The Making of Legal Authority

The Making of Legal Authority PDF

Author: Nils Jansen

Publisher:

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 0199588767

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Accounts of the nature of legal authority typically focus on the authority of officially sanctioned rules issued by legally recognised bodies - legislatures, courts and regulators - that fit comfortably within traditional state-centred concepts of law. Such accounts neglect the more complex processes involved in acquiring legal authority. Throughout the history of modern legal systems texts have come to acquire authority for legal officials without being issued by a legislature or a court. From Justinian's Institutes and Blackstone's Commentaries to modern examples such as the American Law Institute's Restatements and the UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts academic codifications have come to be seen as legally authoritative, and their norms applied as such in courts and other contexts. How have such texts acquired legal authority? Does their authority undermine the orthodox accounts of the nature of legal systems? Drawing on examples from Roman law to the present day, this book offers the first comparative analysis of non-legislative codifications. It offers a provocative contribution to the debates surrounding the harmonisation of European private law, and the growth of international law.

Ministers of the Law

Ministers of the Law PDF

Author: Jean Porter

Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

Published: 2010-10-21

Total Pages: 512

ISBN-13: 1467434515

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In Ministers of the Law Jean Porter articulates a theory of legal authority derived from the natural law tradition. As she points out, the legal authority of most traditions rests on their own internal structures, independent of extralegal considerations -- legal houses built on sand, as it were. Natural law tradition, on the other hand, offers a basis for legal authority that goes beyond mere arbitrary commands or social conventions, offering some extralegal authority without compromising the independence and integrity of the law. Yet Porter does more in this volume than simply discuss historical and theoretical realms of natural law. She carries the theory into application to contemporary legal issues, bringing objective normative structures to contemporary Western societies suspicious of such concepts.

Model Rules of Professional Conduct

Model Rules of Professional Conduct PDF

Author: American Bar Association. House of Delegates

Publisher: American Bar Association

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 9781590318737

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The Model Rules of Professional Conduct provides an up-to-date resource for information on legal ethics. Federal, state and local courts in all jurisdictions look to the Rules for guidance in solving lawyer malpractice cases, disciplinary actions, disqualification issues, sanctions questions and much more. In this volume, black-letter Rules of Professional Conduct are followed by numbered Comments that explain each Rule's purpose and provide suggestions for its practical application. The Rules will help you identify proper conduct in a variety of given situations, review those instances where discretionary action is possible, and define the nature of the relationship between you and your clients, colleagues and the courts.

Law and Authority in the Early Middle Ages

Law and Authority in the Early Middle Ages PDF

Author: Thomas Faulkner

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016-02-15

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 1107084911

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An examination of the barbarian laws in Carolingian Europe, contributing to debates concerning written law, kingship and ethnic identities.

Coercion to Compromise

Coercion to Compromise PDF

Author: Mary E. Vogel

Publisher:

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 456

ISBN-13:

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Plea bargaining is one of the most striking features of American courts. The vast majority of criminal convictions today are produced through bargained pleas. Where does the practice come from? Whose interests does it serve? Often plea bargaining is imagined as a corruption of the court during the post-World War II years, paradoxically rewarding those who appear guilty rather than those claiming innocence. Yet, as Mary Vogel argues in this pathbreaking history, plea bargaining's roots are deeper and more distinctly American than is commonly supposed. During the Age of Jackson, amidst crime and violence wrought by social change, the courts stepped forward as agents of the state to promote the social order. Plea bargaining arose during the 1830s and 1840s as part of this process of political stabilization and an effort to legitimate institutions of self-rule--accomplishments that were vital to Whig efforts to restore order and reconsolidate their political power. To this end, the tradition of episodic leniency from British common law was recrafted into a new cultural form--plea bargaining--that drew conflicts into the courts while maintaining elite discretion over sentencing policy. In its reliance on the mechanism of leniency, the courts were attempting a sort of social "triage"--sorting those who could be reclaimed as industrious and productive citizens from marginals and transients. The "worthy" often paid fines and were returned to their community under the watchful eyes of their intercessors and that most powerful web of social control, that of everyday life. Created during a period of social mobility, plea bargaining presumed that those with much to lose through conviction would embrace individual reform. Today, when many defendants who come before the court have much less in the way of prospects to lose, leniency may be more likely to be regarded with cynicism, as an act of weakness by the state, and plea bargaining may grow more problematic.

