Cultural rights constitute one of the most exciting new frontiers of human rights research and practice. Cultural rights are also the ultimate law and humanities topic. These are good enough reasons for making cultural rights the main focus of a book. But there are other reasons, too. Cultural rights are both transformative and empowering rights. They enable people to aspire to a better future for themselves, their families, and the society in which they live, and they play a key (...) role in realizing all other human rights. Furthermore, they provide a much-needed discourse or common forum in which we can explore, negotiate, and come to new cross-cultural understandings. All of this is supremely important today, at a time when respect for cultural diversity is a key concern worldwide, and when migration and advances in technology are increasing the level of cultural exchange but also fostering cultural clashes and incompatibilities previously masked by distance. (shrink)

Law schools are failing both their staff and students by requiring them to prize reason and rationality and to suppress or ignore emotions. Despite innovations in terms of both content and teaching techniques, there is little evidence that emotions are effectively acknowledged or utilised within legal education. Instead law schools are clinging to an out-dated and erroneous perception of emotions as, at best, irrational, and at worst dangerous. In contrast to this, educational and scientific developments have demonstrated that emotions are (...) a fundamental, inescapable part of learning, teaching and skills development. Harnessing these emotions will therefore have a transformative effect on legal education and enable it to adapt to the needs and demands of the 21st century. This book provides a theoretical overview of the role played by emotions in all aspects of the life of the law school. It explores the relationship between emotions and key traditional and contemporary approaches to legal education, the ways in which emotions can be conceptualised, their interaction with the politics and policies of legal education and their role within teaching and learning. The book also considers the importance of emotional wellbeing for both law students and legal academics Overall, this book argues for a more holistic form of legal education in which emotions play a valuable (and valued) role. This requires a new vision for law schools, in which emotions are acknowledged and embedded at all levels, institutional and personal. (shrink)

The meaning of an expression resides not in the expression itself but in the experience of a person’s engagement with it. Meaning will be different not only to different people but also to the same person at different times. This book offers a way of attending to these different meanings. This way is a version of a trans-cultural activity that Richard Dawson calls attunement. The activity of attunement involves a movement of self-adjustment to a language, which a person transforms in (...) her or his use of it. Consciously performing the activity can enable understanding of the processes by which we constitute ourselves and others when we use a language. This directly connects to the topic justice, which is concerned with constituting appropriate selves and relations. Justice as Attunement engages with a wide range of texts – legal, literary, economic, philosophical, among others – and illuminates many useful and fascinating connections between them. There is a sense in which this book transcends disciplinary boundaries, for, in addition to students and scholars of law, literature, economics, and philosophy, it is written to a general reader who is interested in reflecting on and doing justice to their experiences in life. (shrink)

This volume celebrates the career of John Martin Fischer, whose work on a wide range of topics over the past forty years has been transformative and inspirational. Fischer's semicompatibilist view of free will and moral responsibility is perhaps the most widely discussed view of its kind, and his emphasis on the significance of reasons-responsiveness as the capacity that underlies moral accountability has been widely influential. Aside from free will and moral responsibility, Fischer is also well-known for his work on (...) freedom and foreknowledge, the problem of evil, the badness of death, the meaning of life, and the allure of immortality. This volume gathers new essays by leading scholars on some of the major themes of Fischer's work, and it also includes a new piece by Fischer in which he offers a systematic reflection on and defense of the motivations that have shaped his theorizing about moral responsibility. Freedom, Responsibility, and Value will be of interest to scholars and students working on a variety of issues in metaphysics, ethics, and philosophy of religion. (shrink)

This book proposes a holistic transdisciplinary approach to sustainability as a subject of social sciences. At the same time, this approach shows new ways, as perspectives of philosophy, political science, law, economics, sociology, cultural studies and others are here no longer regarded separately. Instead, integrated perspectives on the key issues are carved out: Perspectives on conditions of transformation to sustainability, on key instruments and the normative questions. This allows for a concise answer to urgent and controversial questions such as the (...) following: Is the EU an environmental pioneer? Is it possible to achieve sustainability by purely technical means? If not: will that mean to end of the growth society? How to deal with the follow-up problems? How will societal change be successful? Are political power and capitalism the main barriers to sustainability? What is the role of emotions and conceptions of normality in the transformation process? To which degree are rebound and shifting effects the reason why sustainability politics fail? How much climate protection can be claimed ethically and legally e.g. on grounds of human rights? And what is freedom? Despite all rhetoric, the weak transition in energy, climate, agriculture and conservation serves as key example in this book. It is shown how the Paris Agreement is weak with regard to details and at the same time overrules the growth society by means of a radical 1,5-1,8 degrees temperature limit. It is shown how emissions trading must – and can – be reformed radically. It is shown why CSR, education, cooperation and happiness research are overrated. And we will see what an integrated politics on climate, biodiversity, nitrogen and soil might look like. (shrink)

Recoge: 1.Conceps of law. A Proposal -- 2.Evolutionary concepts -- 3.Neo-evolutionary theories -- 4.Evolution as learning -- 5.Law as autopoiesis -- 6.Towards a critique of the "Evolution of law" paradigm.

