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The law serves a function that is not often taken seriously enough by ethicists, namely practicability. A consequence of practicability is that law requires elaborated and explicit methodologies that determine how to do things with norms. This consequence forms the core idea behind this book, which employs methods from legal theory to inform and examine debates on methodology in applied ethics, particularly bioethics. It is argued that almost all legal methods have counterparts in applied ethics, which indicates that much can be gained from comparative study of the two. The author first outlines methods as used in legal theory, focusing on deductive reasoning with statutes as well as analogical reasoning with precedent cases. He then examines three representative kinds of contemporary ethical theories, Beauchamp and Childress’s principlism, Jonsen and Toulmin’s casuistry, and two versions of consequentialism—Singer’s preference utilitarianism and Hooker’s rule-consequentialism—with regards to their methods. These examinations lead to the Morisprudence Model for methods in applied ethics.
This book explores the trail-blazing Theory of Constitutional Rights of Robert Alexy. The authors combine critical analysis of the structural elements of Alexy’s theory with an assessment of its applied relevance, paying special attention to the UK Human Rights Act and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. Alexy himself opens the book with an insightful contextualisation of his theory of fundamental rights within his general legal theory.
Comparative constitutionalism emerged in its current form against the backdrop of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. As that backdrop recedes into the past, it is being replaced by a more multi-polar and confusing world, and the current state of the discipline of comparative constitutionalism reflects this fragmentation and uncertainty. This has opened up space for new, more varied, and increasingly critical voices seeking to improve the project of democratic constitutionalism. But it also raises questions: What of the past, if anything, is worth preserving? Which more recent parts should be defining of the field? In this context, this book asks which are - or should be...
Juliano Z. Benvindo investigates the current movement of constitutional courts towards political activism, especially by focusing on the increasing use of the balancing method as a “rational” justification for this process. From the critical perception of the serious risks of this movement to democracy, the book takes as examples two constitutional realities, Germany and Brazil, in order to discuss the rationality, correctness, and legitimacy of constitutional decisions within this context. Through a dialogue between Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction and Jürgen Habermas’s proceduralism, the author confronts Robert Alexy’s defense of the balancing method as well as those two constitutional realities. This confrontation leads to the introduction of the concept of limited rationality applied to constitutional democracy and constitutional adjudication, which affirms the double bind of history and justice as a condition for a practice of decision-making committed to the principle of separation of powers.
This book addresses the principle of proportionality, which is currently one of the most important instruments of judicial review, from both analytical and theory of law perspectives. As such, the analysis provided is far more comprehensive and can be applied to all areas of law, not just constitutional law. On the one hand, the volume offers a broad perspective on several aspects related to proportionality, such as its structure, the balancing methodology and the distinction between rules and principles. On the other, it provides an innovative, normativist and analytical approach to proportionality, helping readers understand its structure and behaviour.
Judicial control of public power ensures a guarantee of the rule of law. This book addresses the scope and limits of judicial control at the national level, i.e. the control of public authorities, and at the supranational level, i.e. the control of States. It explores the risk of judicial review leading to judicial activism that can threaten the principle of the separation of powers or the legitimate exercise of state powers. It analyzes how national and supranational legal systems have embodied certain mechanisms, such as the principles of reasonableness, proportionality, deference and margin of appreciation, as well as the horizontal effects of human rights that help to determine how far a...
In this book, Alec Stone Sweet and Jud Mathews focus on the law and politics of rights protection in democracies, and in human rights regimes in Europe, the Americas, and Africa. After introducing the basic features of modern constitutions, with their emphasis on rights and judicial review, the authors present a theory of proportionality that explains why constitutional judges embraced it. Proportionality analysis is a highly intrusive mode of judicial supervision: it permits state officials to limit rights, but only when necessary to achieve a sufficiently important public interest. Since the 1950s, virtually every powerful domestic and international court has adopted proportionality analys...
This is the first book on proportionality in Latin American constitutional law. Leading scholars in the region explore how proportionality analysis has become a key part of the constitutional law of a region where, almost paradoxically, constitutions with clear transformative intentions coexist with the highest indicators of social inequality in the world. In this book, scholars, practitioners and students will find a fascinating account of how proportionality has been a central concept in Latin America's constitutional struggles to curtail excessive uses of state power. The book illustrates how, more recently, proportionality has played an important role in national processes of constitutionalization and transitional justice, and how its current uses in the domain of social rights endow it with a distinctive meaning and role in regional constitutionalism. This pioneering book opens up the space for a much needed global conversation on how Latin America has decisively contributed to comparative constitutional law.
This book offers its readers an overview of recent developments in the theory of legal argumentation written by representatives from various disciplines, including argumentation theory, philosophy of law, logic and artificial intelligence. It presents an overview of contributions representative of different academic and legal cultures, and different continents and countries. The book contains contributions on strategic maneuvering, argumentum ad absurdum, argumentum ad hominem, consequentialist argumentation, weighing and balancing, the relation between legal argumentation and truth, the distinction between the context of discovery and context of justification, and the role of constitutive and regulative rules in legal argumentation. It is based on a selection of papers that were presented in the special workshop on Legal Argumentation organized at the 25th IVR World Congress for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy held 15-20 August 2011 in Frankfurt, Germany.