Kangaroo Courts and the Rule of Law

Kangaroo Courts and the Rule of Law
Author: Desmond Manderson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2012
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0415529514

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Annotation This volume addresses the legacy of contemporary critiques of language for the concept of the rule of law. Can the rule of law be re-configured in light of the critical turn of the past several years in legal theory, rather than being steadfastly opposed to it?

Kangaroo Courts and the Rule of Law

Kangaroo Courts and the Rule of Law
Author: Desmond Manderson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2012-07-26
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1136340467

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Kangaroo Courts and the Rule of Law -The Legacy of Modernism addresses the legacy of contemporary critiques of language for the concept of the rule of law. Between those who care about the rule of law and those who are interested in contemporary legal theory, there has been a dialogue of the deaf, which cannot continue. Starting from the position that contemporary critiques of linguistic meaning and legal certainty are too important to be dismissed, Desmond Manderson takes up the political and intellectual challenge they pose. Can the rule of law be re-configured in light of the critical turn of the past several years in legal theory, rather than being steadfastly opposed to it? Pursuing a reflection upon the relationship between law and the humanities, the book stages an encounter between the influential theoretical work of Jacques Derrida and MIkhail Bakhtin, and D.H. Lawrence's strange and misunderstood novel Kangaroo (1923). At a critical juncture in our intellectual history - the modernist movement at the end of the first world war - and struggling with the same problems we are puzzling over today, Lawrence articulated complex ideas about the nature of justice and the nature of literature. Using Lawrence to clarify Derrida’s writings on law, as well as using Derrida and Bakhtin to clarify Lawrence’s experience of literature, Manderson makes a robust case for 'law and literature.' With this framework in mind he outlines a 'post-positivist' conception of the rule of law - in which justice is imperfectly possible, rather than perfectly impossible.

Getting to the Rule of Law

Getting to the Rule of Law
Author: James E. Fleming
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2011-09-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0814728448

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The rule of law has been celebrated as “an unqualified human good," yet there is considerable disagreement about what the ideal of the rule of law requires. When people clamor for the preservation or extension of the rule of law, are they advocating a substantive conception of the rule of law respecting private property and promoting liberty, a formal conception emphasizing an “inner morality of law,” or a procedural conception stressing the right to be heard by an impartial tribunal and to make arguments about what the law is? When are exertions of executive power “outside the law” justified on the ground that they may be necessary to maintain or restore the conditions for the rule of law in emergency circumstances, such as defending against terrorist attacks? In Getting to the Rule of Law a group of contributors from a variety of disciplines address many of the theoretical legal, political, and moral issues raised by such questions and examine practical applications “on the ground” in the United States and around the world. This timely, interdisciplinary volume examines the ideal of the rule of law, questions when, if ever, executive power “outside the law” is justified to maintain or restore the rule of law, and explores the prospects for and perils of building the rule of law after military interventions.

Law and Leviathan

Law and Leviathan
Author: Cass R. Sunstein
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2020-09-15
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0674247531

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From two legal luminaries, a highly original framework for restoring confidence in a government bureaucracy increasingly derided as “the deep state.” Is the modern administrative state illegitimate? Unconstitutional? Unaccountable? Dangerous? Intolerable? American public law has long been riven by a persistent, serious conflict, a kind of low-grade cold war, over these questions. Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule argue that the administrative state can be redeemed, as long as public officials are constrained by what they call the morality of administrative law. Law and Leviathan elaborates a number of principles that underlie this moral regime. Officials who respect that morality never fail to make rules in the first place. They ensure transparency, so that people are made aware of the rules with which they must comply. They never abuse retroactivity, so that people can rely on current rules, which are not under constant threat of change. They make rules that are understandable and avoid issuing rules that contradict each other. These principles may seem simple, but they have a great deal of power. Already, without explicit enunciation, they limit the activities of administrative agencies every day. But we can aspire for better. In more robust form, these principles could address many of the concerns that have critics of the administrative state mourning what they see as the demise of the rule of law. The bureaucratic Leviathan may be an inescapable reality of complex modern democracies, but Sunstein and Vermeule show how we can at last make peace between those who accept its necessity and those who yearn for its downfall.

Law's Rule

Law's Rule
Author: Shane Paul Chalmers
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016
Genre:
ISBN:

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Law's rule is animated by an irresolvable contradiction. By definition 'the rule of law' is opposed to 'the rule of humans'; and yet law remains an inter-subjective phenomenon, enlivened by the very humans over whom it would rule. Thus the rule of law, set against the rule of humans, cannot be instituted in a way that finally separates law from its subjects. This problem is a familiar one. In political theory, it underlies the paradox of how both law-maker and made-law can be sovereign at the same time. In legal theory, it underlies the concern over how judges, as the ultimate authority of law, can render impartial, dispassionate-objective-legal decisions, in service of the rule of law. For sociologists and anthropologists, and those working in the fields of peace-building and development, it underlies the debate over how to institute a legal order that upholds the rule of law in socially diverse situations. In addressing this problem, the thesis takes up the challenge set down by Desmond Manderson in Kangaroo Courts and the Rule of Law (2012): to take seriously the contradiction in the rule of law as its animating condition. This means approaching the contradiction, not as a problem to be resolved, but as the very index of the life of law's rule. However, whilst the humanities provide the means, and literature the locus, of Manderson's seminal study, the social sciences provide the primary means of this thesis, with Liberia as its locus. Thus it is by asking the question, what takes place in the rule of law?, and more specifically, what is taking place in the rule of law in Liberia?, that the thesis undertakes a study of the life of law's rule in a country that is on the frontline of the global spread of powerful ideologies. With Theodor Adorno's negative-dialectical philosophy as guide, and based on fieldwork carried out in Liberia and the United States in 2013, the thesis examines how these ideologies inform the rule of law, and how the rule of law provides a medium for them to take place. Part I begins with a reading of Adorno's negative-dialectical philosophy (Chapter 1), before examining the origins of the contradiction as a condition of law (Chapter 2), to show how this opens the rule of law to animation by different logics which inform how it takes place (Chapter 3). Part II then moves to Liberia to examine how the rule of law is taking place there, mediated by the logics of capital (Chapter 4), security (Chapter 5), and liberalism (Chapter 7), whilst providing a medium for these logics to take place. Critically, however, the thesis also shows how the rule of law and its institutional logics do not become identical, leaving the rule of law open to take place otherwise (Chapter 6). The thesis concludes by returning to the question of what this means for the rule of law in theory and in the practice of trying to institute it around the world.

