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Law's Documents: Authority, Materiality, Aesthetics
by Katherine Biber, Trish Luker and Priya VaughanIlluminating their breadth and diversity, this book presents a comprehensive and multidisciplinary view of legal documents and their manifold forms, uses, materialities and meanings. In 1951, Suzanne Briet, a librarian at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, famously said that an antelope in a zoo could be a document, thereby radically changing the way documents were analysed and understood. In the fifty years since this pronouncement, the digital age has introduced a potentially limitless range of digital and technological forms for the capture and storage of information. In their multiplicity and their ubiquity, documents pervade our everyday life. However, the material, intellectual, aesthetic and political dimensions and effects of documents remain difficult to pin down. Taking a multidisciplinary and international approach, this collection tackles the question, what is a legal document?, in order to explore the material, aesthetic and intellectual attributes of legal documentation; the political and colonial orders reflected and embedded in documents; and the legal, archival and social systems which order and utilise information. As well as scholars in law, documentary theory, history, Indigenous studies, art history and design theory and practice, this book will also appeal to those working in libraries, archives, galleries and museums, for whom the ongoing challenges of documentation in the digital age are urgent and timely questions.
Law's Dream of a Common Knowledge (The Cultural Lives of Law)
by Mariana ValverdeIf knowledge is power, then the power of law can be studied through the lens of knowledge. This book opens up a substantive new area of legal research--knowledge production--and presents a series of case studies showing that the hybridity and eclecticism of legal knowledge processes make it unfruitful to ask questions such as, "Is law becoming more dominated by science?" Mariana Valverde argues that legal decision making cannot be understood if one counterposes science and technology, on the one hand, to common knowledge and common sense on the other. The case studies of law's flexible collage of knowledges range from determinations of drunkenness made by liquor licensing inspectors and by police, through police testimony in "indecency" cases, to how judges define the "truth" of sexuality and the harm that obscenity poses to communities. Valverde emphasizes that the types of knowledge that circulate in such legal arenas consist of "facts," values, and codes from numerous incompatible sources that combine to produce interesting hybrids with wide-ranging legal and social effects. Drawing on Foucaultian and other analytical tools, she cogently demonstrates that different modes of knowledge, and hence various forms of power, coexist happily. Law's Dream of a Common Knowledge underlines the importance of analyzing dynamically how knowledge formation works. And it helps us to better understand the workings of power and resistance in a variety of contemporary contexts. It will interest scholars and students from disciplines including law, sociology, anthropology, history, and science-and-technology studies as well as those concerned with the particular issues raised by the case studies.
Law's Empire
by Ronald M. DworkinWith the incisiveness and lucid style for which he is renowned, Ronald Dworkin has written a masterful explanation of how the Anglo-American legal system works and on what principles it is grounded. Law's Empire is a full-length presentation of his theory of law that will be studied and debated--by scholars and theorists, by lawyers and judges, by students and political activists--for years to come. Dworkin begins with the question that is at the heart of the whole legal system: in difficult cases how do (and how should) judges decide what the law is? He shows that judges must decide hard cases by interpreting rather than simply applying past legal decisions, and he produces a general theory of what interpretation is--in literature as well as in law--and of when one interpretation is better than others. Every legal interpretation reflects an underlying theory about the general character of law: Dworkin assesses three such theories. One, which has been very influential, takes the law of a community to be only what the established conventions of that community say it is. Another, currently in vogue, assumes that legal practice is best understood as an instrument of society to achieve its goals. Dworkin argues forcefully and persuasively against both these views: he insists that the most fundamental point of law is not to report consensus or provide efficient means to social goals, but to answer the requirement that a political community act in a coherent and principled manner toward all its members. He discusses, in the light of that view, cases at common law, cases arising under statutes, and great constitutional cases in the Supreme Court, and he systematically demonstrates that his concept of political and legal integrity is the key to Anglo-American legal theory and practice.
Law’s Ethical, Global and Theoretical Contexts
by Baxi, Upendra and McCrudden, Christopher and Paliwala, Abdul Upendra Baxi Christopher Mccrudden Abdul PaliwalaLaw's Ethical, Global and Theoretical Contexts examines William Twining's principal contributions to law and jurisprudence in the context of three issues which will receive significant scholarly attention over the coming decades. Part I explores human rights, including torture, the role of evidence in human rights cases, the emerging discourse on 'traditional values', the relevance of 'Southern voices' to human rights debates, and the relationship between human rights and peace agreements. Part II assesses the impact of globalization through the lenses of sociology and comparative constitutionalism, and features an analysis of the development of pluralistic ideas of law in the context of privatization. Finally, Part III addresses issues of legal theory, including whether global legal pluralism needs a concept of law, the importance of context in legal interpretation, the effect of increasing digitalization on legal theory, and the utility of feminist and postmodern approaches to globalization and legal theory.