The article considers the historical transformations of the law, and argues that many contemporary scientists are wrong to ignore it. The paper criticizes the approach to the status of laws, which is determined by the degree of their compliance with the criteria of objectivity and rationality. Instead, a classification is constructed that includes the laws of logic and mathematics, natural sciences, technology, as well as social and legal. To consider the processes of unfolding laws in the evolution of reality, the (...) concept of nomogenesis is used. The unification of laws is achieved due to the fact that they are all determined by the balance of their characteristic tendencies: objective / subjective, rational / extra-rational, determination / will. Special attention is paid to social and legal laws. The case of defining three social laws is offered. (shrink)

Millions of domestic workers in Indonesia are a source of livelihood for those in the lower middle class. Sadly, protection for domestic workers has yet to be adequately implemented. It has sparked debate among human rights activists and other human rights groups who hope a particular law will protect domestic workers. It means that legal transformation is needed. This research was conducted to conduct a juridical analysis of what legal transformation model would be appropriate for domestic workers in Indonesia by (...) conducting a comparative test with the case of domestic workers in Hong Kong. The research results show that from the start, Indonesia must clarify the status of domestic workers as one of the elements of workers in Indonesia and create a Lex Specialist for domestic workers. At the same time, Indonesia also needs to take lessons from Hong Kong regarding the importance of an independent body to supervise law enforcement to protect domestic workers because the formation of a law without a sound law enforcement system means the expected results will not be by the vision and mission when forming the law. (shrink)

Power, Prose, and Purse is an edited collection of essays that draw connections between literature, economics and law. The essays discuss novels that explore the time period between the Industrial Revolution and the Great Depression and analyze the insights that novelists may offer to law and economics, while noting the tensions among these paradigms.

Over the last three decades, the art market has undergone a remarkable transformation. Before the 1990s, artworks were sold with hardly any concern about whether they had been stolen or looted, whereas now any reputable gallery or auction house checks the “provenance” of any substantial work before sale. This transformation reflects interlocking changes in law, norms, and institutions. New York’s and more broadly the United States’ assertion of jurisdiction and application of U.S. substantive law has destabilized title to stolen and (...) looted goods worldwide because American statutes of limitations generally provide weaker protection for those who possess stolen or looted goods even in good faith. Application of American law has had a profound effect, especially for the high end of the market, because European or Asian investors who purchase art outside of the U.S. may eventually want to sell or display their works in the U.S. Defective title under American law thus affects prices worldwide. The tightening and broader application of American law reflects both longstanding legal principles and changes in social norms towards the redress of historical wrongs, most notably prominent campaigns relating to art confiscated or sold under duress in Nazi Germany. New institutions, most importantly searchable databases recording stolen and looted art such as the Art Loss Register, are also changing perceptions about minimum standards for good faith purchase, which in turn affects both social norms and court cases. These new norms, induced by both legal changes and better information, have influenced the market even for less valuable art, for which sale or display in the U.S. is not a relevant consideration and for which the threat of costly legal action is not credible. The fact that social and institutionalized norms play an important role in protecting original owners is probably good, because norms and institutions can be effective even where law is not and often do so at lower cost. (shrink)

Law is an essential tool for improving public health infrastructure and outcomes; however, existing state statutory public health laws may be insufficient. Built over decades in response to various diseases/conditions, public health laws are antiquated, divergent, and confusing. The Turning Point Public Health Statute Modernization National Collaborative addressed the need for public health law reform by producing a comprehensive model state act. The Act provides scientifically, ethically, and legally sound provisions on public health infrastructure, powers, duties, and practice. This article (...) examines how statutory law can be a tool for improving the public's health, existing needs for public health law reform, themes and provisions of the Turning Point Act, and how it is being used by public health practitioners. (shrink)

This article is about the information relevant to decision-making capacity in refusal of life-prolonging medical treatment cases. We examine the degree to which the phenomenology of the options available to the agent—what the relevant states of affairs will feel like for them—forms part of the capacity-relevant information in the law of England and Wales, and how this informational basis varies across adolescent and adult medical treatment cases. We identify an important doctrinal phenomenon. In the leading authorities, the courts appear to (...) count the first-personal phenomenology of the available options among the information that adolescents seeking to refuse life-prolonging treatment must understand and appreciate in order to possess capacity; adults are not held to this (higher) standard. We evaluate this differential treatment in light of philosophical work on transformative choice—decisions involving options whose sensory character, and effect on our values and preferences, are grasped only through experience itself. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to fill a certain gap in the assessment of relativism by drawing on Joseph Ratzinger’s (1927–2022) criticism of the normative transformation since Kant. During the Enlightenment, Natural Law was doubted as a cultural feature of Christianity that had no bearing on pluralist society. Consequently, this jurisprudential tradition underwent de-Hellenization and branched out in radical directions, the most decisive of which was Kant’s post-metaphysical system of natural values. Positivism and German Idealism attempted to restore the (...) unity of philosophy that Kant’s philosophy had disrupted. Yet even more influentially, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was Marxism that relativized the doxological aspect of normativity by emphasizing the importance of praxis. Since philosophy became neither an exact science as Kant had conceived it to be, nor a practical programme for social justice as Marxism had promised, the Existentialists, and particularly Sartre, advocated a more radical philosophy of freedom. Ratzinger argues that despite the nuances of post-Kantian philosophy, Positivism, Existentialism, and Marxism failed to comprehend the human condition and that the positivist method resulted in an overwhelming relativism that has reduced normativity to a matter of correct procedures rather than regarding it as the foundation of the inviolable dignity of the human being. (shrink)

Global constitutionalism : positivism and international law -- International trade law : theories and practices in negotiations -- Making rules in the WTO : negotiations from Doha to Bali -- North-South controversy : developed and developing countries in the WTO -- Self-determination and minority rights under international law -- Human right : the interlocutor of global constitutionalism -- Asian approaches to international law -- The future of international law.

In the evolving landscape of legal information systems, ChatGPT-4 and other advanced conversational agents (CAs) offer the potential to disruptively transform the law industry. This study evaluates commercially available CAs within the German legal context, thereby assessing the generalizability of previous U.S.-based findings. Employing a unique corpus of 200 distinct legal tasks, ChatGPT-4 was benchmarked against Google Bard, Google Gemini, and its predecessor, ChatGPT-3.5. Human-expert and automated assessments of 4000 CA-generated responses reveal ChatGPT-4 to be the first CA to surpass (...) the threshold of solving realistic legal tasks and passing a German business law exam. While ChatGPT-4 outperforms ChatGPT-3.5, Google Bard, and Google Gemini in both consistency and quality, the results demonstrate a considerable degree of variability, especially in complex cases with no predefined response options. Based on these findings, legal professionals should manually verify all texts produced by CAs before use. Novices must exercise caution with CA-generated legal advice, given the expertise needed for its assessment. (shrink)

Scholars and lawmakers are familiar with a meta-narrative describing the liberal revolution of spousal law that occurred in the last decades of the twentieth century, which further transformed marriage, already transformed from a Catholic religious sacrament into a public institution and legal status model in the nineteenth century, into a private contract at the end of the twentieth. This Article addresses the liberal transformation of spousal law. The goals of the discussion are threefold: First, the Article examines the liberalization as (...) a historical narrative and the sub-narratives contained therein. Secondly, it explores the liberalization as the normative framework for the current normative debates. Finally, the Article criticizes the existing school of thought and proposes principles for a new theory that would depart from the thought patterns imposed by the liberalization narrative. (shrink)

This paper argues for the contemporary significance of the ‘Critique of Violence’ by proposing a Benjaminian reading of two important analyses of the relationship between history, politics and the Rights of Man: Hegel’s account of the French Revolution and the concept of dissensus proposed by Jacques Rancière. For both Hegel and Rancière, the gap between right and reality – between the ideal of equality, for example, and the existence of concrete inequality – does not warrant a rejection of the Rights (...) of Man. Rather, the gap is a constitutive condition of law and political rights. From the perspective of Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’, however, these analyses serve to perpetuate a bourgeois legality, one that both Hegel and Rancière acknowledge can never be realized due to the constitutive discrepancy between right and reality. In preserving the promise of legal equality, these analyses preclude the possibility of a suspension or ‘absolution’ from law. This suspension of law is a task that Benjamin identified with the proletarian general strike, a strategy whose pure violence is supposed to secure what Benjamin described, enigmatically, as a ‘wholly transformed work’. Remarkably, however, the relationship between the suspension of law in a general strike and a total transformation of labour is never clearly defined in the ‘Critique’. This paper will develop an account of this relationship by pursuing the references to Marx’s critical theory of capitalism in Benjamin’s writings. (shrink)

