An Introduction to Rights is the only accessible and readable introduction to the history, logic, moral implications, and political tendencies of the idea of rights. It is organized chronologically and discusses important historical events such as the French Revolution. It deals with historical figures, including Grotius, Paley, Hobbes, Locke, Bentham, Burke, Godwin, Mill, and Hohfeld, and covers contemporary debates, including consequentialism versus contractualism. Rights come in various types – human, moral, civil, political, and legal – and claims about who has a right, and to what, are often contested.What are rights? Are they timeless and universal, or merely conventional? How are they related to other morally significant values, such as well-being, autonomy, and community? Can animals have rights? Or fetuses? Do we have a right to do as we please so long aswe do not harmothers? ProfessorWilliam A. Edmundson addresses these issues from both philosophical and legal perspectives.

Кл.слова:
правознавство -- юриспруденція

Jeffrie G. Murphy's third collection of essays further pursues the topics of punishment and retribution that were explored in his two previous collections: Retribution, Justice and Therapy and Retribution Reconsidered. Murphy now explores these topics in the light of reflections on issues that are normally associated with religion: forgiveness, mercy, and repentance. He also explores the general issue of theory and practice and discusses a variety of topics in applied ethics - e.g., freedom of artistic expression, the morality of gambling, and the value of forgiveness in psychological counseling. As always, his perspective may be described as Kantian; and, indeed, this collection contains the first extended piece of Kant scholarship that he has done in years: a long essay on Kant on theory and practice.

Кл.слова:
право

In this book, legal scholars, philosophers, historians, and political scientists from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States analyze the common law through three of its classic themes: rules, reasoning, and constitutionalism. Their essays, specially commissioned for this volume, provide an opportunity for thinkers from different jurisdictions and disciplines to talk to each other and to their wider audience within and beyond the common law world. This book allows scholars and students to consider how these themes and concepts relate to one another. It will initiate and sustain a more inclusive and well-informed theoretical discussion of the common law's method, process, and structure. It will be valuable to lawyers, philosophers, political scientists, and historians interested in constitutional law, comparative law, judicial process, legal theory, law and society, legal history, separation of powers, democratic theory, political philosophy, the courts, and the relationship of the common law tradition to other legal systems of the world.

Кл.слова:
право

The book is a pleasure to read for its learning and sophistication. Nottage and Wolff also deserve high praise for their light touch as editors and translators. David Nelken, University of Cardiff, UK and University of Macerata, Italy This important book translates seven landmark essays by one of Japan s most respected and influential legal thinkers. While Takao Tanase concedes that law might not matter as much in Japan as it does in the United States, in a provocative challenge to socio-legal researchers and comparative lawyers, he asks: why should it? The issue, he contends, is not whether law matters to society; it is how society matters to law. Developing a descriptive and normative theory of community and the law, the author directly challenges the view that legal liberalism represents the pinnacle of legal achievement. He criticises liberalism for destroying community in the United States and for offering false hope for a delayed modernity in Japan. By applying a distinctive interpretivist methodology, he constructs a communitarian model of law and society that serves as an alternative to legal liberalism. The book challenges conventional understandings of such legal sociological staples as torts, lawyers ethics, family law, human rights, constitutionalism and litigiousness. This fascinating book will prove a stimulating, thought provoking read for researchers and scholars of law, Japanese and American studies, sociology and jurisprudence.

Кл.слова:
теорія суспільства -- теорія права -- правопорушення -- конституціоналізму

The language of rights is utilized frequently in debates over contemporary social issues—a fetus’s “right to life” versus a woman’s “right to choose,” for example. Because these debates pertain to what our social policies should be, it is clear that the rights in question are moral rights, and that existing legal rights ought to be changed or maintained accordingly. The problem, however, is that moral rights require moral justification. In Conflicts of Rights, John Rowan takes this next step, and investigates possible moral justifications for rights alleged to exist in four contexts: abortion, affirmative action, welfare, and pornography freedoms. In doing so, he reaches conclusions about the morally appropriate policy for each issue, and also about the effectiveness of rights language in general.