Law's Fragile State
by Mark Fathi MassoudHow do a legal order and the rule of law develop in a war-torn state? Using his field research in Sudan, Massoud uncovers how colonial administrators, postcolonial governments, and international aid agencies have used legal tools and practices to promote stability and their own visions of the rule of law amid political violence and war in Sudan. Refuting the conventional wisdom of a legal vacuum in failed states, this book offers a thoughtful and readable account of the important ways that law matters in even the most extreme cases of states still fighting for political stability. Law's Fragile State helps scholars, students, policymakers, and the interested public to make sense of Sudan and what law does, and what it fails to do, in the world's most desperate environments.
Laws Harsh As Tigers
by Lucy E. SalyerFocusing primarily on the exclusion of the Chinese, Lucy Salyer analyzes the popular and legal debates surrounding immigration law and its enforcement during the height of nativist sentiment in the early twentieth century. She argues that the struggles between Chinese immigrants, U.S. government officials, and the lower federal courts that took place around the turn of the century established fundamental principles that continue to dominate immigration law today and make it unique among branches of American law. By establishing the centrality of the Chinese to immigration policy, Salyer also integrates the history of Asian immigrants on the West Coast with that of European immigrants in the East.Salyer demonstrates that Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans mounted sophisticated and often-successful legal challenges to the enforcement of exclusionary immigration policies. Ironically, their persistent litigation contributed to the development of legal doctrines that gave the Bureau of Immigration increasing power to counteract resistance. Indeed, by 1924, immigration law had begun to diverge from constitutional norms, and the Bureau of Immigration had emerged as an exceptionally powerful organization, free from many of the constraints imposed upon other government agencies.
Law's Hermeneutics: Other Investigations
by Simone Glanert Fabien GirardBringing together leading academics hailing from different cultural and scholarly horizons, this book revisits legal hermeneutics by making particular reference to philosophy, sociology and linguistics. On the assumption that theory has much to teach law, that theory motivates and enables, the writings of such intellectuals as Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricœur, Giorgio Agamben, Jürgen Habermas, Ronald Dworkin and Ludwig Wittgenstein receive special consideration. As it explores the matter of reading the law and as it inquires into the emergence of meaning within the dynamic between reader and text against the background of the reader’s worldly finiteness, this collection of essays wishes to contribute to an improved appreciation of the merits and limits of law’s hermeneutics which, it argues, is emphatically not to be reduced to a simple tool for textual exegesis.
Laws in Conflict: A Mystery of Medieval Ireland (Burren Mysteries #8)
by Cora Harrison"Harrison, like Peter Tremayne in his Sister Fidelma series, provides a superior brand of historical mystery" Booklist. February, 1512. Mara, Brehon of the Burren, judge and lawgiver, has been invited to the magnificent city state of Galway, which is ruled by English laws and a royal charter originally granted by Richard III. Mara wonders whether she can use her legal knowledge to save the life of a man from the Burren who has been caught stealing a meat pie, but events soon take an even more dramatic turn when the mayor's son is charged with a heinous crime. Sure there is more to the case than meets the eye, Mara investigates ...
Law's Indigenous Ethics
by John BorrowsLaw’s Indigenous Ethics examines the revitalization of Indigenous peoples’ relationship to their own laws and, in so doing, attempts to enrich Canadian constitutional law more generally. Organized around the seven Anishinaabe grandmother and grandfather teachings of love, truth, bravery, humility, wisdom, honesty, and respect, this book explores ethics in relation to Aboriginal issues including title, treaties, legal education, and residential schools. With characteristic depth and sensitivity, John Borrows brings insights drawn from philosophy, law, and political science to bear on some of the most pressing issues that arise in contemplating the interaction between Canadian state law and Indigenous legal traditions. In the course of a wide-ranging but accessible inquiry, he discusses such topics as Indigenous agency, self-determination, legal pluralism, and power. In its use of Anishinaabe stories and methodologies drawn from the emerging field of Indigenous studies, Law’s Indigenous Ethics makes a significant contribution to scholarly debate and is an essential resource for readers seeking a deeper understanding of Indigenous rights, societies, and cultures.
