Europe

Over the past few years, the European Court of Human Rights has been criticised in several extrajudicial speeches in the United Kingdom. In this article the author, a judge of the Strasbourg Court, analyses some of this criticism, focussing especially on Lord Hoffmann’s views in his 2009 farewell lecture, The Universality of Human Rights, as well as discussing some more recent speeches by senior British judges.

Первое десятилетие ХX века стало временем самоопределения многих общественных сил и колоссального запроса на политические изменения, временем поиска будущего, многочисленных программных установок и формирования партийных организаций. Новая книга Кирилла Соловьева посвящена либеральной оппозиции в России накануне и во время Первой русской революции 1905 года. Речь идет о формах политического действия оппозиции в условиях самодержавия — причем той ее части, которая не была готова к прямому насилию и вместе с тем рассчитывала на итоговый успех.

A Historical Sketch of Liberty and Equality is a window to one of the most important historians of all time. The exclusive Liberty Fund edition of F.W. Maitland's classic includes a note on Maitland by Charles Haskins and a general account of Maitland's life and work, "The Historical Spirit Incarnate: Frederic William Maitland," by Robert Schuyler. A historian's historian, F.W. Maitland was never to be caught indulging in fanciful speculation about times long past.

At the present day, when there is renewed interest in the concept of human rights and in the application of this concept to the problems of government, it may be instructive to review an eighteenth-century dispute which was concerned precisely with these themes. Nor should the investigation be any less interesting because the disputants were Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine: both these men have also been the object of renewed attention and study in recent years. Critical work on the biography and bibliography of Paine is being done by Professor Aldridge and Col.

By the end of the eighteenth century, politicians in America and France were invoking the natural rights of man to wrest sovereignty away from kings and lay down universal basic entitlements. Exactly how and when did “rights” come to justify such measures? In On the Spirit of Rights, Dan Edelstein answers this question by examining the complex genealogy of the rights that regimes enshrined in the American and French Revolutions.

How can we think about people and cultures unlike our own? In the early modern period, the fact of human diversity presented Europeans with little cause for anxiety: they simply assumed the superiority of the West. During the 18th century this view was gradually abandoned, as thinkers argued that other peoples possessed reason and sensibility, and thus deserved the same respect that Westerners accorded themselves.

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?

Here, for the first time in one volume, is the full story of crimes committed by the Nazi leaders and of the trials in which they were brought to judgement. Conot reconstructs in a single absorbing narrative not only the events at Nuremburg but the offenses with which the accused were charged. He brilliantly characterizes each of the twenty-one defendants, vividly presenting each case and inspecting carefully the process of indictment, prosecution, defense and sentencing.

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.

There is a long history of laws responding to terrorism that have been utilized in the United Kingdom. This article outlines the important strands of development, including in the former colonies of the British Empire, in Ireland, and in mainland Britain itself. It offers an overview of contemporary legislation — the Terrorism Act 2000, the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001, the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005 and the Terrorism Act 2006.