The first part of the 21st Century will likely go down in history as the era when ethical hackers opened governments. The line of transparency is moving by force. The twitter page for Wikileaks demons
This book was the first booklength treatment of the philosophical foundations of international criminal law. The focus is on the moral, legal, and political questions that arise when individuals who commit collective crimes, such as crimes against humanity, are held accountable by international criminal tribunals. These tribunals challenge one of the most sacred prerogatives of states - sovereignty - and breaches to this sovereignty can be justified in limited circumstances, following what the author calls a minimalist account of the justification of international prosecution. Written in a clear and accessible style, this book should appeal to anyone with an interest in international law, political philosophy, international relations, and human rights theory.
African states have become testing grounds for Western conflict-resolution experiments, particularly power-sharing agreements, supposedly intended to end deadly conflict, secure peace and build democracy in divided societies. This volume examines the legal and political efficacy of transitional political power-sharing between democratically constituted governments and the African warlords, rebels, or junta that seek to violently unseat them. What role does law indicate for itself to play in informing, shaping and regulating peace agreements? This book addresses this question and others through the prism of three West African case studies: Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea-Bissau. It applies the neo-Kadeshean model of analysis and offers a framework for a 'Law on Power-sharing'. In a field dominated by political scientists, and drawing from ancient and contemporary international law, this book represents the first substantive legal critique of the law, practice and politics of power-shar
Informed consent is a central topic in contemporary biomedical ethics. Yet attempts to set defensible and feasible standards for consenting have led to persistent difficulties. In Rethinking Informed Consent in Bioethics, first published in 2007, Neil Manson and Onora O'Neill set debates about informed consent in medicine and research in a fresh light. They show why informed consent cannot be fully specific or fully explicit, and why more specific consent is not always ethically better. They argue that consent needs distinctive communicative transactions, by which other obligations, prohibitions, and rights can be waived or set aside in controlled and specific ways. Their book offers a coherent, wide-ranging and practical account of the role of consent in biomedicine which will be valuable to readers working in a range of areas in bioethics, medicine and law.
Courts today seek to involve both parents in a child's life rather than choosing between them. Mediation and education have replaced the courtroom as the primary forum for resolving parental disputes. This book provides an overview of these trends in law, conflict resolution and mental health and the empirical research that supports them. It analyzes the principle challenges facing the child custody court of today: assuring the safety of parents and children from violence and providing access to justice and services. It examines how the roles of key courtroom players - judges, lawyers for both parents and children and mental health professionals - must change to promote the best interests of children. The book concludes with an agenda for reform of the child custody court based on interdisciplinary collaboration that can help courts meet the needs of twenty-first century parents and children.
African regional trade integration has grown exponentially in the last decade. This book is the first comprehensive analysis of the legal framework within which it is being pursued. It will fill a huge knowledge gap and serve as an invaluable teaching and research tool for policy makers in the public and private sectors, teachers, researchers and students of African trade and beyond. The author argues that African Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) are best understood as flexible legal regimes particularly given their commitment to variable geometry and multiple memberships. He analyzes the progress made toward trade liberalization in each region, how the RTAs are financed, their trade remedy and judicial regimes, and how well they measure up to Article XXIV of GATT. The book also covers monetary unions as well as intra-African regional integration, and examines free trade agreements with non-African regions including the Economic Partnership Agreements with the European Union.
As well as examining Lawrence's life through his struggles with the dominant discourses of his day - censorship law, the First World War and its politics, the growth of psychoanalysis and the early wo
Remedies is the subject of increasing academic interest. It is one of the key organising concepts of the obligations approach to the common law, the pre-eminent approach in law schools, now officially sanctioned by the Law Society. This second edition modernizes the first edition quite considerably. This work determines the place of remedies in contract and tort within the current debate about the reform of the common law obligation.
Thomas Hobbes' timeless account of the human condition, first developed in The Elements of Law (1640), which comprises Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, is a direct product of the intellectual an
This is the second edition of a work which first appeared in 1979. The first edition gave an interpretation of Paul's Letters to the Galatians which proceeded along the following lines: firstly, Paul's opponents at Galatia were Jewish Christians who believed that Gentiles had to accept the Law in order to be saved; secondly, that Paul first revealed his noncircumcision gospel to James, Cephas and John at the Jerusalem Conference; thirdly, Paul's view of justification by faith was seen in terms of Christ keeping faith with Abraham's promise that all nations would be blessed; and fourthly, that Paul considered Torah as binding upon Jewish Christians, but not upon Gentiles. In his second edition, the author brings the discussion into line with his present thinking, and proposes a more nuanced view of the Galatian opponents. These, he feels, did not all share the same opinions, although they were Jewish Christians. The chief discrepancy in their views consisted in the fact that some beli
Beginning with its first edition and through subsequent editions, Thinking and Deciding has established itself as the required text and important reference work for students and scholars of human cognition and rationality. In this fourth edition, first published in 2007, Jonathan Baron retains the comprehensive attention to the key questions addressed in the previous editions - how should we think? What, if anything, keeps us from thinking that way? How can we improve our thinking and decision making? - and his expanded treatment of topics such as risk, utilitarianism, Baye's theorem, and moral thinking. With the student in mind, the fourth edition emphasises the development of an understanding of the fundamental concepts in judgement and decision making. This book is essential reading for students and scholars in judgement and decision making and related fields, including psychology, economics, law, medicine, and business.
