empirical evidence should not be restricted by normative theories and philosophies of the social sciences. If we agree on these premises that Human Rights are biological, then biology can provide a framework of cooperation for social and applied scientists. (shrink)

abstract I consider the putative originality of applied philosophy and seek to defend a version of it often called 'bottom up'. I review ways in which imagined cases may cause us to reconsider our normative commitments, and endorse a general attentiveness to the matter of how the world is and how it might reasonably be imagined. This is important if practical philosophers want to form the correct normative judgements, to be able to recognize the sui generis character of (...) some moral theorising in particular domains, practically to enact their considered judgments, and properly to acknowledge how the real world, in the form of institutions, practices and a cultural framework, constrains, or facilitates, practical enactment. Throughout I illustrate my abstract claims by reference to the moral judgement and legal regulation of sexual behaviour. (shrink)

Professor Matthew Kramer is one of the most important legal philosophers of our time - even if the label 'legal philosopher' does not do justice to the breadth of his work. This collection of essays brings together esteemed philosophers, as well as junior scholars, to critically assess Kramer's philosophy. The contributions focus on Kramer's work on legal philosophy, metaethics, normative ethics, and political philosophy. The volume is divided into six parts, each focusing on different (...) aspect of Kramer's work. The first part, Rights and Right-holding, contains five essays addressing Kramer's work on rights and right-holding, including the Hohfeldian analysis and the interest theory of right-holding. The four essays in the second part, General Jurisprudence, focus on Kramer's work in general jurisprudence, from the compatibility of legal positivism with universal legal error, to his robust defense of inclusive legal positivism, concluding with reflections on his writings on the rule of law. The third part, General Matters of Ethics, contains two essays addressing Kramer's metaethical work on moral realism as a moral doctrine. The fourth and fifth parts, Freedom and Liberalism, have four essays falling within political philosophy, probing Kramer's work on negative freedom and political liberalism, respectively. The sixth part, Applied Ethics, contains two essays on Kramer's work on capital punishment and freedom of expression. The collection is rounded off by reflections on, and replies to, the contributions by Kramer himself. (shrink)

The law serves functions that are not often taken seriously enough by ethicists, namely feasibility and practicability. A consequence of feasibility is that most laws do not meet the demands of ideal ethical theory. A consequence of practicability is that law requires elaborated and explicit methodologies that determine how to do things with norms. These two consequences form the core idea behind this book, which employs methods from legal theory to inform and examine debates on methodology in applied (...) ethics, particularly bioethics. It is argued that almost all legal methods have counterparts in applied ethics, which indicates that much can be gained from comparative study of the two. The author first outlines methods as used in legal, focusing on deductive reasoning with statutes as well as analogical reasoning with precedent cases. He then examines three representative kinds of contemporary ethical theories, Beauchamp and Childress’s principlism, Jonsen and Toulmin’s casuistry, and two versions of consequentialism—Singer’s preference utilitarianism and Hooker’s rule-consequentialism—with regards to their methods. These examinations lead to the Morisprudence Model for methods in applied ethics. (shrink)

This essay introduces the philosophy of legal information (PLI), which is a response to the radical changes brought about in philosophy by the information revolution. It reviews in some detail the work of Luciano Floridi, who is an influential advocate for an information turn in philosophy that he calls the philosophy of information (PI). Floridi proposes that philosophers investigate the conceptual nature of information as it currently exists across multiple disciplines. He shows how a focus (...) on the informational nature of traditional philosophical questions can be transformative for philosophy and for human self-understanding. The philosophy of legal information (PLI) proposed here views laws as a body of information that is stored, manipulated, and analyzed through multiple methods, including the computational methodologies. PLI offers resources for evaluating the ethical and political implications of legal infomatics (also known as "legal information systems"). -/- This essay introduces PLI. Parts I and II describe Floridi's philosophy of information. First, Part I introduces the transformation in the concept of information that occurred in the twentieth century through the work of Alan Turning and Claude Shannon. Part II describes Floridi's approaches to traditional questions in epistemology, ontology, and ethics. Part III applies PI to the analysis of legal positivism. It suggests that PLI is a viable project that has potential for transforming the understanding law in the information age. -/- . (shrink)

