Law, Justice and Power – serie

It is commonly thought in secular society that the Bible is one of the greatest hindrances to doing justice. Isn't it full of regressive views? Didn't it condone slavery? Why look to the Bible for guidance on how to have a more just society? But Keller sees it another way. In GENEROUS JUSTICE, Keller explores a life of justice empowered by an experience of grace: a generous, gracious justice. Here is a book for believers who find the Bible a trustworthy guide, as well as those who suspect that Christianity is a regressive influence in the world.Keller's church, founded in the 80s with fewer than 100 congregants, is now exponentially larger. Over 5,000 people regularly attend Sunday services, and another 25,000 download Keller's sermons each week. A recent profile in New York magazine described his typical sermon as 'a mix of biblical scholarship, pop culture, and whatever might have caught his eye in The New York Review of Books or on Salon.com that week.' In short, Timothy Keller speaks a language that many thousands of people understand. In GENEROUS JUSTICE, he offers them a new understanding of modern justice and human rights.

Drawing upon theories of critical legal pluralism and psychological theories of narrative identity, this book argues for an understanding of popular culture as legal authority, unmediated by translation into state law. In narrating our identities, we draw upon collective cultural narratives, and our narrative/nomos obligational selves become the nexus for law and popular culture as mutually constitutive discourse.The author demonstrates the efficacy and desirability of applying a pluralist legal analysis to examine a much broader scope of subject matter than is possible through the restricted perspective of state law alone. The study considers whether presumptively illegal acts might actually be instances of a re-imagined, alternative legality, and the concomitant implications. As an illustrative example, works of critical dystopia and the beliefs and behaviours of eco/animal-terrorists can be understood as shared narrative and normative commitments that constitute law just as fully as does the state when it legislates and adjudicates.This book will be of great interest to academics and scholars of law and popular culture, as well as those involved in interdisciplinary work in legal pluralism.

It has long been acknowledged that the death penalty in the United States of America has been shaped by the country’s history of slavery and racial violence, but this book considers the lesser-explored relationship between the two practices’ respective abolitionist movements. The book explains how the historical and conceptual links between slavery and capital punishment have both helped and hindered efforts to end capital punishment. The comparative study also sheds light on the nature of such efforts, and offers lessons for how death penalty abolitionism should proceed in future. Using the history of slavery and abolition, it is argued that anti-death penalty efforts should be premised on the ideologies of the radical slavery abolitionists.

Pragmatism is experiencing a resurgence in law, philosophy and social science, with pragmatists seeking a consistent, comprehensive and productive understanding of social life. In its four sections Renascent Pragmatism aids the reinvigoration of pragmatism as an important intellectual tradition and contributor to inquiry and change in social life. The book is a first of its kind for combining essays on theory, method, public policy and empirical scholarship, presenting contributions from philosophers, legal scholars and social scientists. Throughout the book, the concrete linkage between policy, theory and method is emphasized, while recognizing the philosophical tradition in which the inquiries and prescriptions rest.

Pragmatism and Law provides a textual reading of the American legal discourse, as it unfolds through various genres of pragmatism, which evolve and transform during the twentieth century. The historical narrative, which the book weaves, traces the transformation of the pragmatic idea from the forefront of philosophical intellectual inquiries at the turn of the twentieth century to a common sense lawyers’ practical rule of action at the turn of the twenty-first century. During this sequence, a fresh look at American history and legal history in particular is offered through the emphasis on recurring discursive structures which assume incommensurable treatments of basic liberal notions like justice, politics, and truth. Underlying the writing is an interpretative mode of inquiry, based on European post-structural methodologies, while claiming to represent their next intellectual phase. This contemporary mode of inquiry is that of a reading which insists on healing through the paradoxes. It is the same mode that sets, in the author’s view, the updated interpretative model of dispute resolution studies.

This perceptive study investigates the different ways in which the state deals with various social groups through the mechanisms of space. By means of case studies involving three social groups within Israel's multicultural society - the Sephardim, the Bedouin-Arab minority and the ultra-Orthodox community of Jerusalem - the different roles played by political space in legal analysis are revealed and analyzed. Issachar Rosen-Zvi then unearths the unifying logic underlying the disparate legal treatment of political space, brought to light by the case studies. The law treats political space differently depending on the social group involved, an attitude that, the author argues, can be traced back to early Zionist thinking. He concludes that a reform of local government law is required, to correct the segregated system of political space and the separate and unequal distribution of political power and economic resources that accompany it.