Beginning with the premise that the principal function of a criminal trial is to find out the truth about a crime, Larry Laudan examines the rules of evidence and procedure that would be appropriate if the discovery of the truth were, as higher courts routinely claim, the overriding aim of the criminal justice system. Laudan mounts a systematic critique of existing rules and procedures that are obstacles to that quest. He also examines issues of error distribution by offering the first integrated analysis of the various mechanisms - the standard of proof, the benefit of the doubt, the presumption of innocence and the burden of proof - for implementing society's view about the relative importance of the errors that can occur in a trial.
Informed consent is a central topic in contemporary biomedical ethics. Yet attempts to set defensible and feasible standards for consenting have led to persistent difficulties. In Rethinking Informed Consent in Bioethics, first published in 2007, Neil Manson and Onora O'Neill set debates about informed consent in medicine and research in a fresh light. They show why informed consent cannot be fully specific or fully explicit, and why more specific consent is not always ethically better. They argue that consent needs distinctive communicative transactions, by which other obligations, prohibitions, and rights can be waived or set aside in controlled and specific ways. Their book offers a coherent, wide-ranging and practical account of the role of consent in biomedicine which will be valuable to readers working in a range of areas in bioethics, medicine and law.
After the first human contact with the Siwannese ended in a mass suicide, the Terran government made a law that no further contact with sentient aliens would be allowed. But since their own planet was
This volume makes available to a student readership one of the central texts in the utilitarian tradition, in the authoritative 1977 edition prepared by Professors Burns and Hart as part of Bentham's Collected works. A Fragment on Government is, as Ross Harrison observes in his introduction, a young man's work, and Bentham's exuberant prose reflects his own confidence that the Fragment 'was the first publication by which men at large were invited to break loose from the trammels of authority and ancestor-wisdom on the field of law'. Certain that history was on his side, Bentham sought to rid the world of the hideous mess wrought by legal obfuscation and confusion, and to transform politics into a rational scientific activity, premised on the hideous politics into a rational scientific activity, premised on the fundamental axiom that 'it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong'. In the context of a European social and political order still
Why has Japan found it easier than the United States to pursue a consistent industrial policy? Why does Britain provide health care collectively whereas France relies on private provision? Why is the American government unable to ensure the safety of its citizens whereas personal safety is not even an issue in Japan? Such questions are central to the study of comparative public politics and this textbook, first published in 1992, seeks to answer them by integrating policy analysis with mainstream comparative politics. The authors examine power and policy in four liberal democracies: France, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. They provide an introduction to the politics of these four leading democracies, setting out the actors, arenas and agendas of policy in each country. The following sections explore four contrasting areas of policy: industrial, health, ethnic minorities and law and order. In the final part these countries and sectors are discussed from the perspectives
This book was the first booklength treatment of the philosophical foundations of international criminal law. The focus is on the moral, legal, and political questions that arise when individuals who commit collective crimes, such as crimes against humanity, are held accountable by international criminal tribunals. These tribunals challenge one of the most sacred prerogatives of states - sovereignty - and breaches to this sovereignty can be justified in limited circumstances, following what the author calls a minimalist account of the justification of international prosecution. Written in a clear and accessible style, this book should appeal to anyone with an interest in international law, political philosophy, international relations, and human rights theory.
This book is the first comprehensive study of the meaning and measure of enforceability. While we have long debated what restraints should govern the conduct of our social life, we have paid relatively little attention to the question of what it means to make a restraint enforceable. Focusing on the enforceability of legal rights but also addressing the enforceability of moral rights and social conventions, Mark Reiff explains how we use punishment and compensation to make restraints operative in the world. After describing the various means by which restraints may be enforced, Reiff explains how the sufficiency of enforcement can be measured, and he presents a unified theory of deterrence, retribution, and compensation that shows how these aspects of enforceability are interconnected. Reiff then applies his theory of enforceability to illuminate a variety of real-world problem situations.
The theologians of the late German Enlightenment saw in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason a new rational defence of their Christian faith. In fact, Kant's critical theory of meaning and moral law totally subverted the spirit of that faith. This challenging new study examines the contribution made by the Critique of Pure Reason to this change of meaning. George di Giovanni stresses the revolutionary character of Kant's critical thought but also reveals how this thought was being held hostage to unwarranted metaphysical assumptions that caused much confusion and rendered the First Critique vulnerable to being reabsorbed into modes of thought typical of Enlightenment popular philosophy. Amongst the striking features of this book are nuanced interpretations of Jacobi and Reinhold, a lucid exposition of Fichte's early thought, and a rare, detailed account of Enlightenment popular philosophy.
This important book was the first serious work of philosophy to address the question: Do adults have a moral right to use drugs for recreational purposes? Many critics of the 'war on drugs' denounce law enforcement as counterproductive and ineffective. Douglas Husak argues that the 'war on drugs' violates the moral rights of adults who want to use drugs for pleasure, and that criminal laws against such use are incompatible with moral rights. This is not a polemical tract but a scrupulously argued work of philosophy that takes full account of all available data concerning drug use in the United States today. The author is careful to describe the properties a recreational drug would have to possess before the state would be justified in prohibiting it. Since criminal laws against the use of recreational drugs are justified neither by the harm users cause to themselves nor by the harm users cause to each other, Professor Husak concludes that such laws are, in almost all cases, unjustified
