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This book presents the theory of the validity of legal norms, aimed at the practice of law, in particular the jurisdiction of the constitutional courts. The postpositivist concept of the validity of statutory law, grounded on a critical analysis of the basic theories of legal validity elaborated up to now, is introduced. In the first part of the book a contemporary German nonpositivist conception of law developed by Ralf Dreier and Robert Alexy is analysed in order to answer the question whether the juristic concept of legal validity should include moral standards or criteria. In the second part, a postpositivist concept of legal validity and an innovative model of validity discourse, based on the juristic presumption of the validity of legal norms, are proposed. The book is a work on analytical legal theory, written from a postpositivist, detached point of view.
This book fills a gap in legal academic study and practice in International Commercial Arbitration (ICA) by offering an in-depth analysis on legal discourse and interpretation. Written by a specialist in international business law, arbitration and legal theory, it examines the discursive framework of arbitral proceedings, through an exploration of the unique status of arbitration as a legal and semiotic phenomenon. Historical and contemporary aspects of legal discourse and interpretation are considered, as well as developments in the field of discourse analysis in ICA. A section is devoted to institutional and structural determinants of legal discourse in ICA in which ad hoc and institutional forms are examined. The book also deals with functional aspects of legal interpretation in arbitral discourse, focusing on interpretative standards, methods and considerations in decision-making in ICA. The comparative examinations of existing legal framework and case law reflect the international nature of the subject and the book will be of value to both academic and professional readers.
International law is usually communicated in more than one language and reflects common norms that lawyers and adjudicators across national legal cultures agree on and develop together. As a result, the negotiation of the wording and meaning of international legislative texts is an integral part of legal interpretation in international law. This book sheds light on that essential interpretation process. Language and Legal Interpretation in International Law treats the subject from the perspective of recent legal and linguistic theories of meaning. Anne Lise Kjær and Joanna Lam bring together internationally renowned experts to provide strong theoretical and practical foundations for the stu...
Law and Evilpresents an alternative evolutionary picture of man, focusing on the origins and nature of human evil, and demonstrating its useful application in legal-philosophical analyses. Using this representation of human nature, Wojciech Zaluski analyses the development of law, which he interprets as moving from evolutionary ethics to genuine ethics, as well as arguing in favour of metaethical realism and ius naturale. Zaluski argues that human nature is undoubtedly ambivalent: human beings have been endowed by natural selection with moral, immoral, and neutral tendencies (the first ambivalence), and the moral tendencies themselves are ambivalent (the second ambivalence), giving rise to a...
There is something quite puzzling about the global conversation on jurisprudence. On the one hand, jurisprudence is supposed to deal with abstract questions concerning the nature, structure, and distinctive features of the law. These questions are not tightly associated with, or dependent on, the particular legal practices in one jurisdiction or another. But, on the other hand, it seems that jurisprudents are tacitly affected by their background institutional context: there is an evident divide between theorizing about the law in the civil law world and in the common law world. Jurisprudence in the Mirror: The Common Law World Meets the Civil Law World systematically presents the major achie...
Provides a systematic analysis of both the historical development and current interpretation of constitutional law discourse in Europe.
The concept of learning to ‘think like a lawyer’ is one of the cornerstones of legal education in the United States and beyond. In this book, Jeffrey Lipshaw provides a critique of the traditional views of ‘thinking like a lawyer’ or ‘pure lawyering’ aimed at lawyers, law professors, and students who want to understand lawyering beyond the traditional warrior metaphor. Drawing on his extensive experience at the intersection of real world law and business issues, Professor Lipshaw presents a sophisticated philosophical argument that the "pure lawyering" of traditional legal education is agnostic to either truth or moral value of outcomes. He demonstrates pure lawyering’s potenti...
This volume assembles leading scholars to examine how their respective theoretical positions relate to the artifactual nature of law. It offers a complete analysis of what is ontologically entailed by the claim that law - including legal systems, legal norms, and legal institutions - is an artifact, and what consequences, if any, this claim has for philosophical accounts of law. Examining the artifactual nature of law draws attention to the role that intention, function, and action play in the ontological structure of law, and how these attributes interact with rules. It puts the role of author and authorship at the center of its analysis of legal ontology, and widens the scope that function...