Legal Judgment Summarization (LJS) can highly summarize legal judgment documents, improving judicial work efficiency in case retrieval and other occasions. Legal judgment documents are usually lengthy; however, most existing LJS methods are directly based on general text summarization models, which cannot handle long texts effectively. Additionally, due to the complex structural characteristics of legal judgment documents, some information may be lost by applying only one single kind of summarization model. To address these issues, we propose an (...) integrated summarization method which leverages both semantic and structural information to improve the quality of LJS. Specifically, legal judgment documents are firstly segmented into three relatively short parts according to their specific structure. We propose an extractive summarization model named BSLT and an abstractive summarization model named LPGN by adopting Lawformer as the encoder. Lawformer is a new pre-trained language model for long legal documents, which specializes in capturing long-distance dependency and modeling legal semantic features. Then, we adopt different models to summarize the corresponding part regarding its structural characteristics. Finally, the obtained summaries are integrated to generate a high-quality summary involving semantic and structural information. We conduct comparative experiments to evaluate the performance of our model. The results show that our model outperforms the baseline model LEAD-3 by 14.78% on the mean ROUGE score, which demonstrates our method is effective in LJS and is prospected to be applied to assist other tasks in legal artificial intelligence. (shrink)

A theme of growing importance in both the law and philosophy and socio-legal literature is how regulatory dynamics can be identified and normative expectations met in an age when transnational actors operate on a global plane and in increasingly fragmented and transformative contexts. A reconsideration of established theories and axiomatic findings on regulatory phenomena is an essential part of this discourse. There is indeed an urgent need for discontinuity regarding what we know about, among other things, law, legality, (...) sovereignty and political legitimacy, power relations, institutional design and development, and pluralist dynamics of ordering under processes of globalisation and transnationalism. Making an important contribution to the scholarly debate on the subject, this volume features original and much-needed essays of theoretical and applied legal philosophy as well as socio-legal accounts that reflect on whether legal positivism has anything to offer to this intellectual enterprise. This is done by discussing whether global and transnational cultural, socio-political, economic, and juridical challenges as well as processes of diversification, fragmentation, and transformation reinforce or weaken legal positivists’ assumptions, claims, and methods. The themes covered include, but are not limited to, absolute and limited state sovereignty; the ‘new international legal positivism’; Hartian legal positivism and the ‘normative positivist’ account; the relationship between modern secularisation, social conventionalism, and meta-ontological issues of temporality in postnational jurisprudence; the social positivisation of human rights; the formation and content of jus cogens norms; feminist critique; the global and transnational migration of principles of justice and morality; the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties rule of interpretation; and the responsibility of transnational corporations. (shrink)

The face is a component of an individual’s image, and as such it belongs to the attributes of a person’s identity. The spread of photography and other means of recording the image of a person’s face have been accompanied by an increase in the scale of threats of unauthorized intrusion into the sphere of individual privacy. The nature and frequency of the manifestations of interference with privacy are significantly influenced by the Internet and easy access to mass media, including electronic (...) media, in the information society. These phenomena are also becoming apparent in the field of employment. With the development of modern technologies used in workplaces to process personal data and control employees, the threat of unwarranted intrusion into the sphere of privacy of a person performing subordinate work is constantly increasing—not only by the employer, but also by third parties. Nowadays, one-, two- and three-dimensional images of the employee’s face are processed, including the use of biometric techniques. This paper attempts to show the limits of permissible interference in the sphere of employee privacy in connection with the recording, processing and sharing of images of the employee’s face using modern technologies. The subject of the analysis will be the solutions in EU and national law; in particular, those regulations concerning the protection of an employee’s personal data. The formal-dogmatic method is the basic research tool used to achieve the research objective. (shrink)