Demonstrating how users of law, who often operate in multi-sited situations, are forced to deal with increasingly complex legal circumstances, this volume focuses on political and social processes through which people appropriate, use and create legal forms in multiple legal settings. It provides new insights into social and political processes through which transnational law is locally appropriated by different actors and presents empirical studies of confrontation, adaptation, vernacularization and hybridization of law due to its transplantation across the borders of national states. The contributors offer insights into modern dynamics of legal change, challenging assumptions about increasing homogeneity in law, with a keen eye for the historical situations in which current legal changes stand.

The Logic of Consent analyzes the varied nature of consent arguments in criminal law and examines the confusions that commonly arise from the failure of legislatures, courts and commentators to understand them. Peter Westen skillfully argues that the conceptual aspect accounts for a significant number of the difficulties that legislatures, courts and scholars have with consent in criminal cases; he observes that consent masquerades as a single kind of event when, in reality, it refers to diverse and sometimes mutually exclusive kinds of events. Specifically, consent is used in law to refer to three pairs of contrasting kinds of events: factual versus legal, attitudinal versus expressive, and prescriptive versus imputed. While Westen takes no position on whether the substance of existing defenses of consent in criminal law ought to be enlarged or reduced in scope, he examines each of these contrasting events and analyzes the normative confusions they produce.

This book presents a distinctive approach to the study of law in society, focusing on the sociological interpretation of legal ideas. It surveys the development of connections between legal studies and social theory and locates its approach in relation to sociolegal studies on the one hand and legal philosophy on the other. It is suggested that the concept of law must be re-considered. Law has to be seen today not just as the law of the nation state, or international law that links nation states, but also as transnational law in many forms. A legal pluralist approach is not just a matter of redefining law in legal theory; it also recognizes that law's authority comes from a plurality of diverse, sometimes conflicting, social sources. The book suggests that the social environment in which law operates must also be rethought, with many implications for comparative legal studies. The nature and boundaries of culture become important problems, while the concept of multiculturalism points to the cultural diversity of populations and to problems of fragmentation, or perhaps to new kinds of unity of the social. Theories of globalization raise a host of issues about the integrity of societies and about the need to understand social networks and forces that extend beyond the political societies of nation states. Through a range of specific studies, closely interrelated and building on each other, the book seeks to integrate the sociology of law with other kinds of legal analysis and engages directly with current juristic debates in legal theory and comparative law.

Examining the relationship between law and social change in the context of employees' everyday problems with sexual harassment, this volume elaborates a framework for studying the role of law in everyday acts of resistance - what the author calls the legal consciousness of injustice. The framework situates the analysis in the context of a specific social problem and its related legal domain. It de-centres the law by accounting for the way that social movements, counter-movements, policy makers and powerful institutions frame the debate surrounding the social problem. Drawing on frame analysis developed in social movement studies, this aspect of the approach specifically incorporates other schema and shows how law supports both oppositional and dominant interpretations of experience. Following the stages of a dispute, the framework then examines the way that people use frames to make sense of their experiences.

Taking the novel position of dealing with law, classical rhetoric and feminism concurrently, this book considers the effects of beliefs about language on those who attempt to theorize about and use law to accomplish practical and political purposes. The author employs Aristotle's terminology to analyze economic and literary schools of thought in the US legal academy, noting the implicit language theory underlying claims by major thinkers in each school about the nature of law and its relationship to justice. The underlying assumption is that, as law can only work through language, beliefs about its relationship to justice are determined by assumptions about the nature of language. In addition, the author provides an alternative, feminist rhetoric that, being focused on the production of texts rather than their interpretation, offers a practical ethic of intervention.

