In the long-standing debate between positivism and non-positivism, legal validity has always been a subject of controversy. While positivists deny that moral values play any role in the determination of legal validity, non-positivists affirm the opposite thesis. In departing from this narrow point of view, the book focuses on the notion of legal knowledge. Apart from what one takes to constitute the grounds of legal validity, there is a more fundamental issue about cognitive validity: how do we acquire knowledge of whatever is assumed to constitute the elements of legal validity? When the question is posed in this form a fundamental shift takes place. Given that knowledge is a philosophical concept, for anything to constitute an adequate ground for legal validity it must satisfy the standards set by knowledge. In exploring those standards the author argues that knowledge is the outcome of an activity of judging, which is constrained by reasons (reflexive). While these reasons may vary with the domain of judging, the reflexive structure of the practice of judging imposes certain constraints on what can constitute a reason for judging. Amongst these constraints are found not only general metaphysical limitations but also the fundamental principle that one with the capacity to judge is autonomous or, in other words, capable of determining the reasons that form the basis of action. One sees, as soon as autonomy has been introduced into the parameters of knowledge, that law is necessarily connected with every other practical domain. The author shows, in the end, that the issue of knowledge is orthogonal to questions about the inclusion or exclusion of morality, for what really matters is whether the putative grounds of legal validity are appropriate to the generation of knowledge. The outcome is far more integral than much work in current theory: neither an absolute deference to either universal moral standards or practice-independent values nor a complete adherence to conventionality and institutional arrangements will do. In suggesting that the current positivism versus non-positivism debate, when it comes to determining law's nature, misses the crux of the matter, the book aims to provoke a fertile new debate in legal theory. "George Pavlakos' engaging book tackles the fundamental question of what makes legal knowledge possible. Since all articulate thought has to conform to implicit rules of grammar, it is necessarily normatively structured. Thus normativity cannot be something external to human thinking that we study from the outside, but is intrinsic to all human practices (including the natural sciences). This insight opens up fascinating new lines of inquiry into the character of law and its relations to other normative domains." Professor Sir Neil MacCormick, Edinburgh University "With admirable analytical acumen, George Pavlakos underscores the practical character of legal knowledge as well as the importance of argumentation in legal theory. He rejects those approaches to the nature of law that rest on conventional criteria as well as those that turn on factors altogether independent of practice, developing instead the thesis that objectivity and knowledge emerge from practical activity reflecting the spontaneity of human reason. In light of this notion of legal cognition as a practical activity directed and constrained by reason, the law is seen as an enduring institution, jurisprudence as a humanistic discipline. A truly important work." Professor Dr. Robert Alexy, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel

Who Owns Knowledge? explores the emerging linkages between the extension of knowledge and the law. It anticipates that the legal system will not only be called upon to adjudicate in matters of creative minds, but will be expected to do so to an ever increasing degree. Linkages between the legal system and knowledge are bound to multiply in modern societies. Ironically, while increasingly relying on knowledge, we are simultaneously investing significant resources into controlling this same knowledge. This includes developing a system of legal governance over how knowledge is extended or enlarged. Such modes of governance may take the form of regulatory legal codes, or legal challenges and judgments that shape the evolution of modern society and potentially transform knowledge itself, as a productive force. Who Owns Knowledge? asks such questions as: What is the appropriate balance of public and private interests involved in this process? How can creative powers, natural resources and indigenous knowledge be protected from either public or private exploitation? Does the law have the power to prevent this exploitation, or is adaptive technology needed? Also, in this identity theft conscious age, how can the rights of the individual be protected against policies allowing access to any kind of information, especially confidential information? The editors and contributors demonstrate that the relationship between knowledge and the law needs to be further researched and discussed. Who Owns Knowledge? is a must-read for those interested in the subjects of intellectual property, the history and development of modern legal and economic systems and their entanglements, and how judicial systems make choices between the legal and economic systems and, especially, between the public and private good and their often opposing interests.

If knowledge is power, then the power of law can be studied through the lens of knowledge. This book opens up a substantive new area of legal research--knowledge production--and presents a series of case studies showing that the hybridity and eclecticism of legal knowledge processes make it unfruitful to ask questions such as, "Is law becoming more dominated by science?" Mariana Valverde argues that legal decision making cannot be understood if one counterposes science and technology, on the one hand, to common knowledge and common sense on the other. The case studies of law's flexible collage of knowledges range from determinations of drunkenness made by liquor licensing inspectors and by police, through police testimony in "indecency" cases, to how judges define the "truth" of sexuality and the harm that obscenity poses to communities. Valverde emphasizes that the types of knowledge that circulate in such legal arenas consist of "facts," values, and codes from numerous incompatible sources that combine to produce interesting hybrids with wide-ranging legal and social effects. Drawing on Foucaultian and other analytical tools, she cogently demonstrates that different modes of knowledge, and hence various forms of power, coexist happily. Law's Dream of a Common Knowledge underlines the importance of analyzing dynamically how knowledge formation works. And it helps us to better understand the workings of power and resistance in a variety of contemporary contexts. It will interest scholars and students from disciplines including law, sociology, anthropology, history, and science-and-technology studies as well as those concerned with the particular issues raised by the case studies.