Despite the fact that in recent years there has been an active trend of growth of freedom of expression in Kazakhstan, domestic legislative and judicial practice lags far behind international standards. The purpose of the study is to examine the legal situation concerning freedom of expression in Kazakhstan, particularly with regard to the functioning of the media, and to find ways to effectively ensure and adequately regulate this issue in law. The methodological approach is based on the dialectical method (...) used to investigate the content and legal foundations of freedom of speech, synthesis, analysis, and comparative legal method. The results obtained provide an opportunity to analyse the state of national legislation in the sphere of implementation and protection of the right to freedom of expression, as well as to identify the largest gaps in this sphere and their subsequent resolution. The investigation of international legal experience and a comparative analysis allow identifying a significant difference between the legislations of countries with a high index of press freedom and freedom of speech, and Kazakhstan. This research is of critical importance for the development of the human rights and freedoms protection sector, as well as journalism, especially given the current situation in the Republic associated with strict state control over the activities of the media, the inability to express and publicly broadcast opinions and ideas that are unfavourable for the ruling circles. (shrink)

Electronic commercial transactions have become a vital part of digital economies around the world. However, the countries need to upgrade their policy frameworks and related legal provisions amid a fragile cyber security environment. The authentication of electronic signatures is a complex phenomenon that needs attention for authentication and recognition. This research presents a comparative analysis of the two countries Jordan and the United Arab Emirates. This study analyzes the related legal statutes to figure out differences and compatibility with (...) reference to their recognition and ability to execute safe electronic transactions in the minimum time. Two legislative enactments have been analyzed in this study that is Jordanian electronic transactions law of 2015 and the United Arab Emirates Electronic transactions and trust services law of 2021. The study concludes that UAE laws are better recognized to verify and authenticate the electronic-signature-based commercial transaction in comparison with the enactments of Jordan in terms of categorizing different levels of security of the electronic signatures and legal preventive measures in case of falsification of data, content, and signatures and breach of the trust. (shrink)

This book presents an analysis of global legal history in Modern times, questioning the effect of political revolutions since the 17th century on the legal field. Readers will discover a non-linear approach to legal history as this work investigates the ways in which law is created. These chapters look at factors in legal revolution such as the role of agents, the policy of applying and publicising legal norms, codification and the orientations of legal writing, (...) and there is a focus on the publicization of law. The author uses Herbert Hart's schemes to conceive law as a human artefact or convention, being the union between primary rules of obligations and secondary rules conferring powers. Here we learn about those secondary rules and the legal construction of the Modern state, and we question the extent to which codification and law reporting were likely to revolutionize the legal field. These chapters examine the hypothesis of a legal revolution that could have concerned many countries in modern times. To begin with, the book considers the legal aspect of the construction of Modern States in the 17th and 18th centuries. It goes on to examine the consequences of the codification movement as a legal revolution before looking at the so-called "constitutional" revolution, linked with the extension of judicial review in many countries after World War II. Finally, the book enquires into the construction of an EU legal order and international law. In each of these chapters, the author measures the scope of the change, how the secondary rules are concerned, the role of the professional lawyers and what are the characters of the new configuration of the legal field. This book provokes new debates in legal philosophy about the rule of change and will be of particular interest to researchers in the fields of law, theories of law, legal history, philosophy of law and historians more broadly. (shrink)

The nature of concepts is a subject of study of various disciplines, from philosophy to cognitive sciences, leading to fragmented understandings and conceptual dissociations. Legal concepts have been studied in an interdisciplinary manner across all these disciplines, suffering from similar fragmentation. Recently, the interdisciplinary crossroads between law and cognitive sciences have brought forward the notion of legal concepts as mental representations. However, this approach largely overlooks the systemic, historical, and societal elements essential to comprehending legal concepts. (...) The aim of this paper is to advocate for the Social Representations Theory as a useful framework that bridges cognitive and socio-cultural dimensions of meaning and can provide a holistic approach to understanding legal concepts. This paper unfolds in three sections. The first section contextualizes the social representations approach within the law and language framework, emphasizing the societal influences on thought and meaning. The second section explains the notion of social representations, building upon Serge Moscovici’s definitions and Ivana Marková’s arguments for the necessity of this approach to accommodate the social dimension of meaning. The third and last section underscores the claim that legal concepts are, in essence, social representations, advocating for the usefulness of this approach in legal scholarship, both paradigmatically and methodologically, consequently arguing for an inclusion for a stronger focus on the social dimension of legal meaning. (shrink)

