Punishment, Participatory Democracy, and the Jury

by Albert W. Dzur  (Author)

Focusing contemporary democratic theory on the neglected topic of punishment, Punishment, Participatory Democracy, and the Jury argues for increased civic engagement in criminal justice as an antidote to the American penal state. Albert W. Dzur considers how the jury, rather than merely expressing unreflective public opinion, may serve as a participatory institution that gathers and utilizes citizens' juridical capabilities. In doing so, the book resists trends in criminal justice scholarship that blame increases in penal severity on citizen participation and rejects political theorists' longstanding skepticism of lay abilities.

Dzur distinguishes constructive citizen involvement that takes responsibility for public problems from a mass politics mobilized superficially around single issues. This more positive view of citizen action, which was once a major justification for the jury trial, is now also manifest in the restorative justice movement, which has incorporated lay people into community boards and sentencing circles. Both jury trials and restorative justice programs, Dzur explains, are examples of rational disorganization, in which lay citizen action renders a process less efficient yet also contributes valuable qualities such as attunement, reflectiveness, and full-bodied communication. While restorative justice programs and participatory policy forums such as citizens' juries have become attractive to reformers, traditional juries have suffered a steep and troubling decline. Punishment, Participatory Democracy, and the Jury advocates a broader role for jurors in the criminal courts and more widespread use of jury trials.

Though no panacea for a political culture grown too comfortable with criminalization and incarceration, participatory institutional designs that rationally disorganize punishment practices and slow down criminal justice can catalyze civic responsibility and public awareness about the need to find alternative paths forward for America's broken penal system.

Legitimate Target:

A Criteria-Based Approach to Targeted Killing

by Amos Guiora (Author)

Targeted killings represent both the contemporary weapon of choice and, clearly, the weapon of the future. From the perspective of the nation-state, the benefits of targeted killing are clear: aggressive measures against identified targets can be carried out with minimal, if any, risk to soldiers. But while the threat to soldiers is minimal, there are other risks that must be considered. Particularly, there is a high possibility of collateral damage as well as legitimate concerns regarding how a target is defined. Clearly broad legal, moral, and operational issues are at stake when considering targeted killing.

In Legitimate Target, A Criteria Based Approach to Targeted Killing, Amos Guiora proposes that targeted killing decisions must reflect consideration of four distinct elements: law, policy, morality, and operational details, thus ensuring that it complies with principles of domestic and international laws. The author, writing from both personal experience and an academic perspective, offers important criticism and insight into the policy as presently implemented, highlighting the need for a criteria based decision making process in defining and identifying a legitimate target. Legitimate Target, A Criteria-Based Approach to Targeted Killing blends concrete examples with a nuanced study of the current targeted killing paradigm with an emphasis on the dilemmas of morality and the law.

Limiting Leviathan:

Hobbes on Law and International Affairs

 by Larry May  (Author)

Thomas Hobbes wrote extensively about law and was strongly influenced by developments and debates among lawyers of his day. And Hobbes is considered by many commentators to be one of the first legal positivists. Yet there is no book in English that focuses on Hobbes's legal philosophy. Indeed, Hobbes's own book length treatment of law, A Dialogue Between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England, has also not received much commentary over the centuries. Larry May seeks to fill the gap in the literature by addressing Hobbes's legal philosophy directly, and comparing Leviathan to the Dialogue, as he offers a new interpretation of Hobbes's views about the connections among law, politics, and morality.

May argues that Hobbes is much more amenable to moral, and even legal, limits on the law--indeed closer to Lon Fuller than to today's legal positivists--than he is often portrayed. He shows that Hobbes's views can provide a solid grounding for the rules of war and international relations generally, contrary to the near universal belief that Hobbes is the bete noir of international law. To support these views, May holds that Hobbes places greater weight on equity than on justice, and that understanding the role of equity is the key to his legal philosophy. Equity also is the moral concept that provides restrictions on what a sovereign can legitimately do, and if violated is the kind of limitation on sovereignty that could open the door for possible international institutions.