The Politics of Islamic Law

The Politics of Islamic Law PDF

Author: Iza R. Hussin

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2016-03-31

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 022632348X

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In The Politics of Islamic Law, Iza Hussin compares India, Malaya, and Egypt during the British colonial period in order to trace the making and transformation of the contemporary category of ‘Islamic law.’ She demonstrates that not only is Islamic law not the shari’ah, its present institutional forms, substantive content, symbolic vocabulary, and relationship to state and society—in short, its politics—are built upon foundations laid during the colonial encounter. Drawing on extensive archival work in English, Arabic, and Malay—from court records to colonial and local papers to private letters and visual material—Hussin offers a view of politics in the colonial period as an iterative series of negotiations between local and colonial powers in multiple locations. She shows how this resulted in a paradox, centralizing Islamic law at the same time that it limited its reach to family and ritual matters, and produced a transformation in the Muslim state, providing the frame within which Islam is articulated today, setting the agenda for ongoing legislation and policy, and defining the limits of change. Combining a genealogy of law with a political analysis of its institutional dynamics, this book offers an up-close look at the ways in which global transformations are realized at the local level.

The Authority of Law

The Authority of Law PDF

Author: Joseph Raz

Publisher:

Published: 1979

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13:

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This revised edition of one of the classic works of modern legal philosophy, first published in 1979, represents Raz's landmark contribution which has had an enduring influence on philosophical work on the nature of law and its relation to morality. The new edition includes two previously uncollected essays and a new introduction from the author.

Shared Authority

Shared Authority PDF

Author: Dimitrios Kyritsis

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2015-01-22

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13: 1782255109

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This new book advances a fresh philosophical account of the relationship between the legislature and courts, opposing the common conception of law, in which it is legislatures that primarily create the law, and courts that primarily apply it. This conception has eclectic affinities with legal positivism, and although it may have been a helpful intellectual tool in the past, it now increasingly generates more problems than it solves. For this reason, the author argues, legal philosophers are better off abandoning it. At the same time they are asked to dismantle the philosophical and doctrinal infrastructure that has been based on it and which has been hitherto largely unquestioned. In its place the book offers an alternative framework for understanding the role of courts and the legislature; a framework which is distinctly anti-positivist and which builds on Ronald Dworkin's interpretive theory of law. But, contrary to Dworkin, it insists that legal duty is sensitive to the position one occupies in the project of governing; legal interpretation is not the solitary task of one super-judge, but a collaborative task structured by principles of institutional morality such as separation of powers which impose a moral duty on participants to respect each other's contributions. Moreover this collaborative task will often involve citizens taking an active role in their interaction with the law.

Acts of Hope

Acts of Hope PDF

Author: James Boyd White

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1995-08-16

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 022605635X

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To which institutions or social practices should we grant authority? When should we instead assert our own sense of what is right or good or necessary? In this book, James Boyd White shows how texts by some of our most important thinkers and writers—including Plato, Shakespeare, Dickinson, Mandela, and Lincoln—answer these questions, not in the abstract, but in the way they wrestle with the claims of the world and self in particular historical and cultural contexts. As they define afresh the institutions or practices for which they claim (or resist) authority, they create authorities of their own, in the very modes of thought and expression they employ. They imagine their world anew and transform the languages that give it meaning. In so doing, White maintains, these works teach us about how to read and judge claims of authority made by others upon us; how to decide to which institutions and practices we should grant authority; and how to create authorities of our own through our thoughts and arguments. Elegant and accessible, this book will appeal to anyone wanting to better understand one of the primary processes of our social and political lives.