This essay argues that techniques for assessing testimonial credibility were well established in English legal contexts before they appeared in English natural philosophy. ‘Matters of fact’ supported by testimony referred to human actions and events before the concept was applied to natural phenomena. The article surveys English legal views about testimony and argues that the criteria for credible testimony in both legal and scientific venues were not limited to those of gentle status. Natural philosophers became (...) concerned with testimony when they shifted their attention from universal statements about nature to particular natural and experimental events. Testimony thus became important in the construction of natural and experimental histories constructed by English naturalists. The shift to a more Baconian approach to natural investigation, itself shaped in part by legal concepts and practice, made it possible for members of the Royal Society to adopt an already familiar and societally approved approach to testimony. However, the essay also suggests how the use of scientific instruments and the desire to avoid the adversarial processes of the law modified legal conditions for fact determination, and made it possible for later generations to associate the concept of fact, supported by credible testimony, with the natural rather than the human sciences.Author Keywords: Natural history; Natural philosophy; Testimony; Credibility; Science and law. (shrink)

Bioethics became applied ethics when it was assimilated to moral philosophy. Because deduction is the rationality of moral philosophy, subsuming facts under moral principles to deduce conclusions about what ought to be done became the prescribed reasoning of bioethics, and bioethics became a theory comprised of moral principles. Bioethicists now realize that applied ethics is too abstract and spare to apprehend the specificity, particularity, complexity and contingency of real moral issues. Empirical ethics and contextual ethics are (...) needed to incorporate these features into morality, not just bioethics. The relevant facts and features of problems have to be identified, investigated and framed coherently, and potential resolutions have to be constructed and assessed. Moreover, these tasks are pursued and melded within manifold contexts, for example, families, work and health care systems, as well as societal, economic, legal and political backgrounds and encompassing worldviews. This naturalist orientation and both empirical ethics and contextual ethics require judgment, but how can judgment be rational? Rationality, fortunately, is more expansive than deductive reasoning. Judgment is rational when it emanates from a rational process of deliberation, and a process of deliberation is rational when it uses the resources of non-formal reason: observation, creative construction, formal and informal reasoning methods and systematic critical assessment. Empirical ethics and contextual ethics recognize that finite, fallible human beings live in complex, dynamic, contingent worlds, and they foster creative, critical deliberation and employ non-formal reason to make rational moral judgments. (shrink)

How does a lawyer think? Does legal intuition exist? Do lawyers need imagination? Why is legal language so abstract? It is no longer possible to answer these questions by applying philosophical analysis alone. Recent advances in the cognitive sciences have reshaped our conceptions of the human mental faculties and the tools we use to solve problems. A new picture of the functioning of the legal mind is emerging. In The Legal Mind, Bartosz Brożek uses philosophical arguments (...) and insight from the cognitive sciences to depict legal thinking as a close cooperation between three cognitive mechanisms - intuition, imagination, and language - and addresses the question of how to efficiently use these mental tools. This novel and provocative approach provides a fresh perspective on legal thinking and gives rise to important questions pertaining to the limits of legal interpretation and rationality in the law. (shrink)

Self-driving vehicles will need to make decisions that carry ethical dimensions and manufacturers have (the responsibility) to pre-determine this underlying, deliberate decision-making process. With the rise of self-driving vehicles, scholars have simultaneously started investigating what ethical theories should guide machine behavior, but have not concluded as to which theory should be preferred and adopted. We aim to address this matter by providing a holistic and analytical review of the autonomous driving ethics literature. Based on this review, we summarize the social, (...) moral/legal, and functional advantages and disadvantages of applying particular (traditional) ethical theories to the decision-making of self-driving vehicles. Furthermore, we derive an integrated model that shows how each identified ethical theory could be technically implemented and guide the decision-making of self-driving vehicles. Overall, this article aims to set the groundwork for reflected, successful integration of ethical behavior within self-driving vehicles and deduce an updated research agenda. (shrink)

