The ‘law-language-law’ theme is deeply engraved in Occidental culture, more so than contemporary studies on the subject currently illustrate. This insightful book creates awareness of these cultural roots and shows how language and themes in law can be richer than studying a simple mutuality of motives. Rethinking Law and Language unveils today’s problems with the two faces of language: the analogue and the digital, on the basis of which our smart phones and Artificial Intelligence create modern life.

Rethinking Copyright is a small gem for an audience broader than copyright and intellectual property scholars, and well worth acquiring by a variety of general, corporate, law and academic libraries. Laurence Seidenberg, International Journal of Legal Information This excellent book raises again the controversial issue of whether we can learn anything and, if so, what from revisiting our past. Jeremy Phillips, ipkat.com All histories are about the present, not the past. Histories of copyright are no different: the pitched battles today over the nature of copyright frequently re-create a mythical past to shore up support for a partisan present. Deazley s Rethinking Copyright is a must have book for those who care about getting things right. Rethinking Copyright carefully reviews the critical formative years of statutory copyright (1710 1912), and then masterfully ties this foundational period to the current culture wars. It is a tour de force to be savored and returned to over and over again. William Patry, Senior Copyright Counsel, Google Inc., New York, US Two books in one, the first half of this manifesto offers a contrarian account of eighteenth and nineteenth-century English copyright history; the second contributes to the burgeoning rhetoric of the public domain in contemporary copyright scholarship. Deazley contends that, contrary to the common wisdom, common law copyright never existed in the eighteenth-century, but was a concerted creation of nineteenth-century treatise writers. He may not convince us that common law copyright was a myth, but he does compellingly demonstrate that, like the mythical giant Antaeus, whenever common law copyright seemed beaten down to the ground, it rose again with renewed force. He also persuades us that it may be a Herculean task to strangle the life out of the impulse, historical or otherwise, to believe that authors labors justify the contemporary default setting of the positive law in favor of proprietary rights. The second half, calling for reconceptualization of copyright as a derogation from the public s freedom to engage with works of authorship will surely provoke disagreement from many readers knowledgeable about copyright, but Deazley is an apt expositor of this increasingly popular trend in the legal academy. Jane C. Ginsburg, Columbia University School of Law, New York, US Copyright law remains hotly debated with the public domain contested territory. Ronan Deazley brings some welcome sanity to the discussion by revisiting the history of UK copyright law with a fresh eye and also by exploring the theoretical justifications for intellectual property in light of recent scholarship. The roles of rhetoric and legal writing in constructing copyright paradigms are the particular target of Deazley s critique. This is a provocative and challenging book which deserves a wide audience. Simon Stokes, Blake Lapthorn Tarlo Lyons and Bournemouth Law School, UK I have just finished reading Ronan Deazley s manuscript. It s a very enjoyable, readable book. As to content, I found it interesting, carefully researched, wide in scope, and thought-provoking even where I didn t agree with his conclusions. Catherine Seville, Newnham College, Cambridge, UK This book provides the reader with a critical insight into the history and theory of copyright within contemporary legal and cultural discourse. It exposes as myth the orthodox history of the development of copyright law in eighteenth-century Britain and explores the way in which that myth became entrenched throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To this historical analysis are added two theoretical approaches to copyright not otherwise found in mainstream contemporary texts. Rethinking Copyright introduces the reader to copyright through the prism of the public domain before turning to the question as to how best to locate copyright within the parameters of traditional property discourse. Moreover, underpinning

Over the past decades, the field commonly known as comparative law has significantly expanded. The multiplication of journals, the proliferation of scholarship and the creation of courses or summer schools specifically devoted to comparative law attest to its increasing popularity. Within the Western legal tradition, a traditional, black-letter approach to law has proved particularly authoritative. This co-authored book rethinks comparative law’s mainstream model by providing both students and lawyers with the intellectual equipment allowing them to approach any foreign law in a more meaningful way.

In an ere as morally confused as ours, Stoner argues, we at least ought to know what we've abandoned or suppressed in the name of judicial activism and the modern rights-oriented Constitution. Having lost our way, perhaps the common law, in its original sense, provides a way back, a viable alternative to the debilitating relativism of our current age.

American constitutional lawyers and legal historians routinely assert that the Supreme Court's state action doctrine halted Reconstruction in its tracks. But it didn't. Rethinking the Judicial Settlement of Reconstruction demolishes the conventional wisdom - and puts a constructive alternative in its place. Pamela Brandwein unveils a lost jurisprudence of rights that provided expansive possibilities for protecting blacks' physical safety and electoral participation, even as it left public accommodation rights undefended. She shows that the Supreme Court supported a Republican coalition and left open ample room for executive and legislative action. Blacks were abandoned, but by the president and Congress, not the Court. Brandwein unites close legal reading of judicial opinions (some hitherto unknown), sustained historical work, the study of political institutions, and the sociology of knowledge. This book explodes tired old debates and will provoke new ones.

This book is about the competing images of man offered us by the disciplines of law and psychiatry. Michael Moore describes the legal view of persons as rational and autonomous and defends it from the challenges presented by three psychiatric ideas: that badness is illness, that the unconscious rules our mental life, and that a person is a community of selves more than a unified single self. Using the tools of modern philosophy, he attempts to show that the moral metaphysical foundations of our law are not eroded by these challenges of psychiatry. The book thus seeks, through philosophy, to go beneath the centuries-old debates between lawyers and psychiatrists, and to reveal their hidden agreement about the nature of man. Some attention is paid to practical legal and psychiatric issues of contemporary concern, such as the proper definition of mental illness for psychiatric purposes, and the proper definition of legal insanity for legal purposes. This book was first announced, for publication in hard covers, in the Press's January to July seasonal list.

This insightful book presents a radical rethinking of the relationship between law, regulation, and technology. While in traditional legal thinking technology is neither of particular interest nor concern, this book treats modern technologies as doubly significant, both as major targets for regulation and as potential tools to be used for legal and regulatory purposes. It explores whether our institutions for engaging with new technologies are fit for purpose.

A critical analysis of Israel's control of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, advocating a normative and functional approach.

In the original euphoria that attended the virtually simultaneous demise of so many dictatorships in the late 1980s and early 90s, there was a widespread belief that problems of 'transition' basically involved shedding a known past, and replacing it with an also-known future. This volume surveys and contributes to the prolific debates that occurred in the years between the collapse of communism and the enlargement of the European Union regarding the issues of constitutionalism, dealing with the past, and the rule of law in the post-communist world. Eminent scholars explore the issue of transitional justice, highlighting the distinct roles of legal and constitutional bodies in the post-transition period. The introduction seeks to frame the work as an intervention in the discussion of communism and transition-two stable and separate points-while emphasizing the instability of the post-transition moment.

This book demonstrates how legal realism offers important and unique jurisprudential insights that are not just a part of legal history, but are also relevant and useful for a contemporary understanding of legal theory.