jurisprudence

Social and cultural changes have led to free speech claims being made in novel contexts: to challenge the validity of bans on tobacco advertising, to publish 'kiss and tell' stories about celebrities, and to resist attempts to regulate the Internet. In this fully revised and updated new edition of his classic work, Barendt considers the meaning and scope of freedom of speech. How far should free speech and expression clauses go to protect pornography, commercial advertising, and public meetings on the streets? Does this freedom cover desecration of a national flag?

In Simón, the Argentine Supreme Court held that two amnesty laws, adopted in the late 1980s in order to shield authors of serious human rights violations committed during the so-called ‘Dirty War’ (1976–1983), were unconstitutional and void. Although the Argentine Congress had already repealed the two laws in 2003, uncertainty about the validity of this parliamentary decision had led to some controversy.

This book explains and critiques the position adopted by the UK Supreme Court on disputes involving human rights, especially those protected by the Human Rights Act 1998. Building upon the fact that the UK Supreme Court, which began operating in 2009, has inherited case law developed over many decades by the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords, the book considers whether the Supreme Court’s current views are internally consistent and externally in line with the standards adopted by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

Many people were elated when Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren delivered Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in May 1954, the ruling that struck down state-sponsored racial segregation in America's public schools. Thurgood Marshall, chief attorney for the black families that launched the litigation, exclaimed later, "I was so happy, I was numb." The novelist Ralph Ellison wrote, "another battle of the Civil War has been won. The rest is up to us and I'm very glad. What a wonderful world of possibilities are unfolded for the children!" 

Dworkin begins with the question that is at the heart of the whole legal system: in difficult cases how do (and how should) judges decide what the law is? He shows that judges must decide hard cases by interpreting rather than simply applying past legal decisions, and he produces a general theory of what interpretation is—in literature as well as in law—and of when one interpretation is better than others. Every legal interpretation reflects an underlying theory about the general character of law: Dworkin assesses three such theories.

The development of feminist jurisprudence in recent years has made a rich and fruitful contribution to legal theory. Few areas of domestic law have avoided the scrutiny of feminist writers, who have exposed the gender bias of apparently neutral systems of rules. A central feature of many western theories about law is that the law is an autonomous entity, distinct from the society it regulates.

The demise of custom as a source of international law has been widely forecasted. This is because both the nature and the relative importance of custom’s constituent elements are contentious. At the same time, custom has become an increasingly significant source of law in important areas such as human rights obligations. Codification conventions, academic commentary, and the case law of the International Court of Justice (the Court) have also contributed to a contemporary resurrection of custom.

In this well-known critique, Duncan Kennedy argues that legal education reinforces class, race, and gender inequality in our society. However, Kennedy proposes a radical egalitarian alternative vision of what legal education should become, and a strategy, starting from the anarchist idea of workplace organizing, for struggle in that direction. Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy is comprehensive, covering everything about law school from the first day to moot court to job placement to life after law school.

A la fois théorique et pratique, le livre de Mireille Delmas-Marty propose une recomposition des paysages juridiques nationaux et internationaux.