Pragmatism, Law, and Literature

Pragmatism, Law, and Literature
Author: David Kenny
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2024-08-06
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1040113567

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This book uses literary examples to make the case for understanding law and the legal system through the lens of philosophical pragmatism. For pragmatists, experience is everything; they argue against understanding the world through any abstraction, maintaining that it is simply too complicated to fit into categories or theories. Legal pragmatism is the application of this philosophy to the making of law, the practice of law, and the practice of judging. This book maintains that the best way to understand legal pragmatism is not through bare theoretical exegesis but through literature: that is, through stories that cast light on various pragmatic aspects of law. Engaging a range of literary sources, including works by Seamus Heaney, Hilary Mantel, Harper Lee, and Ian McEwan, the book makes a compelling case for the contemporary relevance of pragmatism. This book will appeal to legal theorists, law and literature/humanities scholars, readers of literary criticism, and those with interests in pragmatist philosophy.

Punishment Without Crime

Punishment Without Crime
Author: Alexandra Natapoff
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2018-12-31
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0465093809

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A revelatory account of the misdemeanor machine that unjustly brands millions of Americans as criminals. Punishment Without Crime offers an urgent new interpretation of inequality and injustice in America by examining the paradigmatic American offense: the lowly misdemeanor. Based on extensive original research, legal scholar Alexandra Natapoff reveals the inner workings of a massive petty offense system that produces over 13 million cases each year. People arrested for minor crimes are swept through courts where defendants often lack lawyers, judges process cases in mere minutes, and nearly everyone pleads guilty. This misdemeanor machine starts punishing people long before they are convicted; it punishes the innocent; and it punishes conduct that never should have been a crime. As a result, vast numbers of Americans -- most of them poor and people of color -- are stigmatized as criminals, impoverished through fines and fees, and stripped of drivers' licenses, jobs, and housing. For too long, misdemeanors have been ignored. But they are crucial to understanding our punitive criminal system and our widening economic and racial divides. A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2018

Declaring War

Declaring War
Author: Brien Hallett
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2012-08-13
Genre: Law
ISBN: 110702692X

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Offers an historical, legal, constitutional, moral and philosophical analysis of the declarations of 1812, 1898 and the War Powers Resolution of 1973.

Lawyers in 21st-Century Societies

Lawyers in 21st-Century Societies
Author: Richard L Abel
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 832
Release: 2020-04-02
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1509915168

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The world's legal professions have undergone dramatic changes in the 30 years since publication of the landmark three-volume Lawyers in Society, which launched comparative sociological studies of lawyers. This is the first of two volumes in which scholars from a wide range of disciplines, countries and cultures document and analyse those changes. The present volume presents reports on 46 countries, with broad coverage of North America, Western Europe, Latin America, Asia, Australia, North Africa and the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and former communist countries. These national reports address: the impact of globalisation and neoliberalism on national legal professions (the relationship of lawyers and their professional associations to the state and tensions between state and citizenship); changes in lawyer demography (rapidly growing numbers and the profession's efforts to retain control, the entry of women and obstacles to full gender equality, ethnic diversity); legal education (the proliferation of institutions and pedagogic innovation); the regulation of lawyers; structures of production (especially the growth of large firms and the impact of technology and paraprofessionals); the distribution of lawyers across roles; and access to justice (state-funded legal aid and pro-bono services). The juxtaposition of the reports reveals the dramatic transformations of professional rationales, labour markets, and working practices and the multiple contingencies of the role of lawyers in societies experiencing increasing juridification within a new geopolitical order.

China’s Struggle for the Rule of Law

China’s Struggle for the Rule of Law
Author: Ronald C. Keith
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2016-07-27
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1349131105

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The 'rule of law' is more than the mere existence and application of law within the sphere of state activity. Contemporary Chinese debate on the 'rule of law' underlines the limiting of arbitrary government, the materialisation of 'human rights', legal protection of 'rights and interests' and the principle of equality in the impartial legal mediation of conflicts within society's 'structure of interests'. Based upon China interviews and a comprehensive survey of the domestic press and Chinese-language legal journal materials, this book places pre- and post-Tiananmen Square legal reform in political context. The evolving contents of specific laws across the departments of constitutional, administrative, criminal, civil and economic law are assessed in light of the politics and intellectual dynamic of China's legal circles in their struggle to create a 'rule of law'.