The single most important issue in American constitutional law is the role the Supreme Court should play in interpretation of the constitution. This issue has been a source of controversy since at least 1803, when Chief Justice John Marshall proclaimed that the Supreme Court could declare acts of Congress unconstitutional. But public attention has been refocused by the recent debate between Attorney General Edwin Meese and Supreme Court Justice William Brennan. The Attorney General admonis...

For Richard Posner, legal formalism and formalist judges--notably Antonin Scalia--present the main obstacles to coping with the dizzying pace of technological advance. Posner calls for legal realism--gathering facts, considering context, and reaching a sensible conclusion that inflicts little collateral damage on other areas of the law.

The Cold War ideological battle with universal aspirations has given way to a clash of cultures as the world concurrently moves toward globalization of economies and communications and balkanization through a clash of ethnic and cultural identities. Traditional liberal theory has confronted daunting challenges in coping with these changes and with recent developments such as the spread of postmodern thought, religious fundamentalism and global terrorism. This book argues that a political a...

Legal Architecture addresses how the environment of the trial can be seen as a physical expression of our relationship with ideals of justice. It provides an alternative account of the trial, which charts the troubled history of notions of due process and participation. In contrast to visions of judicial space as neutral, Linda Mulcahy argues that understanding the factors that determine the internal design of the courthouse and courtroom are crucial to a broader and more nuanced ...

In this book Bosko Tripkovic develops a theory of value-based arguments in constitutional adjudication. In contrast to the standard question of constitutional theory that asks whether the courts get moral answers wrong, it asks a more fundamental question of whether the courts get the morality itself wrong. Tripkovic argues for an antirealist conception of value -one that does not presuppose the existence of mind-independent moral truths- and accounts for the effect this ...

Thejudgment of the European Court of Justice concerning the Kadi case has raised substantive and procedural issues that have caught the attention of scholars from many disciplines including EU law, constitutional law, international law and jurisprudence. This book offers a comprehensive view of the Kadi case, and explores specific issues that are anticipated to resonate beyond the immediate case from which they derive.The first part of the volume sets out an analy...

The idea of multi-culturalism has had a significant impact across many areas of law. This book explores how it has shaped the recent development of international human rights law. Custodians of human rights, especially international monitoring bodies, try to advance the effectiveness of human rights standards by interpreting these standards according to a method strongly inspired by the idea of cultural 'relativism'. By using elements of cultural identity and cultural diversity as paramete...

The rise of international criminal trials has been accompanied by a call for domestic responses to extraordinary violence. Yet there is remarkably limited research on the interactions among local, national, and international transitional justice institutions. Rwanda offers an early example of multi-level courts operating in concert, through the concurrent practice of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), the national Rwandan courts, and the gacaca c...

The objective of European integration serves as an ideal of the legal order of the European Union and invites reconsideration of law’s conceptual features. This book critically assesses the legal order of the European Union, focusing on the operative aspects of the Union constitution with particular reference to the institutional practices of the Court of Justice in expressing the values underlying this constitution.Drawing together positivist and non-positivist accounts within an ...

This book argues that the judiciary, particularly the Supreme Court, should embrace an interpretive framework that promotes equal participation in the democratic process, fosters accountability, and facilitates robust public discourse among citizens of all backgrounds. The authors propose a solution that strives to restore integrity to the Court’s decision-making process by eschewing ideology and a focus on the utility of outcomes in favor of an intellectually honest jurisprudence that giv...

The persistent objector rule is said to provide states with an 'escape hatch' from the otherwise universal binding force of customary international law. It provides that if a state persistently objects to a newly emerging norm of customary international law during the formation of that norm, then the objecting state is exempt from the norm once it crystallises into law. The conceptual role of the rule may be interpreted as straightforward: to preserve the fundamentalist positivist notion t...

The notion of burden of proof and its companion notion of presumption are central to argumentation studies. This book argues that we can learn a lot from how the courts have developed procedures over the years for allocating and reasoning with presumptions and burdens of proof, and from how artificial intelligence has built precise formal and computational systems to represent this kind of reasoning. The book provides a model of reasoning with burden of proof and presumption, based on anal...