Law, Rights and Discourse

Law, Rights and Discourse PDF Author: George Pavlakos
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 184731368X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
A philosophical system is not what one would expect to find in the work of a contemporary legal thinker. Robert Alexy's work counts as a striking exception. Over the past 28 years Alexy has been developing, with remarkable clarity and consistency, a systematic philosophy covering most of the key areas of legal philosophy. Kantian in its inspiration, his work admirably combines the rigour of analytical philosophy with a repertoire of humanitarian ideals reflecting the tradition of the Geisteswissenschaften, rendering it one of the most far-reaching and influential legal philosophies in our time. This volume has been designed with two foci in mind: the first is to reflect the breadth of Alexy's philosophical system, as well as the varieties of jurisprudential and philosophical scholarship in the last three decades on which his work has had an impact. The second objective is to provide for a critical exchange between Alexy and a number of specialists in the field, with an eye to identifying new areas of inquiry and offering a new impetus to the discourse theory of law. To that extent, it was thought that a critical exchange such as the one undertaken here would most appropriately reflect the discursive and critical character of Robert Alexy's work. The volume is divided into four parts, each dealing with a key area of Alexy's contribution. A final section brings together concise answers by Robert Alexy. In composing these, Alexy has tried to focus on points and criticisms that address new aspects of discourse theory or otherwise point the way to future developments and applications. With its range of topics of coverage, the number of specialists it engages and the originality of the answers it provides, this collection will become a standard work of reference for anyone working in legal theory in general and the discourse theory of law in particular.

Law, Rights and Discourse

Law, Rights and Discourse PDF Author: George Pavlakos
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 184731368X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 390

Get Book Here

Book Description
A philosophical system is not what one would expect to find in the work of a contemporary legal thinker. Robert Alexy's work counts as a striking exception. Over the past 28 years Alexy has been developing, with remarkable clarity and consistency, a systematic philosophy covering most of the key areas of legal philosophy. Kantian in its inspiration, his work admirably combines the rigour of analytical philosophy with a repertoire of humanitarian ideals reflecting the tradition of the Geisteswissenschaften, rendering it one of the most far-reaching and influential legal philosophies in our time. This volume has been designed with two foci in mind: the first is to reflect the breadth of Alexy's philosophical system, as well as the varieties of jurisprudential and philosophical scholarship in the last three decades on which his work has had an impact. The second objective is to provide for a critical exchange between Alexy and a number of specialists in the field, with an eye to identifying new areas of inquiry and offering a new impetus to the discourse theory of law. To that extent, it was thought that a critical exchange such as the one undertaken here would most appropriately reflect the discursive and critical character of Robert Alexy's work. The volume is divided into four parts, each dealing with a key area of Alexy's contribution. A final section brings together concise answers by Robert Alexy. In composing these, Alexy has tried to focus on points and criticisms that address new aspects of discourse theory or otherwise point the way to future developments and applications. With its range of topics of coverage, the number of specialists it engages and the originality of the answers it provides, this collection will become a standard work of reference for anyone working in legal theory in general and the discourse theory of law in particular.

Reconciling Law and Morality in Human Rights Discourse

Reconciling Law and Morality in Human Rights Discourse PDF Author: Willy Moka-Mubelo
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319494961
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
In this book I argue for an approach that conceives human rights as both moral and legal rights. The merit of such an approach is its capacity to understand human rights more in terms of the kind of world free and reasonable beings would like to live in rather than simply in terms of what each individual is legally entitled to. While I acknowledge that every human being has the moral entitlement to be granted living conditions that are conducive to a dignified life, I maintain, at the same time, that the moral and legal aspects of human rights are complementary and should be given equal weight. The legal aspect compensates for the limitations of moral human rights the observance of which depends on the conscience of the individual, and the moral aspect tempers the mechanical and inhumane application of the law. Unlike the traditional or orthodox approach, which conceives human rights as rights that individuals have by virtue of their humanity, and the political or practical approach, which understands human rights as legal rights that are meant to limit the sovereignty of the state, the moral-legal approach reconciles law and morality in human rights discourse and underlines the importance of a legal framework that compensates for the deficiencies in the implementation of moral human rights. It not only challenges the exclusively negative approach to fundamental liberties but also emphasizes the necessity of an enforcement mechanism that helps those who are not morally motivated to refrain from violating the rights of others. Without the legal mechanism of enforcement, the understanding of human rights would be reduced to simply framing moral claims against injustices. From the moral-legal approach, the protection of human rights is understood as a common and shared responsibility. Such a responsibility goes beyond the boundaries of nation-states and requires the establishment of a cosmopolitan human rights regime based on the conviction that all human beings are members of a community of fate and that they share common values which transcend the limits of their individual states. In a cosmopolitan human rights regime, people are protected as persons and not as citizens of a particular state.