Trafficking of Children for Sexual Exploitation:

Public International Law 1864-1950

by Sunil Rao (Author)

A majority of the existing literature on human trafficking is based on the Trafficking Protocol (2000), and provides limited historical analysis of the preceding law on the subject. This book comprehensively analyses the origin and drafting history of the five treaties on human trafficking that preceded the 2000 treaty. The author, through such an analysis, details the development of public international law in relation to the trafficking of children for sexual exploitation of prostitution from 1864 to 1950. Highlighting a misconception in the existing literature that provides an erroneous understanding of the status of children under one of the treaties in this period, the book seeks to correct this misconception in the literature.

Honor, History, and Relationship:

Essays in Second-Personal Ethics II

 by Stephen Darwall (Author)

In Honor, History, and Relationship Stephen Darwall explores the idea of a second-personal framework for morality and its foundations, in which we are committed to morality by presuppositions that are inescapable when we relate to others (person to person). He expands on the argument set forth in The Second-Person Standpoint to explore the second-personal framework in three further settings. The first concerns a fundamental difference between the form that respect and the concept of person take in honor cultures, on the one hand, and the shape these assume in morality conceived as equal accountability, on the other. One essay explores this difference directly while others investigate related themes of justice versus retaliation and vengeance for insult and injury to honor, including in the writings of Adam Smith and Nietzsche on ressentiment. A second setting concerns the role of second-personal ideas in the development of a distinctively "modern" moral philosophy, beginning in seventeenth-century Europe. Two essays here discuss the centrality of second-personal notions in two formative modern natural law theorists: Grotius and Pufendorf. And two others concentrate on the role of reciprocal recognition in Kant and Fichte, respectively. A third group of essays treat the second-personal structure of interpersonal relations. There are three essays in this group: one on promising as a second-personal transaction between promiser and promisee, a second on what it is to be with another person, and a third on the role of second-personal standing in personal relationships.

Aftermath:

Deportation Law and the New American Diaspora

by Daniel Kanstroom (Author)

Since 1996, when new, harsher deportation laws went into effect, the United States has deported millions of noncitizens back to their countries of origin. While the rights of immigrants-with or without legal status--as well as the appropriate pathway to legal status are the subject of much debate, hardly any attention has been paid to what actually happens to deportees once they "pass beyond our aid." In fact, we have fostered a new diaspora of deportees, many of whom are alone and isolated, with strong ties to their former communities in the United States.

Daniel Kanstroom, author of the authoritative history of deportation, Deportation Nation, turns his attention here to the current deportation system of the United States and especially deportation's aftermath: the actual effects on individuals, families, U.S. communities, and the countries that must process and repatriate ever-increasing numbers of U.S. deportees. Few know that once deportees have been expelled to places like Guatemala, Cambodia, Haiti, and El Salvador, many face severe hardship, persecution and, in extreme instances, even death.

Addressing a wide range of political, social, and legal issues, Kanstroom considers whether our deportation system "works" in any meaningful sense. He also asks a number of under-examined legal and philosophical questions: What is the relationship between the "rule of law" and the border? Where do rights begin and end? Do (or should) deportees ever have a "right to return"? After demonstrating that deportation in the U.S. remains an anachronistic, ad hoc, legally questionable affair, the book concludes with specific reform proposals for a more humane and rational deportation system.

The Criminology of Place: Street Segments and Our Understanding of the Crime Problem

by David Weisburd  (Author),

 Elizabeth R. Groff (Author),

Sue-Ming Yang (Author)

The study of crime has focused primarily on why particular people commit crime or why specific communities have higher crime levels than others. In The Criminology of Place, David Weisburd, Elizabeth Groff, and Sue-Ming Yang present a new and different way of looking at the crime problem by examining why specific streets in a city have specific crime trends over time. Based on a 16-year longitudinal study of crime in Seattle, Washington, the book focuses our attention on small units of geographic analysis-micro communities, defined as street segments. Half of all Seattle crime each year occurs on just 5-6 percent of the city's street segments, yet these crime hot spots are not concentrated in a single neighborhood and street by street variability is significant. Weisburd, Groff, and Yang set out to explain why.