In The Political Uncommons, Kathryn Milun presents a cultural history of the global commons: those domains, including the atmosphere, the oceans, the radio frequency spectrum, the earth's biodiversity, and its outer space, designated by international law as belonging to no single individual or nation state but rather to all humankind. From the res communis of Roman property law to early modern laws establishing the freedom of the seas, from the legal battles over the neutrality of the internet to the heritage of the earth's genetic diversity, Milun connects ancient, modern, and postmodern legal traditions of global commons. Arguing that the logic of legal institutions governing global commons is connected to the logic of colonial doctrines that dispossessed indigenous peoples of their land, she demonstrates that the failure of international law to adequately govern the earth's atmosphere and waters can be more deeply understood as a cultural logic that has successfully dispossessed humankind of basic subsistence rights. The promise of global commons, Milun shows, has always been related to subsistence rights and an earth that human communities have long imagined as 'common' existing alongside private and public domains. Utilizing specific case studies, The Political Uncommons opens a way to consider how global commons regimes might benefit from the cross-cultural logics found where indigenous peoples have gained recognition of their common tenure systems in Western courts.

Offering an anthropological perspective, this volume explores the changing relations between law and governance, examining how changes in the structure of governance affect the relative social significance of law within situations of legal pluralism. The authors argue that there has been a re-regulation rather than a de-regulation, propagated by a plurality of regulative authorities and this re-regulation is accompanied by an increasing ideological dominance of rights talk and juridification of conflict. Drawing on insights into such processes, this volume explores the extent to which law is used both as a constitutive legitimation of governance and as the medium through which governance processes take place. Highlighting some of the paradoxes and the unintended consequences of these regulating processes and the ensuing dynamics, Rules of Law and Laws of Ruling will be a valuable resource for researchers and students working in the areas of legal anthropology and governance.

Spatializing Law: An Anthropological Geography of Law in Society focuses on law and its location, exploring how spaces are constructed on the terrestrial and marine surface of the earth with legal means in a rich variety of socio-political, legal and ecological settings. The contributors explore the interrelations between social spaces and physical space, highlighting the ways in which legal rules may localise people's rights and obligations in social space that may be mapped onto physical space. This volume also demonstrates how different notions of space and place become resources that can be mobilised in social, political and economic interaction, paying specific attention to the contradictory ways in which space may be configured and involved in social interaction under conditions of plural legal orders. Spatializing Law makes a significant contribution to the anthropological geography of law and will be useful to scholars across a broad array of disciplines.

This edited volume brings together leading scholars on the death penalty within international, regional and municipal law. It considers the intrinsic elements of both the promotion and demise of the punishment around the world, and provides analysis which contributes to the evolving abolitionist discourse. The contributors consider the current developments within the United Nations, the Council of Europe, the African Commission and the Commonwealth Caribbean, and engage with the emergence of regional norms promoting collective restriction and renunciation of the punishment. They investigate perspectives and questions for retentionist countries, focusing on the United States, China, Korea and Taiwan, and reveal the iniquities of contemporary capital judicial systems. Emphasis is placed on the issues of transparency of municipal jurisdictions, the jurisprudence on the 'death row phenomenon' and the changing nature of public opinion. The volume surveys and critiques the arguments used to scrutinize the death penalty to then offer a detailed analysis of possible replacement sanctions.

This volume presents an anthropological perspective on the hidden continuities between corruption and law. The authors argue that the two opposites, corruption and law, are inextricably linked - with the possibility of the former already inscribed into the latter. Taking a critical stance towards the normative good governance agenda spearheaded by institutions such as Transparency International and the World Bank, this volume argues that by uncritically depicting corruption as an absolute evil, these anti-corruption programs disregard the close relationship that exists between corruption and state power. Addressing various aspects of a complex and ambivalent phenomenon, Corruption and the Secret of Law draws on studies from different parts of the world including Burundi, China, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico and the USA and provides a valuable resource for students, researchers and policy-makers working in this area.

This book presents new socio-legal perspectives and insights on the social life of corruption and anticorruption in authoritarian regimes.This book takes up the case of Uzbekistan—an authoritarian regime in Central Asia and one of the most corrupt countries in the world according to Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index—and examines the corruption that developed in a tightly closed authoritarian regime permeated by a large-scale shadow economy, a weak rule of law, and a collectivist legal culture. Building on socio-legal frameworks of legal compliance, living law and legal pluralism, the central argument of the book is that the roles, meanings, and logics of corruption are fluid, and depend on a myriad of structural variables, and contextual and situational factors.This book will be of value to researchers, academics, and students in the fields of sociology of law, legal anthropology, and Central Asian studies, especially those with an interest in the intersection of law, society, and corruption in authoritarian regime contexts.The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 International license.