Cultural Rights in International Law and Discourse

Cultural Rights in International Law and Discourse PDF Author: Stephenson Chow
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004328580
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Challenging questions arise in the effort to adequately protect the cultural rights of individuals and communities worldwide, not the least of which are questions concerning the very understanding of ‘culture’. In Cultural Rights in International Law and Discourse: Contemporary Challenges and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Pok Yin S. Chow offers an account of the present-day challenges to the articulation and implementation of cultural rights in international law. Through examining how ‘culture’ is conceptualised in different stages of contemporary anthropology, the book explores how these understandings of ‘culture’ enable us to more accurately put issues of cultural rights into perspective. The book attempts to provide analytical exits to existing conundrums and dilemmas concerning the protections of culture, cultural heritage and cultural identity.

Law, Language and the Courtroom

Law, Language and the Courtroom PDF Author: Stanislaw Gozdz Roszkowski
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100048386X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
This book explores the language of judges. It is concerned with understanding how language works in judicial contexts. Using a range of disciplinary and methodological perspectives, it looks in detail at the ways in which judicial discourse is argued, constructed, interpreted and perceived. Focusing on four central themes - constructing judicial discourse and judicial identities, judicial argumentation and evaluative language, judicial interpretation, and clarity in judicial discourse - the book’s ultimate goal is to provide a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of current critical issues of the role of language in judicial settings. Contributors include legal linguists, lawyers, legal scholars, legal practitioners, legal translators and anthropologists, who explore patterns of linguistic organisation and use in judicial institutions and analyse language as an instrument for understanding both the judicial decision-making process and its outcome. The book will be an invaluable resource for scholars in legal linguistics and those specialising in judicial argumentation and reasoning ,and forensic linguists interested in the use of language in judicial settings.

Law and Imagination in Troubled Times

Law and Imagination in Troubled Times PDF Author: Richard Mullender
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000066835
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
This collection focuses on how troubled times impact upon the law, the body politic, and the complex interrelationship among them. It centres on how they engage in a dialogue with the imagination and literature, thus triggering an emergent (but thus far underdeveloped) field concerning the ‘legal imagination.’ Legal change necessitates a close examination of the historical, cultural, social, and economic variables that promote and affect such change. This requires us to attend to the variety of non-legal variables that percolate throughout the legal system. The collection probes ‘the transatlantic constitution’ and focuses attention on imagination in a common law context that seems to foster imagination as a cultural capability. The book is divided into four parts. The first part begins with a set of insights into the historical development of legal education in England and concludes with a reflection on the historical transition of England from an absolute monarchy to a republic. The second part of the volume examines the role that imagination plays in the functioning of the courts. The third part focuses on patterns of thought in legal scholarship and detects how legal imagination contributes to the process of producing new legal categories and terminology. The fourth part focuses on patterns of thought in legal scholarship, and looks to the impact of the imagination on legal thinking in the future. The work provides stimulating reading for those working in the areas of legal philosophy, legal history and law and humanities and law and language.

