Books in the Law in Context series

Crime, Reason and History critically analyses the general principles of criminal law and offers a different viewpoint: that the law is systematically structured around conflicting elements. Updated to include two new chapters with an extended treatment of offence and defence, this new edition combines challenging and sophisticated analysis with accessibility.

Promotes a global socio-legal perspective that engages with multiple laws and societies and diverse socio-legal systems based on different historical and cultural traditions.

Provides an up-to-date account of English sentencing law.

A stimulating introduction to a rapidly developing area of law, which is becoming more important.

This book is for anyone interested in the history of marriage and cohabitation, whether historian, lawyer or general reader. It is written in an accessible style, while providing a radical reassessment of existing ideas about the popularity, legal treatment and perceptions of cohabitation between 1600 and 2010.

This fresh understanding of global law and contemporary gender relations asks 'whom do we care about?' not 'what rights do women have?'. Case studies feature African women producing fruit and flowers for UK export; Polish, Filipino and Moldovan migrant body workers providing care and sex; and British-Asian transnational marriages.

With reference to the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights and the new international criminal tribunals, John Jackson and Sarah Summers chart the development of a genuinely cosmopolitan law of evidence in criminal cases across the common law and civil law traditions.

Freedom of Information (FOI) laws have generated calls for constitutional reform. Pressures for national security and secrecy must be balanced alongside demands for FOI. This detailed discussion of FOI laws and personal data laws examines the historical development of secrecy, national security and government, and their modern context.

Do inequalities in wealth threaten British democracy? Democracy Distorted demonstrates how wealth can generate political influence, through the funding of political parties, lobbying and media power, and provides a range of potential solutions to the problem of money in politics.

This text is a study of the public/private law divide in the common law tradition. Its starting point is that substantive duties of legality, fairness and rationality are imposed by the common law on bodies discharging public functions, but not always on bodies discharging 'private' functions.

This work compares civil and common law systems using the French legal system as its basis. Focusing on the four main branches of French law: civil, criminal, administrative and constitutional law, the book examines the way that the judiciary, lawyers and academics operate within them.

Written by one of the leading specialists in European law and legal theory, this third edition explains the history and institutional framework of European Union law. It includes commentaries on successive drafts of the Constitutional and Lisbon treaties and discusses recent developments such as the Turkish application.

This overview of the basic principles of labour law explores how international human rights law and economics have influenced labour law since the 1950s. The insights of rights theorists and economists are applied to a selection of topics in labour law to demonstrate the interplay between the two perspectives.

Dora Kostakopoulou examines the prospects of the existing nationality model of citizenship and articulates an alternative institutional design. She outlines the organising principles, legal procedures and qualifying requirements of an anational model of citizenship, defends it against objections and considers the empirical conditions for its implementation.

Scientific evidence is crucial in a burgeoning number of litigated cases, legislative enactments, regulatory decisions and scholarly arguments. This book examines scientific evidence in both civil and criminal contexts and explains how nonscientists who must make decisions about scientific knowledge can improve their decisions.

This book looks at privatized international infrastructure projects, law and human rights. It further distinguishes itself through its diverse and topical case studies, focusing on post-war Iraq, terrorism, indigenous rights, European Union expansion and urban poverty.

Combining materials from a wide variety of sources with Michael Zander's authoritative commentary, this book provides the tools with which an observer of the English legal system can discover how it functions, the problems it faces and the current reforms proposed.

Drawing upon legal history, legal theory, and legal sociology, this book presents an intellectual history of the US legal culture which elaborates on the various developments that have led to and structure the present worrisome legal-political situation.

Remedies is one of the key organizing concepts of the obligations approach to the common law. This second edition modernizes the former 1995 edition quite considerably. It determines the place of remedies in contract and tort within the debate about the reform of the common law obligation.

This text offers the definitive examination of criminal law in context. Exploring the philosophical, social and political environment in which it operates, it gives the student the most complete picture available. With relevant case law and material integrated throughout, it is simply essential reading for students of criminal law.

This book studies ideological divisions within Chinese legal academia and their relationship to arguments about the rule of law. The book describes argumentative strategies used by Chinese legal scholars to legitimize and subvert China's state-sanctioned ideology. It also examines Chinese efforts to invent new, alternative rule of law conceptions. In addition to this descriptive project, the book advances a more general argument about the rule of law phenomenon, insisting that many arguments about the rule of law are better understood in terms of their intended and actual effects rather than as analytic propositions or descriptive statements. To illustrate this argument, the book demonstrates that various paradoxical, contradictory and otherwise implausible arguments about the rule of law play an important role in Chinese debates about the rule of law. Paradoxical statements about the rule of law, in particular, can be useful for an ideological project.

First published in 1973, Karl Llewellyn and the Realist Movement is a classic account of American Legal Realism and its leading figure. