Normative pictures are in use in various fields of legal practice. A background knowledge enables the understanding of this sort of pictures and affects both the morphology of the normative picture and its practical use. This paper is divided into two parts. The first part will focus on the morphology of normative pictures. The second part of the paper focuses on the different uses of normative pictures. Normative pictures with the same morphology can play very different roles because their relationship (...) with the rules can vary. (shrink)

Legal reasoning on the requirements and application of law has been studied for centuries, but in this subject area the legal profession maintains predominantly the same stance it did in the time of the Ancient Greeks. There is a gap between the standards of proof, one which has been always demonstrated by percentages and in terms of the evaluation of these standards by percentages by mathematical or statistical methods. One method to fill the gap is Bayes theorem that describes an (...) event’s probability based on conditions that might be related to an event. Bayes theorem can help to establish or confirm a relation between facts and rules if there is sufficient other evidence that connect a party in a procedure with a considered legal action. (shrink)

This paper critically examines different formulations of the view that the crime of using child soldiers is less serious than other international crimes. The first formulation presents a sociological argument toward this conclusion and the second a deontological argument. After arguing that the second formulation is stronger, because it is grounded in a coherent ethical framework, I then construct a deontological argument to counter it, which construes the wrong of child soldiering as an attack on the developing child's right to (...) dignity, where dignity is understood through a Kantian lens as a person's moral agency. (shrink)

propose an interpretation of the concept of legal validity as a Kantian category so that the question about the ultimate foundation for the validity of a legal order does not arise, since it makes sense to ask about the reasons for the validity of specific legal norms, but it is illegitimate to apply this concept to the totality of norms of a legal system. Thus, the basic norm is not to be conceived as the final grounding of legal validity but (...) as the ultimate transcendental condition for the cognition of it. I also reformulate the Kelsenian concept of effectiveness in terms of the apriori condition that guarantees the existence of legal systems as the objects of study of the science of law. (shrink)

This article asks whether it is morally acceptable for a liberal democratic state to consider refugees' religious beliefs when determining which refugees it will allow to resettle in its territory. I examine four arguments that might be advanced to defend such religious discrimination: i) that it is not even pro tanto wrongful; ii) that refugee resettlement is a supererogatory act, and therefore the way in which a state might choose to engage in it cannot be a proper subject of moral (...) criticism; iii) that religious discrimination is necessary in the refugee resettlement context in order to preserve the political culture of the receiving state; and iv) that selecting refugees for resettlement in a religiously discriminatory manner may lead to a net increase in the total number of the world's refugees that are resettled. I conclude that the first and second rationales should be rejected outright. I argue that the third argument could theoretically succeed in justifying religious discrimination in refugee resettlement decisions, but is not at all plausible in the actual world we inhabit today, given the very low number of refugees that are resettled. I recommend caution in advancing the fourth defence of religious discrimination, and elucidate the range of considerations - as well as the empirical facts that cannot be assumed into existence in advance - upon which its success would depend. Keywords: religious discrimination, refugee resettlement, ethics, political philosophy, social philosophy, diversity, culture. (shrink)