Law's Infamy: Understanding the Canon of Bad Law
by Austin Sarat Lawrence Douglas Martha Merrill UmphreyAn analysis of how problematic laws ought to be framed and consideredFrom the murder of George Floyd to the systematic dismantling of voting rights, our laws and their implementation are actively shaping the course of our nation. But however abhorrent a legal decision might be—whether Dred Scott v. Sanford or Plessy v. Ferguson—the stories we tell of the law’s failures refer to their injustice and rarely label them in the language of infamy. Yet in many instances, infamy is part of the story law tells about citizens’ conduct. Such stories of individual infamy work on both the social and legal level to stigmatize and ostracize people, to mark them as unredeemably other. Law’s Infamy seeks to alter that course by making legal actions and decisions the subject of an inquiry about infamy. Taken together, the essays demonstrate how legal institutions themselves engage in infamous actions and urge that scholars and activists label them as such, highlighting the damage done when law itself acts infamously and focus of infamous decisions that are worthy of repudiation. Law's Infamy asks when and why the word infamy should be used to characterize legal decisions or actions. This is a much-needed addition to the broader conversation and questions surrounding law’s complicity in evil.
Law’s Memories (Palgrave Socio-Legal Studies)
by Matt HowardThis book discusses the relationship between law and memory and explores the ways in which memory can be thought of as contributing to legal socialization and legal meaning-making. Against a backdrop of critical legal pluralism which examines the distributedness of law(s), this book introduces the notion of mnemonic legality. It emphasises memory as a resource of law rather than an object of law, on the basis of how it substantiates senses of belonging and comes to frame inclusions and exclusions from a national community on the basis of linear-trajectory and growth narratives of nationhood. Overall, it explores the sensorial and affective foundations of law, implicating memory and perceptions of belonging within this process of creating legality and legitimacy. By identifying how memory comes to shape and inform notions of law, it contributes to legal consciousness research and to important questions informing much socio-legal research.
Law's Mistakes
by Austin Sarat Lawrence Douglas Martha Merrill UmphreyFrom false convictions to botched executions, from erroneous admission of evidence in a criminal trial to misunderstandings that arise in the process of creating contracts, law is awash in mistakes. These mistakes can be unintentional deviations from expected practices or the result of intentional actions that produce unintended negative consequences. They may become part of a process of response and correction or be accepted as an inevitable cost of action. Some mistakes are external to law itself, such as errors in an agreement made by two private parties. Others are made by legal actors in the course of their work; for example, a police officer’s failing to obtain a search warrant when one was required. The essays in Law’s Mistakes explore the things that law recognizes as errors and the way it responds to them. They identify the jurisprudential and political perspectives that underlie different understandings of what is or is not a legal mistake, and examine the fraught, contested, and evolving relationship between law and error. And they offer templates for thinking about what mistakes can tell us about the aspirations and limits of law, and for understanding how our imagining of law is enabled and shaped by its juxtaposition to a condition labeled mistake. In addition to the volume editors, contributors include Paul Schiff Berman, Sonali Chakravarti, Jody L. Medeira, Stewart Motha, Kunal Parker, and Jordan Steiker.
Law's Moving Image
by Ian Christie Elena Loizidou Leslie J Moran Emma SandonThis book is an essential introduction to the complex issues and debates in the field of law and film. It explores interconnections that are usually ignored between law and film through three main themes: A Fantastic Jurisprudence explores representations of law in law Law, Aesthetics and Visual Technologies focuses on the visual aspects of law's moving image Regulation: Histories, Cultures, Practices brings together work on different dimensions and contexts of regulation, censorship, state subsidies and intellectual property to explore the complex inter-relationship between the state, industry and private regulation. Law's Moving Image is an innovative, multi-disciplinary contribution to the rapidly growing fields of study in law and film, law and visual culture, law and culture, criminology, social and cultural studies. It will be of interest to students and academics involved in these areas.
Laws of Creation: Property Rights in the World of Ideas
by Ronald A. Cass Keith N. HyltonWhile innovative ideas and creative works increasingly drive economic success, the historic approach to encouraging innovation and creativity by granting property rights has come under attack by a growing number of legal theorists and technologists. In Laws of Creation, Ronald Cass and Keith Hylton take on these critics with a vigorous defense of intellectual property law. The authors look closely at the IP doctrines that have been developed over many years in patent, copyright, trademark, and trade secret law. In each area, legislatures and courts have weighed the benefits that come from preserving incentives to innovate against the costs of granting innovators a degree of control over specific markets. Over time, the authors show, a set of rules has emerged that supports wealth-creating innovation while generally avoiding overly expansive, growth-retarding licensing regimes. These rules are now under pressure from detractors who claim that changing technology undermines the case for intellectual property rights. But Cass and Hylton explain how technological advances only strengthen that case. In their view, the easier it becomes to copy innovations, the harder to detect copies and to stop copying, the greater the disincentive to invest time and money in inventions and creative works. The authors argue convincingly that intellectual property laws help create a society that is wealthier and inspires more innovation than those of alternative legal systems. Ignoring the social value of intellectual property rights and making what others create and nurture “free” would be a costly mistake indeed.
