The Judiciary in Central and Eastern Europe

The Judiciary in Central and Eastern Europe PDF Author: Zdenek Kühn
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047429001
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
One of the most widespread problems in post-Communist countries is the quality of the judiciary. The book argues that these problems are intimately linked to the legal culture of Communist law, that an understanding of post-Communist judges necessarily requires an understanding of their Communist predecessors. There seems to be a deep continuity in the methods of legal reasoning employed by lawyers in the region of East Central Europe, starting in the era of Stalinism of the 1950s up to the current post-Communist period, which continuity is manifested in the problems of 1990s and 2000s. Communist legal culture and its aftermath provide an interesting analysis of the development of legal culture in a long-lasting system which was intellectually almost completely separated from the outside world. The book targets the judicial ideology, the conception of law, and the judicial self-perceptions, which are phenomena most likely to be contained in the deepest level of legal culture, that most resistant to change.

The Judiciary in Central and Eastern Europe

The Judiciary in Central and Eastern Europe PDF Author: Zdenek Kühn
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047429001
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Get Book Here

Book Description
One of the most widespread problems in post-Communist countries is the quality of the judiciary. The book argues that these problems are intimately linked to the legal culture of Communist law, that an understanding of post-Communist judges necessarily requires an understanding of their Communist predecessors. There seems to be a deep continuity in the methods of legal reasoning employed by lawyers in the region of East Central Europe, starting in the era of Stalinism of the 1950s up to the current post-Communist period, which continuity is manifested in the problems of 1990s and 2000s. Communist legal culture and its aftermath provide an interesting analysis of the development of legal culture in a long-lasting system which was intellectually almost completely separated from the outside world. The book targets the judicial ideology, the conception of law, and the judicial self-perceptions, which are phenomena most likely to be contained in the deepest level of legal culture, that most resistant to change.

Mechanical Jurisprudence ...

Mechanical Jurisprudence ... PDF Author: Roscoe Pound
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 126

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Book Description


Mechanical Choices

Mechanical Choices PDF Author: Michael S. Moore
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190863994
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 613

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Book Description
"This book assays how the remarkable discoveries of contemporary neuroscience impact upon our conception of ourselves and our responsibility for our choices and our actions. Dramatic (and indeed revolutionary) changes in how we think of ourselves as agents and as persons are commonly taken to be the implications of those discoveries of neuroscience. Indeed, the very notions of responsibility and of deserved punishment are thought to be threatened by these discoveries. Such threats are collected into four groupings: (1) the threat from determinism, that neurosciences shoes us that all of our choices and actions are caused by events in the brain that precede choice; (2) the threat from epiphenomenalism, that our choices are shown by experiment not to cause the actions that are the objects of such choice but are rather mere epiphenomena, co-effects of common causes in the brain; (3) the threat from reductionist mechanism, that we and everything we value is nothing but a bunch of two-valued switches going off in our brains; and (4) the threat from fallibilism, (5) that we are not masters in our own house because we lack the privileged knowledge of our own minds needed to be such masters. The book seeks to blunt such radical challenges while nonetheless detailing how law, morality, and common-sense psychology can harness the insights of an advancing neuroscience to more accurately assign moral blame and legal punishment to the truly deserving"--

On the History of the Idea of Law

On the History of the Idea of Law PDF Author: Shirley Robin Letwin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139448498
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
On the History of the Idea of Law is the first book ever to trace the development of the philosophical theory of law from its first appearance in Plato's writings to today. Professor Letwin finds important and positive insights and tensions in the theories of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Hobbes. She finds confusions and serious errors introduced by Cicero, Aquinas, Bentham, and Marx. She harnesses the insights of H. L. A. Hart and especially Michael Oakeshott to mount a devastating attack on the late twentieth-century theories of Ronald Dworkin, the Critical Legal Studies movement, and feminist jurisprudence. In all of this, Professor Letwin finds the rule of law to be the key to modern liberty and the standard of justice. This is the final work of the distinguished historian and theorist Shirley Robin Letwin, a major figure in the revival of Conservative thought and doctrine from 1960 onwards, who died in 1993.