Offering an anthropological perspective, this volume explores the changing relations between law and governance, examining how changes in the structure of governance affect the relative social significance of law within situations of legal pluralism. The authors argue that there has been a re-regulation rather than a de-regulation, propagated by a plurality of regulative authorities and this re-regulation is accompanied by an increasing ideological dominance of rights talk and juridification of conflict. Drawing on insights into such processes, this volume explores the extent to which law is used both as a constitutive legitimation of governance and as the medium through which governance processes take place. Highlighting some of the paradoxes and the unintended consequences of these regulating processes and the ensuing dynamics, Rules of Law and Laws of Ruling will be a valuable resource for researchers and students working in the areas of legal anthropology and governance.

Historically, at English common law, the death penalty was mandatory for the crime of murder and other violent felonies. Over the last three decades, however, many former British colonies have reformed their capital punishment regimes to permit judicial sentencing discretion, including consideration of mitigating factors. Applying a comparative analysis to the law of capital punishment, Novak examines the constitutional jurisprudence and resulting legislative reform in the Caribbean, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South and Southeast Asia, focusing on the rapid retreat of the mandatory death penalty in the Commonwealth over the last thirty years. The coordinated mandatory death penalty challenges - which have had the consequence of greatly reducing the world’s death row population - represent a case study of how a small group of lawyers can sponsor human rights litigation that incorporates international human rights law into domestic constitutional jurisprudence, ultimately harmonizing criminal justice regimes across borders. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the study and development of human rights and capital punishment, as well as those exploring the contours of comparative criminal justice.

Taking the novel position of dealing with law, classical rhetoric and feminism concurrently, this book considers the effects of beliefs about language on those who attempt to theorize about and use law to accomplish practical and political purposes. The author employs Aristotle's terminology to analyze economic and literary schools of thought in the US legal academy, noting the implicit language theory underlying claims by major thinkers in each school about the nature of law and its relationship to justice. The underlying assumption is that, as law can only work through language, beliefs about its relationship to justice are determined by assumptions about the nature of language. In addition, the author provides an alternative, feminist rhetoric that, being focused on the production of texts rather than their interpretation, offers a practical ethic of intervention.

Examining the relationship between law and social change in the context of employees' everyday problems with sexual harassment, this volume elaborates a framework for studying the role of law in everyday acts of resistance - what the author calls the legal consciousness of injustice. The framework situates the analysis in the context of a specific social problem and its related legal domain. It de-centres the law by accounting for the way that social movements, counter-movements, policy makers and powerful institutions frame the debate surrounding the social problem. Drawing on frame analysis developed in social movement studies, this aspect of the approach specifically incorporates other schema and shows how law supports both oppositional and dominant interpretations of experience. Following the stages of a dispute, the framework then examines the way that people use frames to make sense of their experiences.

This edited volume brings together leading scholars on the death penalty within international, regional and municipal law. It considers the intrinsic elements of both the promotion and demise of the punishment around the world, and provides analysis which contributes to the evolving abolitionist discourse. The contributors consider the current developments within the United Nations, the Council of Europe, the African Commission and the Commonwealth Caribbean, and engage with the emergence of regional norms promoting collective restriction and renunciation of the punishment. They investigate perspectives and questions for retentionist countries, focusing on the United States, China, Korea and Taiwan, and reveal the iniquities of contemporary capital judicial systems. Emphasis is placed on the issues of transparency of municipal jurisdictions, the jurisprudence on the 'death row phenomenon' and the changing nature of public opinion. The volume surveys and critiques the arguments used to scrutinize the death penalty to then offer a detailed analysis of possible replacement sanctions.

Pragmatism and Law provides a textual reading of the American legal discourse, as it unfolds through various genres of pragmatism, which evolve and transform during the twentieth century. The historical narrative, which the book weaves, traces the transformation of the pragmatic idea from the forefront of philosophical intellectual inquiries at the turn of the twentieth century to a common sense lawyers’ practical rule of action at the turn of the twenty-first century. During this sequence, a fresh look at American history and legal history in particular is offered through the emphasis on recurring discursive structures which assume incommensurable treatments of basic liberal notions like justice, politics, and truth. Underlying the writing is an interpretative mode of inquiry, based on European post-structural methodologies, while claiming to represent their next intellectual phase. This contemporary mode of inquiry is that of a reading which insists on healing through the paradoxes. It is the same mode that sets, in the author’s view, the updated interpretative model of dispute resolution studies.