Sovereignty, Knowledge, Law investigates the notion of sovereignty from three different, but related perspectives: as a legal question in relation to the sovereign state, as a political question in relation to sovereign power, and as a metaphysical question in relation to sovereign self-knowledge. The varied and interchangeable uses of legal sovereignty, political sovereignty and metaphysical sovereignty in contemporary debates have resulted in a situation where the word ‘sovereignty’ itself has become something of a non-concept. Panu Minkkinen shows here how these three perspectives have informed one another, by addressing their shared relationship to law, and to the ‘autocephalous’ function of sovereignty; that is, the attempt to provide a single source and foundation for law, power, and self-knowledge. Through an effort to domesticate the intrinsically ‘heterocephalous’ nature of power, the juridical and jurisprudential aim has been to confine power within the closed vertical hierarchy of traditional legal thinking. Sovereignty, Knowledge, Law thus elaborates this heterocephaly, proposing new understandings of sovereignty, as well as of law and of legal scholarship.

The changes brought about by digital technology and the consequent explosion of information known as Big Data have brought opportunities and challenges in all areas of society, and the law is no exception. This book, Knowledge of the Law in the Big Data Age contains a selection of the papers presented at the conference ‘Law via the Internet 2018’, held in Florence, Italy, on 11-12 October 2018. This annual conference of the ‘Free Access to Law Movement’ (http://www.fatlm.org) hosted more than 60 international speakers from universities, government and research bodies as well as EU institutions. Topics covered range from free access to law and Big Data and data analytics in the legal domain, to policy issues concerning access, publishing and the dissemination of legal information, tools to support democratic participation and opportunities for digital democracy. The book is divided into 3 sections: Part I provides an introductory background, covering aspects such as the evolution of legal science and models for representing the law; Part II addresses the present and future of access to law and to various legal information sources; and Part III covers updates in projects, initiatives, and concrete achievements in the field. The book provides an overview of the practical implementation of legal information systems and the tools to manage this special kind of information, as well as some of the critical issues which must be faced, and will be of interest to all those working at the intersection of law and technology.

The past two decades have seen an outpouring of work in legal theory that is self-consciously critical of aspects of American law and the institutions of the liberal state. In this lively volume, eminent scholars in philosophy, law, and political science respond to this recent scholarship by exploring what constitutes a "radical" critique of the law, examining such theories as critical legal studies, feminist theory and theories of "difference," and critical race theory. The authors consider whether the critiques advanced in recent legal theory can truly be called radical and what form a radical critique of American law should take. Writing at the cutting edge of the critique of critical legal theory, they offer insights first on critical legal scholarship, then on feminist political and legal theory. A third group of contributions questions the radicalness of these approaches in light of their failure to challenge fundamental aspects of liberalism, while a final section focuses on current issues of legal reform through critical views on criminal punishment, including observations on rape and hate speech. Each major essay describes the underlying principles in the development of a radical legal theory and addresses unresolved questions relating to it, while accompanying commentaries present conflicting views. The resulting dialogue explores wide-ranging issues like equity, value relativism, adversarial and empathic legal advocacy, communitarianism and the social contract, impartiality and contingency, "natural" law, and corrective justice. A common thread for many of the articles is a focus on the social dimension of society and law, which finds the individualism of prevailing liberal theories too limiting. Radical Critiques of the Law is particularly unique in presenting critical and feminist approaches in one volume-along with skeptical commentary about just how radical some critiques really are. Proposing alternative critiques that embody considerably greater promise of being truly radical, it offers provocative reading for both philosophers and legal scholars by showing that many claims to radicalism are highly problematic at best.

