Public Law

In the public law area, it has been noted that judicial decisionmaking is not always objective, that the courts are not constrained by the law and the facts of the case, and that courts are actually policymakers influenced by extraneous factors having little to do with the legal and factual matters of a case. Yarnold argues that the public law area has discarded the traditional view of the judiciary as a passive interpreter of the law. She examines political and environmental variables that have been used to explain judicial outcomes and develops an original theory of public law explaining under what circumstances political variables impact court decisions, and when region, as an environmental variable, is related to judicial outcomes.

Public Law and the Scientific Theory Public Law and Political Theory Interpretation in Public Law The Structures of Public Law Thought Foundations of Normativism Foundations of Functionalism Traditions of Public Law Thought Contemporary Thought in Public Law The Triumph of Liberal Normativism Public Law in the Face of the Future

In the Limits of Law, Peter Schuck draws on law, social science, and history to explore this momentous clash between law's compelling promise of ordered liberty and the realistic limits of its capacity to deliver on this promise.

Modern law is to be understood as comprising norms which are implicated in particular forms of life which -- animated by the modern values of individualism -- have emerged in democratic polities. Failure to understand the nature of such fundamental institutional forms as `society' and `state', and of the need to appraise the central institutions of the democractic polity against the demands of legitimacy, has had serious consequences for political and legal theory in recent times. In An Institutional Theory of Law, Morton provides a fundamental philosophical critique of the assumptions of positivist jurisprudence and an attack on the foundationalism of contemporary legal philosophy. His prime concern is to distinguish between the different fields of law -- penal, civil, and public -- taking as his starting point the careful analysis of the institutions in a democracy within which legal language and norms are generated. Offering an original, coherent and systematic exposition of law in society today, Peter Morton sheds new, important light on legal practices and relations through comparison with an ideal type of legal system. With this book, Peter Morton offers readers a major contribution to our understanding of law in society in the 1990s. As such it will be of great interest to scholars of legal theory, political science, and political constitution.

This book has a completely original theme, or set of themes. It offers first a new way of analyzing styles of legal reasoning--between more "formal" and more "substantive" styles--that is a major contribution to jurisprudence in its own right. The authors then go on to demonstrate in detail the differences in legal reasoning--and in the legal systems as a whole--between England and America, and suggest that the English is a much more "formal" system and the American a more "substantive." Finally, the book explores a wide range of cultural, institutional, and historical factors relating to the two legal systems.

One of the leading legal philosophers of this century, Kelsen published this short treatise in 1934, when the neo-Kantian influence on his work was at its zenith. An earlier, "constructivist" phase had been displaced by his effort to provide something approximating a neo-Kantian foundation for his theory. If this second phase represents the Pure Theory of Law in its most characteristic form, then the present treatise may well be its central text. And of Kelsen's many statements of the Pure Theory, this one is surely the most accessible. Topics covered include the legal norm and Kelsen's normativity thesis, law and morality, the role of ideology, the concept of the legal person, legal interpretation, the identity of law and state, and the theory of international law. Among the appendices is an annotated bibliography of secondary literature on Kelsen.

This work is a collection of topical essays by many of the UK's leading public lawyers and centred on a single theme: the influence of US jurisprudence upon English Public Law. The contributors address a lively range of topics, while the introduction pulls the many and varied discussions and observations together and deals with a more general theory of the influence of US Public Law upon English Law.

The French legal system is, of all the Common Market legal systems, the most approachable for the common lawyer. An acclaimed resource now in its third edition, A Sourcebook of French Law consists largely of extracts chosen to show the sources, basic legal methods, categories and techniques, and applications of French law. This edition has been completely revised, containing more French translations in order to make the book more accessible.

The origins of this work lie in an attempt by Israeli lawyers to describe and analyse the remarkable efforts of the Supreme Court of Israel to intervene in all kinds of government actions on behalf of basic civil rights and the preservation of the rule of law. Working essentially with the basic English common law tools of constitutional and administrative law, and without the aid of a written Bill of Rights, The Supreme Court recognized that Israel's special political and social realities warranted an extraordinary judicial vigilance. This work charts this remarkable development and offers an insight into a system which is arguably among the most developed in the common law world.