The middle of the second until the middle of the first century BCE is one of the most creative periods in the history of human thought, and an important part of this was the interaction between Roman jurists and Hellenistic philosophers. In this highly original book, René Brouwer shows how jurists transformed the study of law into a science with the help of philosophical methods and concepts, such as division, rules and persons, and also how philosophers came to share the (...) jurists' preoccupations with cases and private property. The relevance of this cross-fertilization for present-day law and philosophy cannot be overestimated: in law, its legacy includes the academic study of law and the Western models of dispute resolution, while in philosophy, the method of casuistry and the concept of just property. (shrink)

Jacques Derrida: Law as Absolute Hospitalityãeepresents a comprehensive account and understanding of Derridaâe(tm)s approach to law and justice. Through a detailed reading of Derridaâe(tm)s texts, Jacques de Ville contends that it is only by way of Derrida's deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence, and specifically in relation to the texts of Husserl, Levinas, Freud and Heidegger - that the reasoning behind his elusive works on law and justice can be grasped. Through detailed readings of texts such as To speculate âe" (...) on Freud, Adieu, Declarations of Independence, Before the Law, Cogito and the history of madness, Given Time, Force of Law and Specters of Marx, De Ville contends that there is a continuity in Derridaâe(tm)s thinking, and rejects the idea of an âe~ethical turnâe(tm). Derrida is shown to be neither a postmodernist nor a political liberal, but a radical revolutionary. De Ville also controversially contends that justice in Derridaâe(tm)s thinking must be radically distinguished from Levinasâe(tm)s reflections on âe~the otherâe(tm). It is the notion of absolute hospitality - which Derrida derives from Levinas, but radically transforms - that provides the basis of this argument. Justice must on De Villeâe(tm)s reading be understood in terms of a demand of absolute hospitality which is imposed on both the individual and the collective subject. A much needed account of Derrida's influential approach to law,ãeeJacques Derrida: Law as Absolute Hospitalityãeewill be an invaluable resource for those with an interest in legal theory, and for those with an interest in the ethics and politics of deconstruction. (shrink)

This is a pivotal moment in the global governance response to pandemic threats, with crucial global health law reforms being undertaken simultaneously in the coming years: the revision of the International Health Regulations, the implementation of the GHSA Legal Preparedness Action Package, and the negotiation of a new Pandemic Treaty. Rather than looking at these reforms in isolation, it will be necessary to examine how they fit together, considering: how these reforms can complement each other to support pandemic prevention, preparedness, (...) and response; what financing mechanisms are necessary to ensure sustainable health governance; and why vital norms of equity, social justice, and human rights must underpin this new global health system. (shrink)

Transformer-based language models (TLMs) have widely been recognized to be a cutting-edge technology for the successful development of deep-learning-based solutions to problems and applications that require natural language processing and understanding. Like for other textual domains, TLMs have indeed pushed the state-of-the-art of AI approaches for many tasks of interest in the legal domain. Despite the first Transformer model being proposed about six years ago, there has been a rapid progress of this technology at an unprecedented rate, whereby BERT and (...) related models represent a major reference, also in the legal domain. This article provides the first systematic overview of TLM-based methods for AI-driven problems and tasks in the legal sphere. A major goal is to highlight research advances in this field so as to understand, on the one hand, how the Transformers have contributed to the success of AI in supporting legal processes, and on the other hand, what are the current limitations and opportunities for further research development. (shrink)

Anthills and aardvarks -- The illusion of independence -- The myth of the master species -- Why law and jurisprudence matter -- The conceit of law -- Respecting the great law -- Remembering who we are -- The question of rights -- Elements of Earth governance -- Seeking Earth jurisprudence -- The rhythms of life -- The law of the land -- A communion of communities -- Transforming law and governance -- The mountain path.