This perceptive study investigates the different ways in which the state deals with various social groups through the mechanisms of space. By means of case studies involving three social groups within Israel's multicultural society - the Sephardim, the Bedouin-Arab minority and the ultra-Orthodox community of Jerusalem - the different roles played by political space in legal analysis are revealed and analyzed. Issachar Rosen-Zvi then unearths the unifying logic underlying the disparate legal treatment of political space, brought to light by the case studies. The law treats political space differently depending on the social group involved, an attitude that, the author argues, can be traced back to early Zionist thinking. He concludes that a reform of local government law is required, to correct the segregated system of political space and the separate and unequal distribution of political power and economic resources that accompany it.

The growth of Islam both worldwide and particularly in the United States is especially notable among African-American inmates incarcerated in American state and federal penitentiaries. This growth poses a powerful challenge to American penal philosophy, structured on the ideal of rehabilitating offenders through penance and appropriate penal measures. Islam in American Prisons argues that prisoners converting to Islam seek an alternative form of redemption, one that poses a powerful epistemological as well as ideological challenge to American penology. Meanwhile, following the events of 9/11, some prison inmates have converted to radical anti-Western Islam and have become sympathetic to the goals and tactics of the Al-Qa'ida organization. This new study examines this multifaceted phenomenon and makes a powerful argument for the objective examination of the rehabilitative potentials of faith-based organizations in prisons, including the faith of those who convert to Islam.

The Logic of Consent analyzes the varied nature of consent arguments in criminal law and examines the confusions that commonly arise from the failure of legislatures, courts and commentators to understand them. Peter Westen skillfully argues that the conceptual aspect accounts for a significant number of the difficulties that legislatures, courts and scholars have with consent in criminal cases; he observes that consent masquerades as a single kind of event when, in reality, it refers to diverse and sometimes mutually exclusive kinds of events. Specifically, consent is used in law to refer to three pairs of contrasting kinds of events: factual versus legal, attitudinal versus expressive, and prescriptive versus imputed. While Westen takes no position on whether the substance of existing defenses of consent in criminal law ought to be enlarged or reduced in scope, he examines each of these contrasting events and analyzes the normative confusions they produce.

Pragmatism is experiencing a resurgence in law, philosophy and social science, with pragmatists seeking a consistent, comprehensive and productive understanding of social life. In its four sections Renascent Pragmatism aids the reinvigoration of pragmatism as an important intellectual tradition and contributor to inquiry and change in social life. The book is a first of its kind for combining essays on theory, method, public policy and empirical scholarship, presenting contributions from philosophers, legal scholars and social scientists. Throughout the book, the concrete linkage between policy, theory and method is emphasized, while recognizing the philosophical tradition in which the inquiries and prescriptions rest.

Spatializing Law: An Anthropological Geography of Law in Society focuses on law and its location, exploring how spaces are constructed on the terrestrial and marine surface of the earth with legal means in a rich variety of socio-political, legal and ecological settings. The contributors explore the interrelations between social spaces and physical space, highlighting the ways in which legal rules may localise people's rights and obligations in social space that may be mapped onto physical space. This volume also demonstrates how different notions of space and place become resources that can be mobilised in social, political and economic interaction, paying specific attention to the contradictory ways in which space may be configured and involved in social interaction under conditions of plural legal orders. Spatializing Law makes a significant contribution to the anthropological geography of law and will be useful to scholars across a broad array of disciplines.

Demonstrating how users of law, who often operate in multi-sited situations, are forced to deal with increasingly complex legal circumstances, this volume focuses on political and social processes through which people appropriate, use and create legal forms in multiple legal settings. It provides new insights into social and political processes through which transnational law is locally appropriated by different actors and presents empirical studies of confrontation, adaptation, vernacularization and hybridization of law due to its transplantation across the borders of national states. The contributors offer insights into modern dynamics of legal change, challenging assumptions about increasing homogeneity in law, with a keen eye for the historical situations in which current legal changes stand.