406 research outputs found
Law, Liberty and the Rule of Law (in a Constitutional Democracy)
In the hunt for a better--and more substantial--awareness of the âlaw,â The author intends to analyze the different notions related to the ârule of lawâ and to criticize the conceptions that equate it either to the sum of âlawâ and âruleâ or to the formal assertion that âlaw rules,â regardless of its relationship to certain principles, including both ânegativeâ and âpositiveâ liberties. Instead, he pretends to scrutinize the principles of the ârule of law,â in general, and in a âconstitutional democracy,â in particular, to conclude that the tendency to reduce the âdemocratic principleâ to the âmajority ruleâ (or âmajority principleâ), i.e. to whatever pleases the majority, as part of the âpositive liberty,â is contrary both to the ânegative libertyâ and to the ârule of lawâ itself
âThe Neuroscience of ResponsibilityââWorkshop Report
This is a report on the 3-day workshop âThe Neuroscience of Responsibilityâ that was held in the Philosophy Department at Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands during February 11thâ13th, 2010. The workshop had 25 participants from The Netherlands, Germany, Italy, UK, USA, Canada and Australia, with expertise in philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, psychiatry and law. Its aim was to identify current trends in neurolaw research related specifically to the topic of responsibility, and to foster international collaborative research on this topic. The workshop agenda was constructed by the participants at the start of each day by surveying the topics of greatest interest and relevance to participants. In what follows, we summarize (1) the questions which participants identified as most important for future research in this field, (2) the most prominent themes that emerged from the discussions, and (3) the two main international collaborative research project plans that came out of this meeting
Legal coercion, respect & reason-responsive agency
Legal coercion seems morally problematic because it is susceptible to the Hegelian objection that it fails to respect individuals in a way that is âdue to them as menâ. But in what sense does legal coercion fail to do so? And what are the grounds for this requirement to respect? This paper is an attempt to answer these questions. It argues that (a) legal coercion fails to respect individuals as reason-responsive agents; and (b) individuals ought to be respected as such in virtue of the fact that they are human beings. Thus it is in this sense that legal coercion fails to treat individuals with the kind of respect âdue to them as menâ.The Leverhulme Trust (ECF-2012-032); AHRC (AH/H015655/1
Law of denial
Lawâs claim of mastery over past political violence is frequently undermined by reversals of that relationship of mastery, so that the violence of the law, and especially its symbolic violence, becomes easily incorporated into longues durĂ©es of political violence, rather than mastering them, settling them, or providing closure. Doing justice to the past, therefore, requires a political and theoretical attunement to the ways in which law, in purportedly attempting to address past political violence, inscribes itself into contemporary contexts of violence. While this may be limited to an analysis of how law is an effect of and affects the political, theoretically this attunement can be further refined by means of a critique of dynamics that are internal to law itself and that have to do with how law understands its own historicity, as well as its relationship to history and historiography. This article aims to pursue such a critique, taking as its immediate focus the ECHR case of Perinçek v Switzerland, with occasional forays into debates around the criminalisation of Armenian genocide denialism in France. The Perinçek case concerned Switzerland's criminalisation of the denial of the Armenian genocide, and concluded in 2015 after producing two judgments, first by the Second Chamber, and then by the Grand Chamber of the ECHR. However, although they both found for the applicant, the two benches had very different lines of reasoning, and notably different conceptions regarding the relationship between law and history. I proceed by tracing the shifting status of 'history' and 'historians' in these two judgments, and paying attention to the deferrals, disclaimers and ellipses that structure law's relation to history. This close reading offers the opportunity for a critical reappraisal of the relationship between law, denial and violence: I propose that the symbolic violence of the law operative in memory laws is a product of that which remains unresolved in law's understanding of historicity (including its own), its self-understanding vis-Ă -vis the task of historiography, and its inability to respond to historical violence without inscribing itself into a history of violence, a process regarding which it remains in denial
Shareholder rights in Britain
An analysis of shareholder rights in Britain and their interaction with European La
Arguing about causes in law: a semi-formal framework for causal arguments
In legal argumentation and liability attribution, disputes over causes play a central role. Legal discussions about causation often have difficulty with cause-in-fact in complex situations, e.g. overdetermination, preemption, omission. We first assess three theories of causation. Then we introduce a semi-formal framework to model causal arguments using both strict and defeasible rules. We apply the framework to the Althen vaccine injury case. Wrapping up the paper, we motivate a causal argumentation framework and propose to integrate current theories of causation
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