Ours is a nation in the grip of a strange kind of mania. Why after President Reagan was shot was there virtually no handgun legislation? Why after the Columbine massacre in Littleton, Colorado, was nothing done to regulate the tools that children most frequently use to kill one another? Why was there no legislative response after a six-year-old in Flint, Michigan, shot a classmate with a .32 caliber "pocket rocket"? Tragedy follows tragedy, with twelve children shot dead every day in Ameri...

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once remarked that the theory of an evolving, "living" Constitution effectively "rendered the Constitution useless." He wanted a "dead Constitution," he joked, arguing it must be interpreted as the framers originally understood it. In The Living Constitution, leading constitutional scholar David Strauss forcefully argues against the claims of Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Robert Bork, and other "originalists," explaining in clear, jargon-free Englis...

Roman law forms a vital part of the intellectual background of many legal systems currently in force in Continental Europe, Latin America, East Asia and other parts of the world. Knowledge of Roman law, therefore, constitutes an essential component of a sound legal education as well as the education of the student of history. This book begins with a historical introduction, which traces the evolution of Roman law from the earliest period of Roman history up to and including Justinian's cod...

Contempt of court has been aptly described as the Proteus of the legal world, assuming an almost infinite diversity of forms. Its central concern is to protect the administration of justice in criminal and civil cases, but also to protect witnesses from being victimized and courts from being subjected to destructive criticism in the press, or disruptive conduct during their proceedings. Professor Miller's classic work Contempt of Court gives a comprehensive treatment of the issues...

This revisionary perspective on South Africa's celebrated Constitutional Court draws on historical and empirical sources alongside conventional legal analysis to show how support from the African National Congress (ANC) government and other political actors has underpinned the Court's landmark cases, which are often applauded too narrowly as merely judicial achievements. Standard accounts see the Court as overseer of a negotiated constitutional compromise and as the looked-to guardian of t...

This is the first comprehensive work to capture the rise of moral damages (non-pecuniary loss) in European contract law through a historical and comparative analysis. Unique features of this study include the first classification scheme of the systems into liberal, moderate and conservative regimes, a taxonomy of non-pecuniary loss drawn from a European-wide jurisprudence, and a comprehensive bibliography of the subject. Written by a leading academic on comparative law, Palmer's precise an...

This is the definitive book on the legal and fiscal framework for civil society organizations (CSOs) in China from earliest times to the present day. Civil Society in China traces the ways in which laws and regulations have shaped civil society over the 5,000 years of China's history and looks at ways in which social and economic history have affected the legal changes that have occurred over the millennia. This book provides an historical and current analysis of the legal framewo...

Possession is a key concept in both the common and civil law, but it has hitherto received little scrutiny. Law and Economics of Possession uses insights from economics, psychology and history to analyse possession in law, compare and contrast possession with ownership, break down the elements of possession as a fact and as a right, challenge the adage that 'possession is 9/10 of the law', examine possession as notice, explain the heuristics of possession, debunk the behavioural studies wh...