Spanning two centuries and five Nordic countries, this book questions the view that political lawyers are required for the development of a liberal political regime. It combines cross-disciplinary theory and careful empirical case studies by country experts whose regional insights are brought to bear on wider global contexts. The theory of the legal complex posits that lawyers will not simply mobilize collectively for material self-interest; instead they will organize and struggle for the limited goal of political liberalism. Constituted by a moderate state, core civil rights, and civil society freedoms, political liberalism is presented as a discrete but professionally valued good to which all lawyers can lend their support. Leading scholars claim that when one finds struggles against political repression, politics of the Legal Complex are frequently part of that struggle. One glaring omission in this research program is the Nordic region. This insightful volume provides a comprehensive account of the history and politics of lawyers of the last 200 years in the Nordic countries: Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland. Topping most global indexes of core civil rights, these states have been found to contain few to no visible legal complexes. Where previous studies have characterized lawyers as stewards and guardians of the law that seek to preserve its semi-autonomous nature, these legal complexes have emerged in a manner that challenges the standard narrative. This book offers rational choice and structuralist explanations for why and when lawyers mobilise collectively for political liberalism. In each country analysis, authors place lawyers in nineteenth century state transformation and emerging constitutionalism, followed by expanding democracy and the welfare state, the challenge of fascism and world war, the tensions of the Cold War, and the latter-day rights revolutions. These analyses are complemented by a comprehensive comparative introduction, and a concluding reflection on how the theory of the legal complex might be recast, making The Limits of the Legal Complex an invaluable resource for scholars and practitioners alike.

Human reason is limited. Given the scarcity of reason, how should the power to make constitutional law be allocated among legislatures, courts and the executive, and how should legal institutions be designed? In Law and the Limits of Reason, Adrian Vermeule denies the widespread view, stemming from Burke and Hayek, that the limits of reason counsel in favor of judges making "living" constitutional law in the style of the common law. Instead, he proposes and defends a "codified constitution" - a regime in which legislatures have the primary authority to develop constitutional law over time, through statutes and constitutional amendments. Vermeule contends that precisely because of the limits of human reason, large modern legislatures, with their numerous and highly diverse memberships and their complex internal structures for processing information, are the most epistemically effective lawmaking institutions.

The Model Rules of Professional Conduct provides an up-to-date resource for information on legal ethics. Federal, state and local courts in all jurisdictions look to the Rules for guidance in solving lawyer malpractice cases, disciplinary actions, disqualification issues, sanctions questions and much more. In this volume, black-letter Rules of Professional Conduct are followed by numbered Comments that explain each Rule's purpose and provide suggestions for its practical application. The Rules will help you identify proper conduct in a variety of given situations, review those instances where discretionary action is possible, and define the nature of the relationship between you and your clients, colleagues and the courts.

The United States today suffers from too much criminal law and too much punishment. Husak describes the phenomena in some detail and explores their relation, and why these trends produce massive injustice. His primary goal is to defend a set of constraints that limit the authority of states to enact and enforce penal offenses. The book urges the weight and relevance of this topic in the real world, and notes that most Anglo-American legal philosophers have neglected it. Husak's secondary goal is to situate this endeavor in criminal theory as traditionally construed. He argues that many of the resources to reduce the size and scope of the criminal law can be derived from within the criminal law itself-even though these resources have not been used explicitly for this purpose. Additional constraints emerge from a political view about the conditions under which important rights such as the right implicated by punishment-may be infringed. When conjoined, these constraints produce what Husak calls a minimalist theory of criminal liability. Husak applies these constraints to a handful of examples-most notably, to the justifiability of drug proscriptions.

Gates Hunt is a compulsive felon, serving a stiff penitentiary sentence for selling cocaine. His brother, Mason, however, has escaped their bitter, impoverished upbringing to become the commonwealth's attorney for their rural hometown in Virginia, where he enjoys a contented life with his wife and spitfire daughter. But Mason's idyll is abruptly pierced by a wicked tragedy, and soon afterward trouble finds him again when he is forced to confront a brutal secret he and his brother had both sworn to take with them to the grave, a secret that threatens everyone and everything he holds dear. Intricately plotted and relentlessly entertaining, The Legal Limit is an exploration of the judicial system's roughest edges, as well as a gripping story of murder, family, and the difficult divide that sometimes separates genuine justice from the law.