The Criminology of Place shows how much essential information about crime is inevitably lost when we focus on larger units like neighborhoods or communities. Reorienting the study of crime by focusing on small units of geography, the authors identify a large group of possible crime risk and protective factors for street segments and an array of interventions that could be implemented to address them. The Criminology of Place is a groundbreaking book that radically alters traditional thinking about the crime problem and what we should do about it.

Boardroom Scandal:

The Criminalization of Company Fraud in Nineteenth-Century Britain

by James Taylor  (Author)

Should businessmen who commit fraud go to prison? This question has been asked repeatedly since 2008. It was also raised in nineteenth-century Britain when the spread of corporate capitalism created enormous new opportunities for dishonesty. Historians have presented Victorian Britain as a haven for white-collar criminals, beneficiaries of a prejudiced criminal justice system which only dealt harshly with offences by the poor. Boardroom Scandal challenges these beliefs.

Based on an unparalleled sample of legal cases - many examined here for the first time - James Taylor presents a radical new interpretation of the relationship between capitalism and the law. Initially, there were no criminal sanctions against publishing false prospectuses, concealing losses in balance sheets, and even misappropriating company money. But parliament became convinced of the need to criminalize these practices to protect the culture of stock market investment on which mid-Victorian prosperity increasingly rested. Persuading judges to play along was harder, with many invoking the principle of caveat emptor to exonerate defendants. But by the end of the century, successful prosecutions of company executives were commonplace. These trials performed multiple functions: they stabilized confidence in times of crisis; they dramatized the class blindness of the law; and they were increasingly seen as essential as faith in a self-regulating economy ebbed. The criminalization of fraud, therefore, has far-reaching implications for our understanding of nineteenth-century Britain. It also has relevance today in light of the on-going economic crisis and the issues it raises regarding business ethics and the role of the state.

Hate Crime and Restorative Justice:

Exploring Causes, Repairing

by Mark Austin Walters  (Author)

The product of an 18 month empirical study which examined the use of restorative justice for hate crime in the United Kingdom, this book draws together theory and practice in order to examine the causes and consequences of hate crime victimisation. Hate Crime and Restorative Justice: Exploring Causes, Repairing Harms also identifies the key process variables within restorative practice that can help to repair the harms of hatred. In doing so, it challenges

commonly held conceptions of both 'hate crime' and 'restorative justice' through its use of qualitative research of restorative interventions across the UK.

The study's findings provide original data on the contextual variables that are intrinsic to both the cause and effect of hate-motivated offences, revealing complex socio-cultural and socio-economic factors that are fundamental, both to our understanding of hate crime and to how such incidents can be best resolved. Through meticulous analysis and discussion, the book also provides new information on how restorative processes can be used to repair the harms of hate and challenge the prejudices

which give rise to hate-motivated conflicts. The issue of group identity and cultural 'difference' amongst participants of restorative justice is explored and examined through the use of detailed case studies, allowing assessment of whether dialogical barriers to reconciliation can limit the success

of restorative processes. In particular, the notion of 'community', a fundamental concept of restorative justice theory and practice, is reconceptualised by exploring both its healing and harming features.

Utilising data from the first study of its kind, Hate Crime and Restorative Justice draws together theoretical assumptions about restorative philosophy and empirical evidence of its use for hate crime to offer a more holistic understanding of how restorative justice can help repair the harms caused by processes of hate, while simultaneously challenging the identity-based prejudices that continue to pervade our multicultural communities.

Attempts:

In the Philosophy of Action and the Criminal

by Gideon Yaffe  (Author)

Gideon Yaffe presents a ground-breaking work which demonstrates the importance of philosophy of action for the law. Many people are serving sentences not for completing crimes, but for trying to. So the law governing attempted crimes is of practical as well as theoretical importance. Questions arising in the adjudication of attempts intersect with questions in the philosophy of action, such as what intention a person must have, if any, and what a person must do, if anything, to be trying to act. Yaffe offers solutions to the difficult problems courts face in the adjudication of attempted crimes. He argues that the problems courts face admit of principled solution through reflection either on what it is to try to do something; or on what evidence is required for someone to be shown to have tried to do something; or on what sentence for an attempt is fair given the close relation between attempts and completions. The book argues that to try to do something is to be committed by one's intention to each of the components of success and to be guided by those commitments. Recognizing the implications of this simple and plausible position helps us to identify principled grounds on which the courts ought to distinguish between defendants charged with attempted crimes.