"I like the use of research and citations throughout the text. It is more comprehensive than my current text and does a much better job of presenting the scientific evidence." —Kathy McGuire, Western Illinois University Written by authors with extensive experience in the field and in the classroom, Psychology and Law: Research and Practice, Second Edition, offers the definitive perspective on the practical application of psychological research to the law. Curt R. Bartol and Anne M. Bartol emphasize the various roles psychologists and other mental health professionals play in criminal and civil legal matters. Topics such as family law, mental health evaluations, police interrogation, jury selection and decision making, involuntary civil commitment, and various civil capacities are included. The authors also emphasize the major contributions psychological research has made to the law and encourage critical analysis through examples of court cases, high-profile current events, and research. This comprehensive book examines complex material in detail and explains it in an easy-to-read way. New to the Second Edition: The new edition has been significantly reorganized to more closely align with the progression through the court system. A new chapter on children, adolescents, and criminal law (Chapter 8) provides students with information on adjudicative competence, comprehension of constitutional rights, and eyewitness identification and courtroom testimony. New feature boxes include case studies, research projects, and contemporary topics with discussion questions for classroom debate. Additional court cases and statutes have been integrated into chapters to emphasize the important role psychology plays in the legal process. The content is applied to real cases such as the Masterpiece Cakeshop case and the Dassey confession (comprehending Miranda). Over 300 recent research findings on topics related to psychology and law highlight cutting-edge research studies that help students understand what research does and prompt them to discuss the methodology and results. New pedagogical tables clearly illustrate complex information around ethical issues, APA amicus briefs, strengths and weaknesses of simulation studies, insanity standards within the states, effects experienced by survivors of traumatic incidents, and more. Increased coverage of contemporary issues encourage critical thinking and active learning by promoting discussions around current issues such as telepsychology, neuropsychology, adversarial allegiance, and actuarial instruments used in bail and sentence decision-making.

This book offers an international breadth of historical and theoretical insights into recent efforts to "decolonise" legal education across the world. With a specific focus on post- and decolonial thought and anti-racist methods in pedagogy, this edited collection provides an accessible illustration of pedagogical innovation in teaching and learning law. Chapters cover civil and common law legal systems, incorporate cases from non-state Indigenous legal systems, and critically examine key topics such as decolonisation and anti-racism in criminology, colonialism and the British Empire, and court process and Indigenous justice. The book demonstrates how teaching can be modified and adapted to address long-standing injustice in the curriculum. Offering a systematic collection of theoretical and practical examples of anti-racist and decolonial legal pedagogy, this volume will appeal to curriculum designers and law educators as well as to undergraduate and post-graduate law level teachers and researchers.

For decades, Engelhardt has alluded to the ethics that binds moral friends. While his 'Foundations of Bioethics' explored the sparse ethics binding moral strangers, this long-awaited volume addresses the morality at the foundations of Christian bioethics. The volume opens with an analysis of the marginalization of Christian bioethics in the 1970s and the irremedial shortcomings of secular ethics in general. Drawing on the Christianity of the first millennium, Engelhardt provides the ontological and epistemological foundations for a Christian bioethics that can remedy the onesidedness of a secular bioethics and supply the bases for a Christian bioethics. The volume then addresses issues from abortion, third-party-assisted reproduction, and cloning, to withholding and withdrawing treatment, physician-assisted suicide, and euthanasia. Practices such as free and informed consent are relocated within a traditional Christian morality. Attention is also given to the allocation of scarce resources in health care, and to the challenge of maintaining the Christian identity of physicians, nurses, patients, and health care institutions in a culture that is now post-Christian.

Modern jurisprudence embodies two distinct traditions of thought about the nature of law. The first adopts a scientific approach which assumes that all legal phenomena possess universal characteristics that may be used in the analysis of any type of legal system. The main task of the legal philosopher is to disclose and understand such characteristics,which are thought to be capable of establishment independently of any moral or political values which the law might promote, and of any other context-dependent features of legal systems. Another form of jurisprudential reflection views the law as a complex form of moral arrangement which can only be analysed from within a system of reflective moral and political practices. Rather than conducting a search for neutral standpoints or criteria, this second form of theorising suggests that we uncover the nature and purpose of the law by reflecting on the dynamic properties of legal practice. Can legal philosophy aspire to scientific values of reasoning and truth? Is the idea of neutral standpoints an illusion? Should legal theorising be limited to the analysis of particular practices? Are the scientific and juristic approaches in the end as rigidly distinct from one another as some have claimed? In a series of important new essays the authors of Jurisprudence or Legal Science? attempt to answer these and other questions about the nature of jurisprudential thinking, whilst emphasising the connection of such 'methodological' concerns to the substantive legal issues which have traditionally defined the core of jurisprudential speculation. The list of contributors includes R. Alexy, S. Coyle, J. Gorman, C. Heidemann, P. Leith, J. Morison, G. Pavlakos and V. Rodriguez-Blanco.