Beyond the Formalist-Realist Divide

Beyond the Formalist-Realist Divide PDF Author: Brian Z. Tamanaha
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400831989
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
According to conventional wisdom in American legal culture, the 1870s to 1920s was the age of legal formalism, when judges believed that the law was autonomous and logically ordered, and that they mechanically deduced right answers in cases. In the 1920s and 1930s, the story continues, the legal realists discredited this view by demonstrating that the law is marked by gaps and contradictions, arguing that judges construct legal justifications to support desired outcomes. This often-repeated historical account is virtually taken for granted today, and continues to shape understandings about judging. In this groundbreaking book, esteemed legal theorist Brian Tamanaha thoroughly debunks the formalist-realist divide. Drawing from extensive research into the writings of judges and scholars, Tamanaha shows how, over the past century and a half, jurists have regularly expressed a balanced view of judging that acknowledges the limitations of law and of judges, yet recognizes that judges can and do render rule-bound decisions. He reveals how the story about the formalist age was an invention of politically motivated critics of the courts, and how it has led to significant misunderstandings about legal realism. Beyond the Formalist-Realist Divide traces how this false tale has distorted studies of judging by political scientists and debates among legal theorists. Recovering a balanced realism about judging, this book fundamentally rewrites legal history and offers a fresh perspective for theorists, judges, and practitioners of law.

Mechanical Choices

Mechanical Choices PDF Author: Michael S. Moore
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190864001
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 613

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Book Description
Mechanical Choices details the intimate connection that exists between morality and law: the morality we use to blame others for their misdeeds and the criminal law that punishes them for these misdeeds. This book shows how both law and morality presuppose the accuracy of common sense, a centuries-old psychology that defines people as rational agents who make honorable choices and act for just reasons. It then shows how neuroscience is commonly taken to challenge these fundamental psychological assumptions. Such challenges--four in number--are distinguished from each other by the different neuroscientific facts from which they arise: the fact that human choices are caused by brain events; the fact that those choices don't cause the actions that are their objects but are only epiphenomenal to those choices; the fact that those choices are identical to certain physical events in the brain; and the fact that human subjects are quite fallible in their knowledge of what they are doing and why. The body of this book shows how such challenges are either based on faulty facts or misconceived as to the relevance of such facts to responsibility. The book ends with a detailed examination of the neuroscience of addiction, an examination which illustrates how neuroscience can help rather than challenge both law and morality in their quest to accurately define excuses from responsibility.

The Scope and Purpose of Sociological Jurisprudence

The Scope and Purpose of Sociological Jurisprudence PDF Author: Roscoe Pound
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Jurisprudence
Languages : en
Pages : 92

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Book Description


Law in a Social Context

Law in a Social Context PDF Author: Lon Luvois Fuller
Publisher: Brill Archive
ISBN: 9789026809736
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description


The New Mechanical Philosophy

The New Mechanical Philosophy PDF Author: Stuart Glennan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198779712
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
This volume argues for a new image of science that understands both natural and social phenomena to be the product of mechanisms, casting the work of science as an effort to understand those mechanisms. Glennan offers an account of the nature of mechanisms and of the models used to represent them in physical, life, and social sciences.

SHYSTER: A Pragmatic Legal Expert System

SHYSTER: A Pragmatic Legal Expert System PDF Author: James Popple
Publisher: Australian National Univ.
ISBN: 0731518276
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 454

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Book Description
Most legal expert systems attempt to implement complex models of legal reasoning. But the utility of a legal expert system lies not in the extent to which it simulates a lawyer’s approach to a legal problem, but in the quality of its predictions and of its arguments. A complex model of legal reasoning is not necessary: a successful legal expert system can be based upon a simplified model of legal reasoning. Some researchers have based their systems upon a jurisprudential approach to the law, yet lawyers are patently able to operate without any jurisprudential insight. A useful legal expert system should be capable of producing advice similar to that which one might get from a lawyer, so it should operate at the same pragmatic level of abstraction as does a lawyer—not at the more philosophical level of jurisprudence. A legal expert system called SHYSTER has been developed to demonstrate that a useful legal expert system can be based upon a pragmatic approach to the law. SHYSTER has a simple representation structure which simplifies the problem of knowledge acquisition. Yet this structure is complex enough for SHYSTER to produce useful advice. SHYSTER is a case-based legal expert system (although it has been designed so that it can be linked with a rule-based system to form a hybrid legal expert system). Its advice is based upon an examination of, and an argument about, the similarities and differences between cases. SHYSTER attempts to model the way in which lawyers argue with cases, but it does not attempt to model the way in which lawyers decide which cases to use in those arguments. Instead, it employs statistical techniques to quantify the similarity between cases. It decides which cases to use in argument, and what prediction it will make, on the basis of that similarity measure. SHYSTER is of a general design: it can provide advice in areas of case law that have been specified by a legal expert using a specification language. Hence, it can operate in different legal domains. Four different, and disparate, areas of law have been specified for SHYSTER, and its operation has been tested in each of those domains. Testing of SHYSTER in these four domains indicates that it is exceptionally good at predicting results, and fairly good at choosing cases with which to construct its arguments. SHYSTER demonstrates the viability of a pragmatic approach to legal expert system design.