Food systems transformations require coherent policies and improved understandings of the drivers and institutional dynamics that shape (un)sustainable food systems outcomes. In this paper, we introduce the Chilean National Organic Agriculture Law as a case of a policy process seeking to institutionalize a recognized pathway towards more sustainable food systems. Drawing from institutional theory we make visible multiple, and at times competing, logics (i.e., values, assumptions and practices) of different actors implicated in organic agriculture in Chile. More specifically, our findings (...) identify five main institutional transformative logics underpinning the interests and actions of organic actors. However, we find that the Law was not motivated by these logics and did not advance them. Rather, the Law was designed to support a market niche targeted to elite consumers and to reinforce agricultural exports. As a result, the Law constrains rather than enables the practice of organic agriculture and access to organic food by consumers, especially at the domestic level. We note that attention to institutional logics in the analysis of food systems, and specifically food system transformation, is relevant to more comprehensive assessments of the transformational potential of food systems policies. We conclude that there is a need to further consider and make visible the way in which different drivers (i.e., laws) are constituted through and by diverse, and often competing, institutional logics. (shrink)

Predictive judicial analytics holds the promise of increasing efficiency and fairness of law. Judicial analytics can assess extra-legal factors that influence decisions. Behavioral anomalies in judicial decision-making offer an intuitive understanding of feature relevance, which can then be used for debiasing the law. A conceptual distinction between inter-judge disparities in predictions and inter-judge disparities in prediction accuracy suggests another normatively relevant criterion with regards to fairness. Predictive analytics can also be used in the first step of causal inference, where the (...) features employed in the first step are exogenous to the case. Machine learning thus offers an approach to assess bias in the law and evaluate theories about the potential consequences of legal change. (shrink)

In a unique rethinking of political transformation, Drucilla Cornell argues for the crucial role of psychoanalysis in social theory in voicing connection between our constitution as gendered subjects and social and political change.

Copyright law is often premised on the identification of an author of a literary, dramatic, musical, or artistic work, and then giving this author exclusive rights for a limited period to control the commercial exploitation of his or her intellectual creation. However, the hegemonic modernist position of the romantic authorial text has been challenged by numerous scholars who have argued that the meaning of a text lies not in its origin but in its destination. Roland Barthes’ work, controversial at the (...) time of publication with its assault on modernity and the primacy of authorial control, has nonetheless laid the groundwork for an important body of scholarship on interpretive communities. Whether one adopts the position of neoconservative postmodernism or poststructural postmodernism, this article argues that a semiotic analysis of works of copyright as “signs”, “myths” and “polysemous texts” will nonetheless offer an important framework to understand the full reach of the transformative use doctrine in the United States today. (shrink)

The 21st Century has seen a dramatic increase in the number of books published on practical halakha. As a result, Halakhic observance has never been more accessible. But how does increased commitment to halakhic detail accomplish its goal of personal and ethical refinement? Halakhic practices are meant to be spiritual entry points for divine encounters. Commitment to Jewish ritual should mold one's character and help facilitate a life guided by divine ideals. In fact, adherence to Jewish law without a parallel (...) understanding of the meaning behind the law runs the risk of transforming halakha into a formulaic set of rules without any larger spiritual vision. Jewish Law as a Journey is a valuable companion to published works of practical halakha. It explores virtues and ideals foundational to daily halakhic practice. Moreover, it offers a systematic exploration of the mitzvot one encounters in a given day and the transformative religious messages that underlie them"--front flap. (shrink)

We live in a world of one-size-fits-all law. People are different, but the laws that govern them are uniform. "Personalized Law" - rules that vary person by person - will change that. Here is a vision of a brave new world, where each person is bound by their own personally-tailored law. "Reasonable person" standards would be replaced by a multitude of personalized commands, each individual with their own "reasonable you" rule. Skilled doctors would be held to higher standards of care, (...) the most vulnerable consumers and employees would receive stronger protections, age restrictions for driving or for the consumption of alcohol would vary according the recklessness risk that each person poses, and borrowers would be entitled to personalized loan disclosures tailored to their unique needs and delivered in a format fitting their mental capacity. The data and algorithms to administer personalize law are at our doorstep, and embryos of this regime are sprouting. Should we welcome this transformation of the law? Does personalized law harbor a utopic promise, or would it produce alienation, demoralization, and discrimination? This book is the first to explore personalized law, offering a vision of law and robotics that delegates to machines those tasks humans are least able to perform well. It inquires how personalized law can be designed to deliver precision and justice and what pitfalls the regime would have to prudently avoid. (shrink)