Laws of Early Iceland: Gragas I
by Andrew Dennis Peter Foote Richard PerkinsThe laws of Medieval Iceland provide detailed and fascinating insight into the society that produced the Icelandic sagas. Known collectively as Gragas (Greygoose), this great legal code offers a wealth of information about early European legal systems and the society of the Middles Ages. This first translation of Gragas is in two volumes.
Laws of Early Iceland: Gragas II (U of M Icelandic Series #4)
by Andrew Dennis Peter Foote Richard PerkinsThe laws of Mediaeval Iceland provide detailed and fascinating insight into the society that produced the Icelandic sagas. Known collectively as Gragas (Greygoose), this great legal code offers a wealth of information about early European legal systems and the society of the Middles Ages. This first translation of Gragas is in two volumes.
Laws of Image: Privacy and Publicity in America
by Samantha BarbasAmericans have long been obsessed with their images--their looks, public personas, and the impressions they make. This preoccupation has left its mark on the law. The twentieth century saw the creation of laws that protect your right to control your public image, to defend your image, and to feel good about your image and public presentation of self. These include the legal actions against invasion of privacy, libel, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. With these laws came the phenomenon of "personal image litigation"--individuals suing to vindicate their image rights. Laws of Image tells the story of how Americans came to use the law to protect and manage their images, feelings, and reputations. In this social, cultural, and legal history, Samantha Barbas ties the development of personal image law to the self-consciousness and image-consciousness that has become endemic in our media-saturated culture of celebrity and consumerism, where people see their identities as intertwined with their public images. The laws of image are the expression of a people who have become so publicity-conscious and self-focused that they believe they have a right to control their images--to manage and spin them like actors, politicians, and rock stars.
Laws of Medicine: Core Legal Aspects for the Healthcare Professional
by Amirala S. PashaThis book provides an overview of the US laws that affect clinical practice for healthcare professionals with no legal background.Divided into thirteen sections, each chapter starts with a summary of the chapter’s content and relevant legal concepts in bullet points before discussing the topics in detail. An application section is provided in many chapters to clarify essential issues by reflecting on clinically relevant case law or clinical vignette(s). Filling a crucial gap in the literature, this comprehensive guide gives healthcare professionals an understanding or a starting point to legal aspects of healthcare.
Laws of Men and Laws of Nature: The History of Scientific Expert Testimony in England and America
by Tal GolanAre scientific expert witnesses partisans, or spokesmen for objective science? This ambiguity has troubled the relations between scientists and the legal system for more than 200 years. Modern expert testimony first appeared in the late eighteenth century, and while its use steadily increased throughout the nineteenth century, in cases involving everything from patents to X-rays, the respect paid to it steadily declined, inside and outside of the courtroom. With deep learning and wry humor, Tal Golan tells stories of courtroom drama and confusion and media jeering on both sides of the Atlantic, until the start of the twenty-first century, as the courts still search for ways that will allow them to distinguish between good and bad science.
The Laws Of Our Fathers
by Scott TurowThe novel opens with a spectacular drive-by shooting in one of Kindle County's notorious drug-plagued housing projects. The victim is an aging white woman who has been seen there before; within days her son, Nile Eddgar, a probation officer, is charged in connection with the crime-and the reader gratefully once more under the hypnotic spell that only Scott Turow can cast. Nile's trial is presided over-and narrated-by Judge Sonia "Sonny" Klonsky, whom his fans will remember from his second novel, The Burden of Proof. It brings together a vivid cast of characters from Sonny's student years during the turbulent sixties, among them Nile's father, Loyell Eddgar, once a leading campus revolutionary, and Sonny's old boyfriend Seth Weissman, who is now a renowned journalist. All have been permanently marked by the heady iconoclasm of their youth; some carry terrible secrets that come to bear on the case at hand in unforeseeable and explosive ways. Scott Turow's most powerful novel to date,
The Laws of Plato
by Plato Thomas L. PangleThe Laws, Plato's longest dialogue, has for centuries been recognized as the most comprehensive exposition of the practical consequences of his philosophy, a necessary corrective to the more visionary and utopian Republic. In this animated encounter between a foreign philosopher and a powerful statesman, not only do we see reflected, in Plato's own thought, eternal questions of the relation between political theory and practice, but we also witness the working out of a detailed plan for a new political order that embodies the results of Plato's mature reflection on the family, the status of women, property rights, criminal law, and the role of religion and the fine arts in a healthy republic. "Because it succeeds in being both literal and comprehensive, it is by far superior to any translation available. By reproducing dramatic detail often omitted, such as oaths, hesitations, repetitions, and forms of address, Pangle allows the reader to follow the dialogue's interplay between argument and dramatic context. . . . Pangle's translation captures the excitement and the drama of Plato's text. "--Mary P. Nichols, Ancient Philosophy "Pangle's achievement is remarkable. . . . The accompanying interpretive essay is an excellent distillation of a dialogue three times its size. The commentary is thoughtful, even profound; and it amply demonstrates the importance of reading Plato carefully and from a translation that is true to his language. "--Patrick Coby, American Political Science Review
