Law

This revised edition of one of the classic works of modern legal philosophy, first published in 1979, represents the author's 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.

This collection of original essays from distinguished legal philosophers offers a challenging assessment of the nature and viability of legal positivism, an approach to legal theory that continues to dominate contemporary legal theoretical debates. To what extent is the law adequately described as autonomous? Should legal theorists maintain a conceptual separation of law and morality?

This is a study of the law governing the bank–customer relationship pertaining to the disposition of funds by cheques and credit transfers, covering both paper-based and electronic payments. This book addresses, with various degrees of detail, common law, civilian, and ‘mixed’ jurisdictions, particularly in Australia, Canada, England, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, South Africa, Switzerland, and the United States. In addition to the description of the law in these jurisdictions, the book contains an in-depth analysis of the common issues and the responses to them, in light of desired policies. Accordingly, an evaluation of the various rules and proposals for reform are integral parts of the study. The book is divided into four chapters. Chapter 1 is an overview of the various legal systems and fundamentals in banking and payment law, in an overall historical context. Chapter 2 deals with the banking relationship, within which collections and payments occur. It highlights the customer contract, the deposit transaction, the mandate authorizing bank collections and payments, and the debt resulting from entries to the current account. Chapter 3 covers the performance of the mandate. It discusses extensively laws governing the payment and collection of cheques and credit transfers, in the context of actual clearing and settlement mechanisms, particularly large-value transfer systems in developed countries. Chapter 4 is on payment systems misuse through fraud, either in the initiation payments or in misdirecting them. It discusses cheque forgery, unauthorized electronic funds transfers, forged cheques endorsements, and misdirected funds transfers.

In Britain today, if you are in the business of fighting crime, then you have to be in the business of dealing with alcohol. ‘Binge drinking’ culture is intrinsic to urban leisure and has come to pose a key threat to public order. Unsurprisingly, a struggle is occurring. Pub and club companies, local authorities, central government, the police, the judiciary, local residents, drug and alcohol campaign groups, and revellers all hold competing notions of social order in the night-time city and the appropriate uses and meanings of its public and private spaces. Bar Wars explores how official discourses of ‘partnership’ and ‘self-regulation’ belie the extent of fierce adversarial contestation between and within these groups. Located within a long tradition of urban ethnography, the book offers unique and hard-hitting analyses of social control in bars and clubs, courtroom battles between local communities and the drinks industry, and street-level policing. These issues go to the heart of contemporary debates concerning urban civility, alcohol and drugs policies, and the impacts of and justifications for new police powers introduced as part of the Licensing Act 2003 and Violent Crime Reduction Act 2006. The author's experiences as a disc jockey and as an expert witness to the licensing courts provide a unique perspective, setting his work apart from other academic commentators. Bar Wars takes the study of the ‘night-time economy’ to a new level of sophistication, making it essential reading for all those wishing to understand the policing and regulation of contemporary British cities.

This book develops ideas on some of the central questions in practical philosophy: legal, political, and moral. It provides an overview of the author's work on jurisprudence and the nature of law in the context of broader questions in the philosophy of practical reason. The book opens with a discussion of methodological issues, focusing on understanding the nature of jurisprudence, asking how the nature of law can be explained, and how the success of a legal theory can be established. The book then addresses central questions on the nature of law, its relation to morality, the nature and justification of authority, and the nature of legal reasoning. It explains how legitimate law, while being a branch of applied morality, is also a relatively autonomous system, which has the potential to bridge moral differences among its subjects. The book offers responses to some critical reactions to the author's theory of authority, adumbrating and modifying the theory to meet some of them. The final part of the book brings together for the first time the author's work on the nature of interpretation in law and the humanities. It includes a new chapter explaining interpretive pluralism and the possibility of interpretive innovation.

This book traces a fundamental transformation in law—the turn towards ‘postnational law’—which reflects the increasing enmeshment of national, regional, and international law and calls into question central legitimating principles of the different layers. Two fundamental approaches to the structure of this new legal order stand out and form the focus of this book: constitutionalism and pluralism. Postnational constitutionalism embodies the hope of integrating the order through an overarching legal framework that would tame politics by defining relations and institutionalizing key values. Yet such a constitutionalist order would require too massive a transformation of postnational institutions and society, and thinner approaches, widespread in the literature and more realistic, would sell the constitutionalist promise short. This book proposes instead to conceptualize and develop the postnational order in a pluralist vein, characterized by a multiplicity of legal sub-orders, not connected through an overarching frame but interacting in often political modes. Many areas of regional and global governance can be understood in such terms, as demonstrated here for the European human rights regime, the UN sanctions regime in its tension with human rights, and the regime complex of international trade, environment, and food safety. The pluralism on display in these examples also holds normative appeal. By reflecting diverging views on the right scope of the polity, it respects individuals’ autonomy and their right to shape their political order, thus furthering democratic values. By leaving relations between different layers of law unsettled, it allows for contestation and adaptation which helps to stabilize postnational governance and remedy power imbalances in its initial design. In the highly diverse and contested space of the postnational, breaking with domestic political traditions and going ‘beyond constitutionalism’ towards a pluralist order may be the better option.