Despite the efforts of some modern Jewish law scholars, it is difficult to apply models of secular jurisprudence (whether positivist or Dworkinian) to the Jewish legal system. Internal analysis suggests that the “secondary rules” of the system are far too fragile. Rather, the system appears to privilege trust over objectively determinable truth. (But perhaps trust is a concept to which greater attention should be paid also in secular jurisprudence, as a legal realism informed by semiotics might maintain.) The practical implications (...) of this difference are here illustrated both from research on reform of Jewish marriage law and recent developments in the area of law and religion, in the wake of Archbishop Rowan Williams’ advocacy in 2008 of a model of “transformative accommodation”. (shrink)

Modeling law search and retrieval as prediction problems has recently emerged as a predominant approach in law intelligence. Focusing on the law article retrieval task, we present a deep learning framework named LamBERTa, which is designed for civil-law codes, and specifically trained on the Italian civil code. To our knowledge, this is the first study proposing an advanced approach to law article prediction for the Italian legal system based on a BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) learning framework, which has (...) recently attracted increased attention among deep learning approaches, showing outstanding effectiveness in several natural language processing and learning tasks. We define LamBERTa models by fine-tuning an Italian pre-trained BERT on the Italian civil code or its portions, for law article retrieval as a classification task. One key aspect of our LamBERTa framework is that we conceived it to address an extreme classification scenario, which is characterized by a high number of classes, the few-shot learning problem, and the lack of test query benchmarks for Italian legal prediction tasks. To solve such issues, we define different methods for the unsupervised labeling of the law articles, which can in principle be applied to any law article code system. We provide insights into the explainability and interpretability of our LamBERTa models, and we present an extensive experimental analysis over query sets of different type, for single-label as well as multi-label evaluation tasks. Empirical evidence has shown the effectiveness of LamBERTa, and also its superiority against widely used deep-learning text classifiers and a few-shot learner conceived for an attribute-aware prediction task. (shrink)

However, it became apparent shortly after the establishing of the Center that not only were all methods of legal semiotics not Peircean in origin, but were in their respective foundational assumptions not likely to be compatible with Peirce's semiotics without some radical, transforming development of the idea, 'legal semiotics'. It was clear that if one would intend to be faithful to Peircean semiotics then holding a fixed notion of what an idea of Peircean semiotics of law means would be a (...) violation of the spirit of Peirce's thought; this above all emphasizes the growth and development of initiative ideas and also the stricture that all leading principles must be subject to revision. Even the idea of Peircean semiotics, as leading principle, must itself be an open idea, the meaning of which must be transformable through the process of defining it. A metasemiotics view of a semiotics of law must leave open the possibility for revision of the leading principle of the term, "legal semiotics. " Therefore, if legal semiotics is an idea which accumulates and evolves its meaning in the very process of self-examination, then a process of investigating law investigates itself as well in any semiotic process of inquiry. It became apparent that the most appropriate contribution the Center could make to the area of a Peirce an semiotics would be to act as a sponsor, an inclusive rather than exclusive agent for inquiry of all kinds into the general topic of law and semiotics. (shrink)

Law and the Formation of Modern Europe explores processes of legal construction in both the national and supranational domains, and it provides an overview of the modern European legal order. In its supranational focus, it examines the sociological pressures which have given rise to European public law, the national origins of key transnational legal institutions and the elite motivations driving the formation of European law. In its national focus, it addresses legal questions and problems which have assumed importance in parallel (...) fashion in different national societies, and which have shaped European law more indirectly. Examples of this are the post-1914 transformation of classical private law, the rise of corporatism, the legal response to the post-1945 legacy of authoritarianism, the emergence of human rights law and the growth of judicial review. This two-level sociological approach to European law results in unique insights into the dynamics of national and supranational legal formation. (shrink)

Recent iterations in international legal thought of the debate over the transformative potential of law have tended to echo the long-standing assumption that radical movements, when they employ law-based tactics, do so in the same manner as reformist movements: they mobilise the legitimacy of law for short-term goals, only with more radical long-term goals in mind. However, movements such as the 2012 student strike in the Canadian province of Quebec demonstrate more diverse, creative engagements with law that openly mock (...) the legal system in an effort to simultaneously delegitimise the current legal order. This article argues that this movement’s approach is consistent with the notion of an ‘impudent’ use of law as politics but also extends it further to include ideas raised by this movement’s theatrical ‘over-compliance’ with law, through which the movement turned law itself into a public spectacle. The article examines instances of the state’s unprecedented mobilisation of the legal system to contain the student strike and the student strikers’ creative and subversive engagements with law in response, illustrating how the ideas thrown up by this movement can advance theoretical discussion in legal scholarship about law’s transformative potential. (shrink)