Public Events and Police Response:

 Understanding Public Order Policing in Democratic India

by T.K. Vinod Kumar  (Author)

Public events are at the heart of civic discourse in modern societies. The nature and number of public events and state response define the characteristics of the society and governance. Events and the police response to them are interactions that provide insight into the nature of social and democratic discourse in society.

Surveying the data of public events in cities and police response to them, detailed case studies of selected major events, and advanced statistical analyses, this book looks at the relationship between public events and police response. While different characteristics of events have varying effect on police response, the scale of violence in the event has the greatest impact on police response. The analyses indicate that the response of the police is largely circumscribed by democratic norms and rule of law. Revealing the tendency for police to be drawn into the ambit of political debate, which greatly impacts police organization and personnel, the study also points to the seeds of criminalization of politics and public discourse in selected public events.

Subversion and Sympathy:

Gender, Law, and the British Novel

 by Martha C. Nussbaum (Editor),

Alison L. LaCroix (Editor)

This interdisciplinary volume of contributed essays focuses on issues of gender in the British novel of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly Hardy and Trollope. Approaching the topic from a variety of backgrounds, the contributors reinvigorate the law-and-literature movement by displaying a range of ways in which literature and law can illuminate one another and in which the conversation between them can illuminate deeper human issues with which both disciplines are concerned. Their chapters shed light on a range of gender-related issues, from inheritance to money-lending to illegitimacy, but also make an important methodological contribution by displaying (and discussing) a range of methodological perspectives that exemplify the breadth and range of this discipline, which links history, gender studies, philosophy, literary studies, and law.

Cannabis Nation:

Control and Consumption in Britain, 1928-2008

by James H. Mills  (Author)

Cannabis has never been a more controversial substance in Britain. Over the last decade it has been reclassified twice, has been the subject of a range of official investigations and scientific studies, and has provoked media campaigns and all manner of political gesturing. Cannabis Nation seeks to understand this period by placing it back into the historical context of the long-term story of cannabis and the British. It takes up where its predecessor, Cannabis Britannica: Empire, Trade, and Prohibition, 1800-1928 (2003) left off.

James Mills traces the story back into the last days of the Empire, when Britain controlled cannabis-consuming societies in Asia and Africa even while there was little taste for the drug back home. He shows that cannabis was caught up in control regimes established to deal with opium and cocaine consumption, while it fell out of favour as a medicine. As such, when migration after the Second World War brought the Empire's cannabis-consumers to the UK, they faced hostile attitudes towards their favourite intoxicant.

From that time on a growing number of groups and agencies took an interest in cannabis. Ambitious bureaucrats in the Home Office saw in it an opportunity to draw resources in to the Drugs Branch, while the police began to use laws related to it for a number of other purposes. Experts ranging from pharmacologists to sociologists formed committees on the subject, and its association with colonial migrants lent it an exotic aura to the politically-minded of the 1960s counter-culture and the working-class youth of Britain's inner cities. Since the 1970s governments were content to devolve responsibility to the police for working out the best legal approach to the substance, and efforts to wrestle this back from them proved difficult a decade ago. Cannabis Nation considers all of these trends, details the often eccentric characters that have shaped them, and concludes that current positions and arguments on cannabis can only be properly assessed if their historical origins are clearly understood.

Familicidal Hearts: The Emotional Styles of 211

by Neil Websdale  (Author)

Oscar, physically and sexually abusive, stabbed his partner and two stepdaughters to death, buried the bodies, and fled the state with his two younger children. Paul, a respected investment banker, donned a Halloween mask and shot his wife and two children before turning the gun on himself. What drives individuals as different as Oscar and Paul to kill their families? Why does familicide appear to be on the rise?

