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National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Norman Cantor provides an accessible and thoroughly researched look at how our current legal system, from the jury trial to the rule of law, was created--from its beginnings in Roman law and its evolution in response to the needs of English society and culture from 1000 to 1780. Index.
White extends his theory of law as constitutive rhetoric, asking how one may criticize the legal culture and the texts within it. "A fascinating study of the language of the law. . . . This book is to be highly recommended: certainly, for those who find the time to read it, it will broaden the mind, and give lawyers a new insight into their role."—New Law Journal
Imagining Legality: Where Law Meets Popular Culture is collection of essays on the relationship between law and popular culture that posits, in addition to the concepts of law in the books and law in action, a third concept of law in the image—that is, of law as it is perceived by the public through the lens of public media. Imagining Legality argues that images of law suggested by television and film are as numerous as they are various, and that they give rise to a potent and pervasive imaginative life of the law. The media’s projections of the legal system remind us not only of the way law lives in our imagination but also of the contingencies of our own legal and social arrangements. Contributors to Imagining Legality are less interested in the accuracy of the portrayals of law in film and television than in exploring the conditions of law’s representation, circulation, and consumption in those media. In the same way that legal scholars have taken on the disciplinary perspectives of history, economics, sociology, anthropology, and psychology in relation to the law, these writers bring historical, sociological, and cultural analysis, as well as legal theory, to aid in the understanding of law and popular culture.
In early modern Europe, international law emerged as a means of governing relations between rapidly consolidating sovereign states, purporting to establish a normative order for the perilous international world. However, it was intrinsically fragile and uncertain, for sovereign states had no acknowledged common authority that would create, change, apply, and enforce legal norms. In Imagining World Order, Chenxi Tang shows that international world order was as much a literary as a legal matter. To begin with, the poetic imagination contributed to the making of international law. As the discourse of international law coalesced, literary works from romances and tragedies to novels responded to its unfulfilled ambitions and inexorable failures, occasionally affirming it, often contesting it, always uncovering its problems and rehearsing imaginary solutions. Tang highlights the various modes in which literary texts—some highly canonical (Camões, Shakespeare, Corneille, Lohenstein, and Defoe, among many others), some largely forgotten yet worth rediscovering—engaged with legal thinking in the period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. In tracing such engagements, he offers a dual history of international law and European literature. As legal history, the book approaches the development of international law in this period—its so-called classical age—in terms of literary imagination. As literary history, Tang recounts how literature confronted the question of international world order and how, in the process, a set of literary forms common to major European languages (epic, tragedy, romance, novel) evolved.
By any measure, Judith Gardam has accomplished much in her professional life and is rightly acknowledged by scholars throughout the world as an expert in her many fields of diverse interest — including international law, energy law and feminist theory. This book celebrates her academic life and work with twelve essays from leading scholars in Gardam’s fields of expertise.
This collection of essays by experts in the field explores the place of the trust in the modern civil law.
Returning to the map of the island of utopia, this book provides a contemporary, inventive, addition to the long history of legal fictions and juristic phantasms. Progressive legal and political thinking has for long lacked a positive, let alone a bold imaginary project, an account of what improved institutions and an ameliorated environment would look like. And where better to start than with the non-laws or imaginary legislations of a realm yet to come. The Cabinet of Imaginary Laws is a collection of fictive contributions to the theme of conceiving imaginary laws in the vivid vein of jurisliterary invention. Disparate in style and diverse in genres of writing and performative expression, the celebrated and unknown, venerable and youthful authors write new laws. Thirty-five dissolute scholars, impecunious authors and dyspeptic artists from a variety of fields including law, film, science, history, philosophy, political science, aesthetics, architecture and the classics become, for a brief and inspiring instance, legislators of impossible norms. The collection provides an extra-ordinary range of inspired imaginings of other laws. This momentary community of radial thought conceives of a wild variety of novel critical perspectives. The contributions aim to inspire reflection on the role of imagination in the study and writing of law. Verse, collage, artworks, short stories, harangues, lists, and other pleas, reports and pronouncements revivify the sense of law as the vehicle of poetic justice and as an art that instructs and constructs life. Aimed at an intellectual audience disgruntled with the negativity of critique and the narrowness of the disciplines, this book will appeal especially to theorists, lawyers, scholars and a general public concerned with the future of decaying laws and an increasingly derelict legal system.