This article deals with the relation between a theory of law and a theory of legal reasoning. Starting from a close reading of Chapter VII of H. L. A. Hart's The Concept of Law, it claims that a theory of law like Hart's requires a particular theory of legal reasoning, or at least a theory of legal reasoning with some particular characteristics. It then goes on to say that any theory of legal reasoning that satisfies those (...) requirements is highly implausible, and tries to show that this is the reason why not only Hart, but also writers like Neil MacCormick and Joseph Raz have failed to offer a theory of legal reasoning that is compatible with legal positivism as a theory of law. They have faced a choice between an explanation of legal reasoning that is incompatible with the core of legal positivism or else strangely sceptical, insofar as it severs the link between general rules and particular decisions that purport to apply them. (shrink)

This article deals with the relation between a theory of law and a theory of legal reasoning. Starting from a close reading of Chapter VII of H. L. A. Hart's The Concept of Law, it claims that a theory of law like Hart's requires a particular theory of legal reasoning, or at least a theory of legal reasoning with some particular characteristics. It then goes on to say that any theory of legal reasoning that satisfies those (...) requirements is highly implausible, and tries to show that this is the reason why not only Hart, but also writers like Neil MacCormick and Joseph Raz have failed to offer a theory of legal reasoning that is compatible with legal positivism as a theory of law. They have faced a choice between an explanation of legal reasoning that is incompatible with the core of legal positivism or else strangely sceptical, insofar as it severs the link between general rules and particular decisions that purport to apply them. (shrink)

The context-based use of terminology and phraseology is one of the essential building blocks of legal translation. The contextual nature of both components has implications when it comes to designing resources that are adapted to the needs of translators. For Arabic legal translation, there are a multitude of different print and online resources available, however, they do not integrate the context-related parameter for term choice acceptability. In this article, we will describe the main features of certain bilingual (...) class='Hi'>legal dictionaries with the English-Arabic and French-Arabic language pairs. We will then make a descriptive assessment of the tools available online, highlighting their limitations. Taking into consideration all the contextual parameters involved in making a translation choice, we will put forward the value of developing bilingual ontologies with Arabic. With the rapid expansion of information technologies, a move towards formalizing legal knowledge will help fill existing gaps in the representation of Arabic legal content and the retrieval of information, providing legal translators with a tool that provides specific details that will enable translators to make informed and relevant decisions, in addition to opening new research perspectives for Arabic legal translation. (shrink)

Just over seventy years ago, three trials took place in Nuremberg, Germany. At the time, they seemed a turning point in international relations—and, indeed, proved to be. The trials involved the prosecution of prominent members of the political, military, economic, and judicial leadership of Nazi Germany, those who planned, oversaw, or otherwise participated in the Holocaust and other large crimes. At the time, the Trials were widely condemned for using retroactive criminal statutes. The most famous discussion is what became known (...) as the Hart-Fuller Debate. This paper argues that Locke provides the best account of the lawfulness of the Trials—at least when compared to the accounts offered by Fuller, Hart, and Ronald Dworkin. (shrink)

Legal institutions are created at a certain point in time, intended to be applied to ‘life’ as it is perceived at the specific moment when they are elaborated and cast into legal form. As a result, legal institutions always already refer, in their original design, to a certain normality, but between the moment of creation of a legal institution and its application to future situations there is always a certain time lag. Some legal institutions—referred (...) to in the paper as “legal survivals” –outlive the epoch in which they were created and continue their legal life long after the conditions which lead to their creation had, in the meantime, disappeared. The aim of this paper is to put forward an archaeologico–genealogical perspective on legal survivals not only as a method of studying continuity of law and the resilience of juridical form, but also as a line of enquiry capable of enriching our understanding of the juridical in its relation to the changing circumstances of life. The study of legal survivals allows to combine three aspects of legal continuity: firstly, the continued use of the same legal forms in different circumstances and for different purposes, whereby the same juridical form is filled with different socio-economic substance; secondly, the gradual adaptation of legal forms to new circumstances; thirdly, the emergence of new legal forms in close reference to old ones. The study of legal survivals allows to address the foundations of law’s claims to authority, based on stability and predictability of juridical forms. It also reveals the complex and multilayered nature of legal form which effectively has the structure of a palimpsest. (shrink)