In Familicidal Hearts, award-winning author and sociologist Neil Websdale uncovers the stories behind 196 male and 15 female perpetrators of this shocking offense, situating their emotional styles on a continuum, from the livid coercive to the civil reputable. With highly detailed and riveting case studies, Websdale explores the pivotal roles of shame, rage, fear, anxiety, and depression in the lives and crimes of the killers. His analysis demonstrates how internal emotional conflict, against a backdrop of societal pressures, is at the root of familicide, challenging the widely accepted argument that murderers kill family members to assert power and control. Websdale contends instead that most perpetrators struggle with intense shame, many sensing that they failed to live up to the demands of modern gender prescriptions, as fathers and lovers, wives and mothers. What emerges is a compelling theory about the haunting effects of modern emotional struggles on perpetrators, controlling and upstanding alike.

Captivatingly written and expertly researched, this provocative book weaves a gripping tale of modern-era "haunted hearts." Blending the social, the historical, and the emotional into a new way of making sense of a horrific crime, Familicidal Hearts is a provocative meditation on gender roles, social forces, and modern life itself.

Forgiveness and Remembrance:

 Remembering Wrongdoing in Personal and Public Life

 by Jeffrey M. Blustein (Author)

Forgiveness and Remembrance examines the complex moral psychology of forgiving, remembering, and forgetting in personal and political contexts. It challenges a number of entrenched ideas that pervade standard philosophical approaches to interpersonal forgiveness and offers an original account of its moral psychology and the emotions involved in it. The volume also uses this account to illuminate the relationship of forgiveness to political reconciliation and restorative political practices in post-conflict societies.

Memory is another central concern that flows from this, since forgiveness is tied to memory and to emotions associated with the memory of injury and injustice. In its political function, memory of wrongdoing -- and of its victims -- is embodied in processes of memorialization, such as the creation of monuments, commemorative ceremonies, and museums. The book casts light on the underexplored relationship of memorialization to transitional justice and politically consequential interpersonal forgiveness. It examines the symbolism and the symbolic moral significance of memorialization as a political practice, reflects on its relationship to forgiveness, and, finally, argues that there are moral responsibilities associated with memorialization that belong to international actors as well as to states.

Governing Guns, Preventing Plunder:

 International Cooperation against Illicit Trade

by Asif Efrat  (Author)

From human trafficking to the smuggling of small arms to the looting of antiquities, illicit trade poses significant threats to international order. So why is it so difficult to establish international cooperation against illicit trade? Governing Guns, Preventing Plunder offers a novel, thought-provoking answer to this crucial question.

Conventional wisdom holds that criminal groups are the biggest obstacle to efforts to suppress illicit trade. Contrarily, Asif Efrat explains how legitimate actors, such as museums that acquire looted antiquities, seek to hinder these regulatory efforts. Yet such attempts to evade regulation fuel international political conflicts between governments demanding action against illicit trade and others that are reluctant to cooperate. The book offers a framework for understanding the domestic origins of these conflicts and how the distribution of power shapes their outcome. Through this framework, Efrat explains why the interests of governments vary across countries, trades, and time. In a fascinating empirical analysis, he solves a variety of puzzles: Why is the international regulation of small arms much weaker than international drug control? What led the United States and Britain to oppose the efforts against the plunder of antiquities, and why did they ultimately join these efforts? How did American pressure motivate Israel to tackle sex trafficking? Efrat's findings will change the way we think about illicit trade, offering valuable insights to scholars, activists, and policymakers.

Anthropology of Law

by Fernanda Pirie  (Author

Questions about the nature of law, its relationship with custom, and the distinctive form of legal rules, categories, and reasoning, are placed at the centre of this introduction to the anthropology of law. It brings empirical scholarship within the scope of legal philosophy, while suggesting new avenues of inquiry for the anthropologist.