This book investigates the causes and consequences of congressional attacks on the US Supreme Court, arguing that the extent of public support for judicial independence constitutes the practical limit of judicial independence. First, the book presents a historical overview of Court-curbing proposals in Congress. Then, building on interviews with Supreme Court justices, members of Congress, and judicial and legislative staffers, the book theorizes that congressional attacks are driven by public discontent with the Court. From this theoretical model, predictions are derived about the decision to engage in Court-curbing and judicial responsiveness to Court-curbing activity in Congress. The Limits of Judicial Independence draws on illustrative archival evidence, systematic analysis of an original dataset of Court-curbing proposals introduced in Congress from 1877 onward and judicial decisions.

International law is much debated and discussed, but poorly understood. Does international law matter, or do states regularly violate it with impunity? If international law is of no importance, then why do states devote so much energy to negotiating treaties and providing legal defenses for their actions? In turn, if international law does matter, why does it reflect the interests of powerful states, why does it change so often, and why are violations of international law usually not punished? In this book, Jack Goldsmith and Eric Posner argue that international law matters but that it is less powerful and less significant than public officials, legal experts, and the media believe. International law, they contend, is simply a product of states pursuing their interests on the international stage. It does not pull states towards compliance contrary to their interests, and the possibilities for what it can achieve are limited. It follows that many global problems are simply unsolvable. The book has important implications for debates about the role of international law in the foreign policy of the United States and other nations. The authors see international law as an instrument for advancing national policy, but one that is precarious and delicate, constantly changing in unpredictable ways based on non-legal changes in international politics. They believe that efforts to replace international politics with international law rest on unjustified optimism about international law's past accomplishments and present capacities.

Many legal experts no longer share an unbounded trust in the potential of law to govern society efficiently and responsibly. They often experience the 'limits of the law', as they are confronted with striking inadequacies in their legal toolbox, with inner inconsistencies of the law, with problems of enforcement and obedience, and with undesired side-effects, and so on. The contributors to this book engage in the challenging task of making sense of this experience. Against the background of broader cultural transformations (such as globalisation, new technologies, individualism and cultural diversity), they revisit a wide range of areas of the law and map different types of limits in relation to some basic functions and characteristics of the law. Additionally, they offer a set of strategies to manage justifiably law's limits, such as dedramatising law's limits, conceptual refinement ('constructivism'), striking the right balance between different functions of the law, seeking for complementarity between law and other social practices.

Faith in the power and righteousness of retribution has taken over the American criminal justice system. Approaching punishment and responsibility from a philosophical perspective, Erin Kelly challenges the moralism behind harsh treatment of criminal offenders and calls into question our society’s commitment to mass incarceration. The Limits of Blame takes issue with a criminal justice system that aligns legal criteria of guilt with moral criteria of blameworthiness. Many incarcerated people do not meet the criteria of blameworthiness, even when they are guilty of crimes. Kelly underscores the problems of exaggerating what criminal guilt indicates, particularly when it is tied to the illusion that we know how long and in what ways criminals should suffer. Our practice of assigning blame has gone beyond a pragmatic need for protection and a moral need to repudiate harmful acts publicly. It represents a desire for retribution that normalizes excessive punishment. Appreciating the limits of moral blame critically undermines a commonplace rationale for long and brutal punishment practices. Kelly proposes that we abandon our culture of blame and aim at reducing serious crime rather than imposing retribution. Were we to refocus our perspective to fit the relevant moral circumstances and legal criteria, we could endorse a humane, appropriately limited, and more productive approach to criminal justice.

This book explores the emergence of the fundamental political concepts of medieval Jewish thought, arguing that alongside the well known theocratic elements of the Bible there exists a vital tradition that conceives of politics as a necessary and legitimate domain of worldly activity that preceded religious law in the ordering of society. Since the Enlightenment, the separation of religion and state has been a central theme in Western political history and thought, a separation that upholds the freedom of conscience of the individual. In medieval political thought, however, the doctrine of the separation of religion and state played a much different role. On the one hand, it served to maintain the integrity of religious law versus the monarch, whether canon law, Islamic law, or Jewish law. On the other hand, it upheld the autonomy of the monarch and the autonomy of human political agency against theocratic claims of divine sovereignty and clerical authority. Postulating the realm of secular politics leads the author to construct a theory of the precedence of politics over religious law in the organization of social life. He argues that the attempts of medieval philosophers to understand religion and the polity provide new perspectives on the viability of an accommodation between revelation and legislation, the holy and the profane, the divine and the temporal. The book shows that in spite of the long exile of the Jewish people, there is, unquestionably, a tradition of Jewish political discourse based on the canonical sources of Jewish law. In addition to providing a fresh analysis of Maimonides, it analyzes works of Nahmanides, Solomon ibn Adret, and Nissim Gerondi that are largely unknown to the English-speaking reader. Finally, it suggests that the historical corpus of Jewish political writing remains vital today, with much to contribute to the ongoing debates over church-state relations and theocratic societies.