Examining the role of ‘open remedies’ in human rights adjudication, this book provides a new perspective informing comparative constitutional debates on how to structure institutional relationships over fundamental rights and freedoms. Open remedies declare a human rights violation but invite the other branches of government to decide what corrective action should be taken. Open remedies are premised on the need to engage institutions beyond courts in the process of thinking about and acting on human rights problems. This book considers examples across the United States, South Africa, Canada, and internationally, emphasising their similarities and differences in design and the diverse ways they could operate in practice. The book investigates these possibilities through the first systematic legal and empirical study of the declaration of incompatibility model under the United Kingdom Human Rights Act. This new model provides a non-binding declaration that the law has infringed human rights standards, for the legislature's consideration. By design, it has the potential to support democratic deliberation on what human rights require of the laws and policies of the State, however, it also carries uncertainties and risks. Providing a lucid account of existing debates on the relative roles of courts and legislatures to determine the requirements of fundamental rights commitments, the book argues that we need to look beyond the theoretical focus on rights disagreements, to how these remedies have operated in practice across the courts and the political branches of government. Importantly, we should pay attention to the nature and scope of legislative engagement in deliberation on the human rights matters raised by declarations of incompatibility. Adopting this approach, this book presents a carefully argued view of how courts have exercised this power, as well as how the UK executive and Parliament have responded to its use.

The present energy economy, with its heavy dependence on fossil fuels, is not sustainable over the medium to long term for many interconnected reasons. Climate change is now recognized as posing a serious threat. Energy and resource decisions involving carbon fuels play a role in this threat. Fossil fuel reserves may be running short and many major reserves are in politically unstable parts of the world. Yet citizens in nations with rapidly developing economies aspire to the benefits of the modern energy economy. China and India alone have 2.4 billion potential customers for cars, industries, and electrical services. Even so, more than half of the world's citizens still lack access to energy. Decisions involving fossil fuels are therefore a significant part of the development equation. This volume explains how the law can impede or advance the shift to a world energy picture significantly different from that which exists today. It first examines the factors that create the problems of the present carbon economy, including environmental concerns and development goals. It then provides international and regional legal perspectives, examining public international law, regional legal structures, the responses of international legal bodies, and the role of major international nongovernmental actors. The book then moves on to explore sectoral perspectives including the variety of renewable energy sources, new carbon fuels, nuclear power, demand controls, and energy efficiency. Finally, it examines how particular states are, could, or should, be adapting legally to the challenges of moving beyond the carbon economy.

This book analyzes the British Government's radical change in policy during the late 1950s on the use of bills of rights in colonial territories nearing independence. More broadly it explores the political dimensions of securing the protection of human rights at independence and the peaceful transfer of power through constitutional means. This book fills a major gap in the literature on British and Commonwealth law, history, and politics by documenting how bills of rights became commonplace in Britain' s former overseas territories. It provides a detailed empirical account of the origins of the bills of rights in Britain's former colonial territories in Africa, the West Indies, and South East Asia as well as in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. It sheds light on the development of legal systems at the point of gaining independence and raises questions about the colonial influence on the British legal establishment's change in attitude towards bills of rights in the late 20th century. It presents an alternative perspective on the end of Empire by focusing upon one aspect of constitutional decolonization and the importance of the local legal culture in determining each dependency's constitutional settlement and provides a series of empirical case studies on the incorporation of human rights instruments into domestic constitutions when negotiated between a state and its dependencies. More generally, this book highlights Britain's human rights legacy to its former Empire, and traces the genesis of the bills of rights of over thirty nations from the Commonwealth.

The digital era shows an unprecedented flow of data both within multinational companies as well as their external service providers. Binding Corporate Rules (BCR) are a form of corporate self-regulation designed to facilitate global inter-company data transfers in compliance with EU Data Protection Law. This book discusses the origins of the regime and the material requirements of Binding Corporate Rules (BCR), as well as how they should be applied in practice and made binding on the companies and employees. It includes a template BCR for employee data and a template BCR for customer data which have been approved by various EU data protection authorities, showing how the material requirements of the BCR regime may be implemented in practice. It also covers how BCRs may provide for enforceable rights for the beneficiaries of the regime, and how they should be brought in line with requirements of European rules on private international law. Furthermore, the book analyses a number of significant academic debates in the areas of transnational private regulation and data protection. It reflects on the legitimacy of transnational private regulation as a method of regulating corporate conduct, and also focuses on the merits and shortcomings of BCR as a method for regulating global data transfers.