Going beyond the functional and instrumental aspects of law that underlie traditional ethnographic studies of order and conflict resolution, The Anthropology of Law considers contemporary debates on human rights and new forms of property, but also delves into the rich corpus of texts and codes studied by legal historians, classicists, and orientalist scholars. Studies of the great legal systems of ancient China, India, and the Islamic world, unjustly neglected by anthropologists, are examined alongside forms of law created on their peripheries. The coutumes of medieval Europe, the codes drawn up by tribal groups in Tibet and the Yemen, village laws on both sides of the Mediterranean, and the intricate codes of saga in Iceland provide rich empirical detail for the author's analysis of the cross-cultural importance of the form of law, as text or rule, and the relative marginality of its functions as an instrument of government or foundation of social order. Carefully-selected examples shed new light upon the interrelations and distinctions between law, custom, and justice. Gradually an argument unfolds concerning the tensions between legalistic thought and argument, and the ideological or aspirational claims to embody justice, morality, and religious truth which lie at the heart of what we think of as law.

Policing the Waterfront:

Networks, Partnerships, and the Governance of Port Security

by Russell Brewer  (Author)

Long recognised as a site where criminal elements have flourished, the waterfront has been exploited for centuries by opportunistic individuals for a whole raft of illicit purposes. Policing the Waterfront: Networks, Partnerships, and the Governance of Port Security is the first book of its kind to fully explore the intricacies of how crime is controlled on the waterfront, and in doing so, seeks to enhance current theoretical understandings of the policing partnerships that exist between state and non-state actors.

Charting the complex configuration of security networks using a range of analytical techniques, this book presents new empirical data, which exposes and explains the social structures that enable policing partnerships to function on the waterfront. Particularly striking is the use of enhanced and adjusted theoretical discussions, to both shape and develop previous policing and security debates - resulting in a work that is both innovative and, yet, still routed in the traditions of empirical

research. The analysis is achieved through a comparative research design, evaluating the narratives of both state and non-state security providers at the busiest ports in America and Australia: the Los Angeles/Long Beach Port Complex and the Port of Melbourne.

Policing the Waterfront presents a rich and highly original account of the underlying structures that foster, facilitate, and enhance policing partnerships on the waterfront, and will be of interest to scholars in the fields of criminology, sociology, law, socio-legal and policy studies, as well as those researching and studying policing, regulation, security, mass transportation, and social capital.

Human Rights and Immigration

by Ruth Rubio-Marin  (Author)

Economic interaction has enlarged the international trade in goods and services, but the safe and humane flow of persons across international borders remains a challenge in a State-based model of territorial jurisdictions. Once an immigrant enters a new host country the guarantee of respect for their human rights comes into question. Indeed, the legal and political constructions of inclusion or exclusion of migrants from the political community touch at the very heart of the cosmopolitan spirit of universal human rights.

This book brings together leading experts in the fields of migration and human rights law to examine central problems in the protection of the human rights of migrants. They explain the theoretical background of present issues in the area including, immigrant integration policies in Europe, the social and labour rights of migrants, the conditions and legal frameworks affecting migrant women, asylum seekers and refugees worldwide among many others. It explains in a clear and critical manner the legal and political implications of migration today in the context of an evolving globalized world.

The Future of Criminology

by Rolf Loeber (Editor),

Brandon C. Welsh (Editor)

Criminology is a dynamic and evolving field of study. In recent decades, the study of the causes, development, prevention, and treatment of juvenile delinquency and adult crime has produced many important discoveries. This volume addresses two questions about crucial topics facing criminology - from causation to prevention to public policy: Where are we now? What does the future hold? Rolf Loeber and Brandon C. Welsh lead a team of more than forty top scholars from across the world to present the future of research, policy, and practice in the discipline.