Кл.слова:
права людини -- суспільна мораль -- цензура

While we would like to believe that forensic science professionals are intrinsically ethical by nature, the reality is that these individuals have moral compasses as varied as those of any individual you may know. They confront ethical dilemmas every day, some with clear-cut protocols and others that frequently have no definitive answers. Ethics and the Practice of Forensic Science explores the range of ethical issues facing those who work in the field and highlights the complicated nature of ethical decision-making in this complex arena.

Кл.слова:
кримінал -- етика

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.

Кл.слова:
юридична наука -- правознавство

International and supranational integration on the European continent, as well as the harmonisation of the rules of international trade and the accompanying development and global popularity of the resolution of commercial disputes through arbitration, constantly exerts a considerable influence on modern legal systems. The sources of each of these phenomena are different, and their action is dissimilar. Each can be described as reaching either from the top to the bottom, through the direct involvement of interested states and consequently affecting their internal legal systems (international and supranational integration; harmonisation of trade regulations through public international law instruments), or bottom-up, as a result of activity by private parties, leading to the achievement of uniform practices and standards (arbitration, lex mercatoria). Nonetheless, they both enrich national legal cultures and contribute to transgressing the limits of national (local) particularisms in creating, interpreting and applying the law.

Кл.слова:
європейський закон -- юриспруденція

Everyone has some idea what lawyers do. And most people have at least heard of criminologists. But who knows what “law and society” is? A lawyer friend of mine, a really smart guy, asks me regularly, “What exactly do you people do?” Once when I was at the annual meeting of the Law and Society Association, my taxi driver was making the usual idle conversation and inquired what I was in town for. I told him I was attending the Law and Society Association’s annual meeting. His interest suddenly aroused, he turned to face me and asked with some urgency, “I’ve been wondering, when is the best time to plant a lawn?”

Кл.слова:
юриспруденція -- законодавство -- держава

Since the earliest days of philosophy, thinkers have debated the meaning of the term happiness and the nature of the good life. But it is only in recent years that the study of happiness—or “hedonics”—has developed into a formal field of inquiry, cutting across a broad range of disciplines and offering insights into a variety of crucial questions of law and public policy. Law and Happiness brings together the best and most influential thinkers in the field to explore the question of what makes up happiness—and what factors can be demonstrated to increase or decrease it. Martha Nussbaum offers an account of the way that hedonics can productively be applied to psychology, Cass R. Sunstein considers the unexpected relationship between happiness and health problems, Matthew Adler and Eric A. Posner view hedonics through the lens of cost-benefit analysis, David A. Weisbach considers the relationship between happiness and taxation, and Mark A. Cohen examines the role crime—and fear of crime—can play in people’s assessment of their happiness, and much more. The result is a kaleidoscopic overview of this increasingly prominent field, offering surprising new perspectives and incisive analyses that will have profound implications on public policy.

Кл.слова:
закон -- філософія

On 7 and 8 December 2007, a group of legal theorists got together to celebrate, but also critically discuss, Neil MacCormick’s latest book, arguably his magnum opus, Institutions of Law: An Essay in Legal Theory (MacCormick 2007). This collection is a direct result of that meeting, which was generously sponsored by the Leverhulme Trust, and held at the School of Law, University of Edinburgh. There had been a previous occasion, and also a previous collection (see Bankowski and MacLean 2006), where a chapter of MacCormick’s earlier Rhetoric and the Rule of Law (MacCormick 2005) was discussed, but the publication of this book was clearly an event that merited its own careful attention.

Кл.слова:
юриспруденція -- правосуддя

This book describes the rule of law as the reign of persuasion rather than the reign of force, and democracy as the reign by persuasion rather than the reign by force. It synthesizes a vast amount of current Cassirer-literature and makes a contribution to jurisprudence. The book is the first systematic elaboration on law as a symbolic form and it sheds new light on a still dark area of intellectual and jurisprudential thought.

Кл.слова:
закон