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This thought-provoking book explores the multifaceted phenomenon of objectivity and its relations to various aspects of jurisprudence, legal interpretation and practical reasoning. Featuring contributions from an international group of researchers from differing legal contexts, it addresses topics relevant not only from a theoretical point of view but also themes directly connected with legal and judicial practice.
This volume critically discusses the relationship between democracy and constitutionalism. It does so with a view to respond to objections raised by legal and political philosophers who are sceptical of judicial review based on the assumption that judicial review is an undemocratic institution. The book builds on earlier literature on the moral justification of the authority of constitutional courts, and on the current attempts to develop a system on “weak judicial review”. Although different in their approach, the chapters all focus on devising institutions, procedures and, in a more abstract way, normative conceptions to democratize constitutional law. These democratizing strategies ma...
What does it mean to understand the law? This challenging book discusses whether and how understanding the law is qualitatively different from understanding a different, non-legal text or linguistic utterance, and whether knowledge of a language is sufficient to understand legal content in that language.
What is law? This question has preoccupied philosophers from Plato to Thomas Hobbes to H. L. A. Hart. Yet many others find it perplexing. How could we possibly know how to answer such an abstract question? And what would be the point of doing so? In Legality, Scott Shapiro argues that the question is not only meaningful but vitally important. In fact, many of the most pressing puzzles that lawyers confront—including who has legal authority over us and how we should interpret constitutions, statutes, and cases—will remain elusive until this grand philosophical question is resolved. Shapiro draws on recent work in the philosophy of action to develop an original and compelling answer to thi...
Over the last decade, the world has watched in shock as populists swept to power in free elections. From Manila to Warsaw, Brasilia to Budapest, the populist tide has shattered illusions of an inexorable march to liberal democracy. Eschewing simplistic notions of a unified global populism, this book unpacks the diversity and plurality of populisms. It highlights the variety of constitutional and extraconstitutional strategies that populists have used to undermine the institutional fabric of liberal democracy and investigates how ruling populists responded to the Covid-19 crisis. Outlining the rise of populisms and their governing styles, Wojciech Sadurski focuses on what populists in power do, rather than what they say. Confronting one of the most pressing concerns of international politics, this book offers a vibrant, contemporary account of modern populisms and, significantly, considers what we can do to fight back.
This book examines the success of Frederick Schauer’s efforts to reclaim force as a core element of a general concept of law by approaching the issue from different legal traditions and distinct perspectives. In discussing Schauer’s main arguments, it contributes to answering the question whether force, sanctions and coercion should (or should not) be regarded as necessary elements of the concept of law, and whether legal philosophy should be concerned at all (or exclusively) with necessary or essential properties. While it was long assumed that legal norms are essentially defined by their force, it was H.L.A. Hart who raised doubts about whether law and coercion are necessarily connecte...
Like every other walk of modern life, the law has embraced digital technology, and is increasingly reliant on information systems for its efficient functioning. This book presents papers from the 30th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2017), held in Luxembourg City, Luxembourg, in December 2017. In the three decades since they began, the JURIX conferences have been held under the auspices of the Dutch Foundation for Legal Knowledge Based Systems, and have become a fully European conference series which addresses familiar topics and extends known techniques, as well as exploring newer topics such as question answering and the use of data mining and mac...
This book provides a critical assessment of how judges reason in the adjudication of historical injustices. The practice of adjudication in historical cases of injustice require that, in determining collective responsibility, judges impart meaning to past injuries. This book analyses the narrative mechanisms through which this meaning is produced. Focusing on three areas of adjudication–racial discrimination, post-colonial extractivism and the climate crisis–the book’s analysis focuses on the issue of time. It considers the interplay of how historical injustice adjudication is shaped by temporal presuppositions and how it enacts a particular idea of temporality. As experiences of injus...
This book brings together leading legal theorists to present original philosophical work on the concept of law - the central question of jurisprudence. It covers five broad topics: firstly it addresses debates concerning the methodology of jurisprudence. In Part II it focuses on the notion of a legal system and its coercive nature, while Part III explores the relationships between law and morality, the traditional point of contention between positivist and non-positivist theories of law. Part IV then examines questions regarding law’s normative character and relationships with practical reason. Lastly, the final part introduces two novel theoretical approaches to conceptual jurisprudence.
Can constitutional amendments be unconstitutional? Using theoretical and comparative approaches, Roznai establishes the nature and scope of constitutional amendment powers by focusing on substantive limitations, looking at their prevalence in practice and the conceptual coherence of the very idea of limitations to constitutional amendment powers.