Gender, Geography, and Punishment:

The Experience of Women in Carceral Russia

by Judith Pallot  (Author), Laura Piacentini (Author)

This book is the first of its kind that brings together human geography and the sociology of punishment to explore the relationship between distance and punishment in con-temporary Russia. Using established penological and geographical theories, the book presents in-depth empirical research to show how the experiences of women prisoners are shaped by the distances that the Russian penal service sends prisoners to serve their sentences. Its most eye-catching feature is its use of interviews conducted by the authors and their research team with adult and juvenile women prisoners, ex-prisoners and prison officers in penal facilities in different regions of the Russian Federation between 2006 and 2010. It includes discussion of the impact of Russia's distinctive penal geography on pris-oners' family relationships, how women prisoners' sense of place and gender identities are shaped and re-shaped on their journey from pre-trial facility to 'correction colony' to release, and the social hierarchies, relationships and practices that characterise Russia's penal institutions for women. The authors are both experienced researchers in Russia. The book brings together their complementary disciplinary expertise in the development of the concept of 'coerced mobilization' to explore Russia's punishment culture. The book argues that Russia's inherited geography of penality, combined with traditional ideas about women's role that shape the penal service's management of women prisoners, add to their 'pains of imprisonment'. Crucially, the authors show how these factors are con-straining the Russian penal service's ability to implement successive reforms aimed at humanizing Russia's notoriously tough prisons. Russian imprisonment as it relates to women is, they believe, an area of significant concern for lawmakers in that country as well as to human rights campaigners, geographers interested in space and power, and scholars studying the post-Soviet system.

The European Court of Human Rights between Law and Politics

by Jonas Christoffersen (Author),

Mikael Rask Madsen (Author)

The European Court of Human Rights between Law and Politics provides a comprehensive analysis of the origins and development of one of the most striking supranational judicial institutions. The book brings together leading scholars and practitioners to cast new light on the substantial jurisprudence and ongoing political reform of the Court. The broad analysis based on historical, legal, and social science perspectives provides fresh insights into the institutional crisis of the Court and the future of the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.

The European Court of Human Rights is in many ways an unparalleled success. The Court embarked, during the 1970s, upon the development of a progressive and genuinely European jurisprudence. In the post-Cold War era, it went from being the guarantor of human rights solely in Western Europe to becoming increasingly involved in the transition to democracy and the rule of law in Eastern Europe. Now the protector of the human rights of some 800 million Europeans from 47 different countries, the European system is once again deeply challenged - this time by a massive case load and by the Member States' increased reluctance towards the Court. This book paves the way for a better understanding of the system and hence a better basis for choosing the direction of the next stage of the Court's life.

Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility,

Volume 2:

by David Shoemaker (Editor), Neal Tognazzini (Editor)

Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility is a series of volumes presenting outstanding new work on a set of connected themes in moral philosophy and philosophy of action.

This special volume in the series presents ten new papers marking the fiftieth anniversary of P. F. Strawson's landmark essay, "Freedom and Resentment." Some of the papers offer critical interpretation of Strawson's essay, some expand on his insights into the nature of interpersonal relationships, and some develop his overall themes in new and challenging directions.

The Oxford Handbook of Internet Studies 

by William H. Dutton  (Editor)

Internet Studies has been one of the most dynamic and rapidly expanding interdisciplinary fields to emerge over the last decade. The Oxford Handbook of Internet Studies has been designed to provide a valuable resource for academics and students in this area, bringing together leading scholarly perspectives on how the Internet has been studied and how the research agenda should be pursued in the future. The Handbook aims to focus on Internet Studies as an emerging field, each chapter seeking to provide a synthesis and critical assessment of the research in a particular area. Topics covered include social perspectives on the technology of the Internet, its role in everyday life and work, implications for communication, power, and influence, and the governance and regulation of the Internet.

The Handbook is a landmark in this new interdisciplinary field, not only helping to strengthen research on the key questions, but also shape research, policy, and practice across many disciplines that are finding the Internet and its political, economic, cultural, and other societal implications increasingly central to their own key areas of inquiry.

Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy Paperback – February 8, 2015

by Melanie Swan (Author)

Bitcoin is starting to come into its own as a digital currency, but the blockchain technology behind it could prove to be much more significant. This book takes you beyond the currency ("Blockchain 1.0") and smart contracts ("Blockchain 2.0") to demonstrate how the blockchain is in position to become the fifth disruptive computing paradigm after mainframes, PCs, the Internet, and mobile/social networking.