"The situation in Syria poses an acute-some might say existential-challenge to the international community's commitment to justice and accountability. It also marks the abject failure of the international system of peace and security erected in the post-World War II period. The Security Council has been almost entirely incapacitated by the propensity of Russia to wield its veto against nearly every coercive measure of any consequence, including legal accountability, that might be imposed on the regime of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad. As a result, other actors, within and outside of the United Nations, have endeavored to find inventive ways around this geopolitical impasse. This forced creativity has generated a number of innovative institutions, legal arguments, and investigative techniques aimed at advancing justice and accountability for Syria, wherever possible. This book catalogues the many obstacles to this pursuit of justice for Syria and analyzes ways today's justice entrepreneurs have worked to find paths around them. The book's subtitle-Water Always Finds Its Way-reflects this idea that the quest for justice is inexorable. Just as water eventually finds its way through cracks and around obstacles, even if at a trickle, so too will justice. Virtually every international crime that forms part of the international penal code-a mélange of customary international law and treaty provisions-has been committed in and around Syria. The Syrian people have witnessed and been subjected to deliberate, indiscriminate, and disproportionate attacks; the misuse of conventional, unconventional, and improvised weapon systems; industrial-grade custodial abuses in a vast network of formal and informal prisons; unrelenting siege warfare; the denial of humanitarian aid and what appears to be the deliberate use of starvation as a weapon of war; sexual violence, including the sexual enslavement of Yezidi women and girls trafficked from Iraq and the sexual torture of detained men and boys; and the intentional destruction of irreplaceable cultural property. Thousands of Syrians are missing, many of them victims of enforced disappearances. Even children are not spared. The long-standing taboo against the use of chemical weapons has been repeatedly flouted in ways that constitute a double violation of IHL: the use of a prohibited weapon to target civilians. And, the sectarian nature of the violence has raised the specter of genocide against ethno-religious minorities. Indeed, then-Secretary of State John Kerry announced in 2016 that ISIL was committing genocide against a number of minority groups in Syria and Iraq. Violence in the region has contributed to the biggest exodus of refugees since World War II"--
This book considers the implications of the regulatory burden being borne increasingly by technological management rather than by rules of law. If crime is controlled, if human health and safety are secured, if the environment is protected, not by rules but by measures of technological management—designed into products, processes, places and so on—what should we make of this transformation? In an era of smart regulatory technologies, how should we understand the ‘regulatory environment’, and the ‘complexion’ of its regulatory signals? How does technological management sit with the Rule of Law and with the traditional ideals of legality, legal coherence, and respect for liberty, human rights and human dignity? What is the future for the rules of criminal law, torts and contract law—are they likely to be rendered redundant? How are human informational interests to be specified and protected? Can traditional rules of law survive not only the emergent use of technological management but also a risk management mentality that pervades the collective engagement with new technologies? Even if technological management is effective, is it acceptable? Are we ready for rule by technology? Undertaking a radical examination of the disruptive effects of technology on the law and the legal mind-set, Roger Brownsword calls for a triple act of re-imagination: first, re-imagining legal rules as one element of a larger regulatory environment of which technological management is also a part; secondly, re-imagining the Rule of Law as a constraint on the arbitrary exercise of power (whether exercised through rules or through technological measures); and, thirdly, re-imagining the future of traditional rules of criminal law, tort law, and contract law.
Imagining New Legalities reminds us that examining the right to privacy and the public/private distinction is an important way of mapping the forms and limits of power that can legitimately be exercised by collective bodies over individuals and by governments over their citizens. This book does not seek to provide a comprehensive overview of threats to privacy and rejoinders to them. Instead it considers several different conceptions of privacy and provides examples of legal inventiveness in confronting some contemporary challenges to the public/private distinction. It provides a context for that consideration by surveying the meanings of privacy in three domains—-the first, involving intimacy and intimate relations; the second, implicating criminal procedure, in particular, the 4th amendment; and the third, addressing control of information in the digital age. The first two provide examples of what are taken to be classic breaches of the public/private distinction, namely instances when government intrudes in an area claimed to be private. The third has to do with voluntary circulation of information and the question of who gets to control what happens to and with that information.