Corpus-based Research on Variation in English Legal Discourse

Corpus-based Research on Variation in English Legal Discourse PDF Author: Teresa Fanego
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027262837
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the research carried out over the past thirty years in the vast field of legal discourse. The focus is on how such research has been influenced and shaped by developments in corpus linguistics and register analysis, and by the emergence from the mid 1990s of historical pragmatics as a branch of pragmatics concerned with the scrutiny of historical texts in their context of writing. The five chapters in Part I (together with the introductory chapter) offer a wide spectrum of the latest approaches to the synchronic analysis of cross-genre and cross-linguistic variation in legal discourse. Part II addresses diachronic variation, illustrating how a diversity of methods, such as multi-dimensional analysis, move analysis, collocation analysis, and Darwinian models of language evolution can uncover new understandings of diachronic linguistic phenomena.

Fictional Discourse and the Law

Fictional Discourse and the Law PDF Author: Hans J. Lind
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429887612
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Drawing on insights from literary theory and analytical philosophy, this book analyzes the intersection of law and literature from the distinct and unique perspective of fictional discourse. Pursuing an empirical approach, and using examples that range from Victorian literature to the current judicial treatment of rap music, the volume challenges the prevailing fact–fiction dichotomy in legal theory and practice by providing a better understanding of the peculiarities of legal fictionality, while also contributing further material to fictional theory’s endeavor to find a transdisciplinary valid criterion for a definition of fictional discourse. Following the basic presumptions of the early law-as-literature movement, past approaches have mainly focused on textuality and narrativity as the common denominators of law and literature, and have largely ignored the topic of fictionality. This volume provides a much needed analysis of this gap. The book will be of interest to scholars of legal theory, jurisprudence and legal writing, along with literature scholars and students of literature and the humanities.

Rules Versus Relationships

Rules Versus Relationships PDF Author: John M. Conley
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226114910
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
In Rules versus Relationships, John M. Conley and William M. O'Barr examine the experiences of litigants seeking redress of everyday difficulties through the small claims courts of the American legal system. The authors find two major and contrasting ways in which litigants formulate and express their problems in terms of specific rule violations and seek concrete legal remedies that would mend soured relationships and respond to their personal and social needs.

Human Rights Discourse in a Global Network

Human Rights Discourse in a Global Network PDF Author: Lena Khor
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317119800
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
In her innovative study of human rights discourse, Lena Khor takes up the prevailing concern by scholars who charge that the globalization of human rights discourse is becoming yet another form of cultural, legal, and political imperialism imposed from above by an international human rights regime based in the Global North. To counter these charges, she argues for a paradigmatic shift away from human rights as a hegemonic, immutable, and ill-defined entity toward one that recognizes human rights as a social construct comprised of language and of language use. She proposes a new theoretical framework based on a global discourse network of human rights, supporting her model with case studies that examine the words and actions of witnesses to genocide (Paul Rusesabagina) and humanitarian organizations (Doctors Without Borders). She also analyzes the language of texts such as Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost. Khor's idea of a globally networked structure of human rights discourse enables actors (textual and human) who tap into or are linked into this rapidly globalizing system of networks to increase their power as speaking subjects and, in so doing, to influence the range of acceptable meanings and practices of human rights in the cultural sphere. Khor’s book is a unique and important contribution to the study of human rights in the humanities that revitalizes viable notions of agency and liberatory network power in fields that have been dominated by negative visions of human capacity and moral action.

The Concept of Human Dignity in Human Rights Discourse

The Concept of Human Dignity in Human Rights Discourse PDF Author: David Kretzmer
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004478191
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
The notion of human dignity plays a central role in human rights discourse. According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognition of the inherent dignity and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world. The international Covenants on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and on Civil and Political Rights state that all human rights derive from inherent dignity of the human person. Some modern constitutions include human dignity as a fundamental non-derogable right; others mention it as a right to be protected alongside other rights. It is not only lawyers concerned with human rights who have to contend with the concept of human dignity. The concept has been discussed by, inter alia, theologians, philosophers, and anthropologists. In this book leading scholars in constitutional and international law, human rights, theology, philosophy, history and classics, from various countries, discuss the concept of human dignity from differing perspectives. These perspectives help to elucidate the meaning of the concept in human rights discourse.