The Laws of Robots: Crimes, Contracts, and Torts
by Ugo PagalloThis book explores how the design, construction, and use of robotics technology may affect today's legal systems and, more particularly, matters of responsibility and agency in criminal law, contractual obligations, and torts. By distinguishing between the behaviour of robots as tools of human interaction, and robots as proper agents in the legal arena, jurists will have to address a new generation of "hard cases." General disagreement may concern immunity in criminal law (e.g., the employment of robot soldiers in battle), personal accountability for certain robots in contracts (e.g., robo-traders), much as clauses of strict liability and negligence-based responsibility in extra-contractual obligations (e.g., service robots in tort law). Since robots are here to stay, the aim of the law should be to wisely govern our mutual relationships.
The Laws of Slavery in Texas
by Randolph B. CampbellThe laws that governed the institution of slavery in early Texas were enacted over a fifty-year period in which Texas moved through incarnations as a Spanish colony, a Mexican state, an independent republic, a part of the United States, and a Confederate state. This unusual legal heritage sets Texas apart from the other slave-holding states and provides a unique opportunity to examine how slave laws were enacted and upheld as political and legal structures changed. The Laws of Slavery in Texas makes that examination possible by combining seminal historical essays with excerpts from key legal documents from the slave period and tying them together with interpretive commentary by the foremost scholar on the subject, Randolph B. Campbell. Campbell's commentary focuses on an aspect of slave law that was particularly evident in the evolving legal system of early Texas: the dilemma that arose when human beings were treated as property. As Campbell points out, defining slaves as moveable property, or chattel, presented a serious difficulty to those who wrote and interpreted the law because, unlike any other form of property, slaves were sentient beings. They were held responsible for their crimes, and in numerous other ways statute and case law dealing with slavery recognized the humanness of the enslaved. Attempts to protect the property rights of slave owners led to increasingly restrictive laws--including laws concerning free blacks--that were difficult to uphold. The documents in this collection reveal both the roots of the dilemma and its inevitable outcome.
Laws of the Land: Fengshui and the State in Qing Dynasty China
by Tristan G. BrownA groundbreaking history of fengshui’s roles in public life and law during China’s last imperial dynastyToday the term fengshui, which literally means “wind and water,” is recognized around the world. Yet few know exactly what it means, let alone its fascinating history. In Laws of the Land, Tristan Brown tells the story of the important roles—especially legal ones—played by fengshui in Chinese society during China’s last imperial dynasty, the Manchu Qing (1644–1912).Employing archives from Mainland China and Taiwan that have only recently become available, this is the first book to document fengshui’s invocations in Chinese law during the Qing dynasty. Facing a growing population, dwindling natural resources, and an overburdened rural government, judicial administrators across China grappled with disputes and petitions about fengshui in their efforts to sustain forestry, farming, mining, and city planning. Laws of the Land offers a radically new interpretation of these legal arrangements: they worked. An intelligent, considered, and sustained engagement with fengshui on the ground helped the imperial state keep the peace and maintain its legitimacy, especially during the increasingly turbulent decades of the nineteenth century. As the century came to an end, contentious debates over industrialization swept across the bureaucracy, with fengshui invoked by officials and scholars opposed to the establishment of railways, telegraphs, and foreign-owned mines.Demonstrating that the only way to understand those debates and their profound stakes is to grasp fengshui’s longstanding roles in Chinese public life, Laws of the Land rethinks key issues in the history of Chinese law, politics, science, religion, and economics.
The Laws of the Roman People
by Callie WilliamsonThis intellectually powerful and highly original book examines Roman expansion through the lens of public lawmaking, the process of negotiation and debate by which citizen assemblies resolved conflict and expressed consensus. Williamson incisively examines how problems of expansion were managed, and boldly argues that in the end it was expansion itself—both of the electorate and its leadership—that overwhelmed the problem-solving capacities of public lawmaking and led to the breakdown of the Republic.