The paper explores the hypothesis that multinomials can act as authorship-based style distinguishing markers in legal communication. Specifically, the analysis focuses on identifying the quantitative distribution patterns of structural categories of multinomials as typical for two authorship categories and on their communicative function. The two authorship categories that are contrasted here are legal professionals/experts and lay people. The analysis is conducted in the corpus-based methodology with a custom-designed corpus of English, authentic texts found in the legal trade, (...) in the domain of company registration proceedings. The findings confirm that multinomials that are conventionally considered to be a feature of professional legal communication are also cognitively salient in lay communication. Further, the texts drafted by the two categories of authors are profiled by structurally distinct multinomials. Functionally, it has been demonstrated that the structurally distinct types of multinomials that are found quantitatively salient in the two authorship categories are used predominantly for specific stylistic and/or pragmatic functions. Stylistically, multinomials contribute to conventional and ritual patterns which are used to meet the formality standards that have evolved in specific legal professions where authority is of particular importance. Pragmatic factors which account for quantitative salience of specific, structurally profiled categories of multinomials involve mainly reduplication of multinomials that embody norm-related concepts, which is required on the ground of intertextuality and ensures the materialisation of legal effect. (shrink)

Applied ontology is the attempt to put to use the rigorous tools of philosophical ontology in the development of category systems which can be of use in the formalization and systematization of knowledge of a given domain. In what follows we shall sketch some elements of the ontology of legal and socio-political institutions, paying attention especially to the normativity involved in such institutions. We shall see that there is more than one type of normativity, but that this fact (...) that has often been ignored in standard attempts by philosophers to build ontologies of legal and other socio-political entities. In order to provide a sound system of categories for legal and socio-political institutions and entities, however, the manifold of normativity needs to be addressed. The classical examples of normative statements have been moral propositions; they do not merely describe states of affairs; they tell us how states of affairs ought to be. The distinction between how things are and how they ought to be is the basis of the distinction between fact and value. Analytic philosophers for a long time shunned discussions of normativity and ethics. They considered ethical statements as pseudo-propositions, or as expressions of pro- or con-attitudes of no theoretical significance.1 Nowadays, in contrast, prominent analytic philosophers discuss normative problems and there are important books written by such philosophers on topics such as law and justice. Here we pay attention to three seminal thinkers in this development: H. L. A. Hart, John Rawls, and John R. Searle in concerning ourselves especially with the way in which they deal with the issue of normativity. Hart is, within the context of recent analytic philosophy, the most important philosopher of law, Rawls the most.. (shrink)

The use of facial recognition systems in concerts provides a perfect pretext to semiotically discuss the role of the face in contemporary culture, identifying different strategies and axiologies (systems of values). In his visionary essay Bruits (“noises”) from 1977, the French thinker Jacques Attali establishes a close connection between music and power and locates it in the site of the collective unfolding of music: the concert hall. Following this hint, the article reconstructs the current debate on facial recognition systems in (...) the music business, with a particular focus on concerts and festivals. The different positions (of musicians, authorities, and professionals) are outlined (some are openly in favor, others openly against), key moments are identified (Beyoncé’s concert in Cardiff, 2017; Jacky Cheung’s in Nanchang, 2018; Taylor Swift’s at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, 2018; the “banfacialrecognition.com” campaign launched in 2019; the case of Barbara Hart at Brandi Carlile’s show at the Madison Square Garden, 2022) and, finally, the issue is framed within the broader debate about the face as an indexical marker of presence, identity, and humanity (the contrast between Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben and American sociologist and design theorist Benjamin Bratton is addressed). (shrink)