Author Melanie Swan, Founder of the Institute for Blockchain Studies, explains that the blockchain is essentially a public ledger with potential as a worldwide, decentralized record for the registration, inventory, and transfer of all assets—not just finances, but property and intangible assets such as votes, software, health data, and ideas.

Topics include:

Concepts, features, and functionality of Bitcoin and the blockchain

Using the blockchain for automated tracking of all digital endeavors

Enabling censorship?resistant organizational models

Creating a decentralized digital repository to verify identity

Possibility of cheaper, more efficient services traditionally provided by nations

Blockchain for science: making better use of the data-mining network

Personal health record storage, including access to one’s own genomic data

Open access academic publishing on the blockchain

This book is part of an ongoing O’Reilly series. Mastering Bitcoin: Unlocking Digital Crypto-Currencies introduces Bitcoin and describes the technology behind Bitcoin and the blockchain. Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy considers theoretical, philosophical, and societal impact of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies.

An Introduction to Empirical Legal Research 

by Lee Epstein  (Author), Andrew D. Martin (Author)

Is the death penalty a more effective deterrent than lengthy prison sentences? Does a judge's gender influence their decisions? Do independent judiciaries promote economic freedom? Answering such questions requires empirical evidence, and arguments based on empirical research have become an everyday part of legal practice, scholarship, and teaching. In litigation judges are confronted with empirical evidence in cases ranging from bankruptcy and taxation to criminal law and environmental infringement. In academia researchers are increasingly turning to sophisticated empirical methods to assess and challenge fundamental assumptions about the law.

As empirical methods impact on traditional legal scholarship and practice, new forms of education are needed for today's lawyers. All lawyers asked to present or assess empirical arguments need to understand the fundamental principles of social science methodology that underpin sound empirical research. An Introduction to Empirical Legal Research introduces that methodology in a legal context, explaining how empirical analysis can inform legal arguments; how lawyers can set about framing empirical questions, conducting empirical research, analyzing data, and presenting or evaluating the results. The fundamentals of understanding quantitative and qualitative data, statistical models, and the structure of empirical arguments are explained in a way accessible to lawyers with or without formal training in statistics.

Written by two of the world's leading experts in empirical legal analysis, drawing on years of experience in training lawyers in empirical methods, An Introduction to Empirical Legal Research will be an invaluable primer for all students, academics, or practicing lawyers coming to empirical research - whether they are embarking themselves on an empirical research project, or engaging with empirical arguments in their field of study, research, or practice.

The Oxford Handbook of 

Empirical Legal Research

by Peter Cane (Author), Herbert Kritzer (Author)

The empirical study of law, legal systems and legal institutions is widely viewed as one of the most exciting and important intellectual developments in the modern history of legal research. Motivated by a conviction that legal phenomena can and should be understood not only in normative terms but also as social practices of political, economic and ethical significance, empirical legal researchers have used quantitative and qualitative methods to illuminate many aspects of law's meaning, operation and impact.

In the 43 chapters of The Oxford Handbook of Empirical Legal Research leading scholars provide accessible and original discussions of the history, aims and methods of empirical research about law, as well as its achievements and potential. The Handbook has three parts. The first deals with the development and institutional context of empirical legal research. The second - and largest - part consists of critical accounts of empirical research on many aspects of the legal world - on criminal law, civil law, public law, regulatory law and international law; on lawyers, judicial institutions, legal procedures and evidence; and on legal pluralism and the public understanding of law. The third part introduces readers to the methods of empirical research, and its place in the law school curriculum.

L’eguaglianza alla prova delle azioni positive

A cura di Fabio Spitaleri

Indice

Introduzione (F. Spitareli). – Abbreviazioni delle Riviste. – I. Passato, presente e futuro delle azioni positive: esperienze nazionali a confronto. – II. Le azioni positive in Europa: diritto dell’Unione europea e Cedu. – III. L’idea di donna nelle azioni positive. – Indice della giurisprudenza. – Notizie sugli autori.