The perennial question posed by the philosophically-inclined lawyer is 'What is law?' or perhaps 'What is the nature of law?' This book poses an associated, but no less fundamental, question about law which has received much less attention in the legal literature. It is: 'Who is law for?' Whenever people go to law, they are judged for their suitability as legal persons. They are given or refused rights and duties on the basis of ideas about who matters. These ideas are (...) basic to legal-decision making; they form the intellectual and moral underpinning of legal thought. They help to determine whether law is essentially for rational human beings or whether it also speaks to and for human infants, adults with impaired reasoning, the comotose, foetuses and even animals. Are these the right kind of beings to enter legal relationships and so become legal persons. Are they, for example, sufficiently rational, or sacred or simply human? Is law meant for them? This book reveals and evaluates the type of thinking that goes into these fundamental legal and metaphysical determinations about who should be capable of bearing legal rights and duties. It identifies and analyses four influential ways of thinking about law's person, each with its own metaphysical suppositions. One approach derives from rationalist philosophy, a second from religion, a third from evolutionary biology while the fourth is strictly legalistic and so endeavours to eschew metaphysics altogether. The book offers a clear, coherent and critical account of these complex moral and intellectual processes entailed in the making of legal persons. (shrink)

As rational adults, we are free to elect what is (or is not) done to our bodies. However, this strong freedom does not extend to the borders of life. Control over the uses of our biological material is constrained and uncertain at law. Our article examines the legal condition of embryos and organs: how law conceptualises them and regulates their uses.

This is a response to an article published in an earlier issue of this journal, 29–65) in which an article by this author was cited as a prime example of a dangerous emerging 'orthodoxy' in feminist legal theory and subjected to a sustained and critical analysis. The purpose of this response is to reflect briefly on the rhetorical style and the theoretical orientation of that article, and to consider their worrying implications for the practice of feminist legal theory as a (...) whole. (shrink)

How can governments and peoples better hold to account international economic institutions, such as the WTO, the World Bank, and the IMF? This article proposes an approach based on public accountability, advocating improvements in four areas: constitutional, political, financial, and internal accountability.The argument for more accountability is made with two caveats: more accountability is not always good–it can be distorting and costly; and, enhancing the accountability of international institutions should not justify increasing their jurisdiction for the sake of reducing the (...) role of national governments. Constitutional accountability poses limits on how the institutions expand their activities, requiring the active consent of all members and particularly those most affected by their activities. Political accountability requires that those who make decisions in the organizations are directly answerable to all member governments and not just to the most powerful ones. The institutions' uneven record and structure of financial accountability is addressed through a model of mutual restraint. Finally, the internal accountability should ensure that technical decisions are distinguishable from political decisions. A better matching of the right kinds of accountability to the activities of the organizations would improve both their effectiveness and legitimacy. (shrink)

Woods's chapter focuses primarily on procedural justice within the international financial institutions. She argues that the procedures adopted by these institutions are central to the debate about global economic justice, and thus it is essential to explore how these bodies make decisions and implement them. Her conclusions suggest that, notwithstanding recent and important reforms, the institutions still suffer from weaknesses in representation and accountability. Unless these bodies attend to these deficiencies, the range and scope of their activities should be circumscribed.

This review article discusses the various conceptions of the legal person delineated and evaluated in Ngaire Naffine's recent book, Law's Meaning of Life. The article argues that, of the four conceptions Naffine examines, her treatment of one—the rationalist legal person—is perhaps the most problematic. The primary problem is an exaggeration of both the power and range of the rationalist legal person. This problem is not insignificant. However, the book as a whole is a lively and stimulating example (...) of legal philosophy that is engaged with general questions about the nature of law, while also being rooted in historic and contemporary features of particular legal systems. It is a contribution to jurisprudence which both strives to be, and actually succeeds in being, interesting. (shrink)

This article aims to contribute to the question of how to conceptualise the relationship between theory and practice in feminist scholarship in law. It looks in detail at the implications of different issues raised in a recent debate between Anne Bottomley and Ngaire Naffine on the existence of a “legal feminist orthodoxy”. I critique the dominance of ethics over politics and join Bottomley in her attack upon “the ethics of respect for the other”, albeit from a different position. (...) I then look at the ways in which the problem of “essentialism” is being rethought from a feminist perspective. (shrink)

The Family and the Nation pose la question du lien entre classe de sexe et droits et devoirs patriotiques. La famille et la nation sont des entités juridiques qui, toutes deux, imposent des devoirs à leurs membres, au premier rang desquels l’obéissance à l’autorité souveraine. Les problèmes engendrés par cette double allégeance vont être considérables lorsque, dès les premières années de la Révolution, famille et nation vont entrer en concurrence : comment une épouse prise entre l’injonction...

Woods is an insightful and thoughtful authority on the Bretton Woods institutions. In this book she examines their activities and focuses on their engagements with Mexico, Russia, and the sub-Saharan African nations.

This note examines two recent judgements of theEnglish Court of Appeal, Re S.L. and ReA., concerning the sterilisation of a womanand a man with learning disabilities. The casesare significant for health care lawyers in thatthey effect a reworking of the common lawdoctrine of necessity, which serves as thelegal justification for providing medicaltreatment to adults lacking capacity to giveconsent. The cases are also significant forfeminist scholars engaged in the project of`sexing' the subjects of legal discourse (forexample, Naffine and Owens, 1997). (...) Thejudgments of Re S.L. and Re A.,consistent with earlier sterilisation cases,fail to offer a conception of learning disabledsubjects as `sexed'. (shrink)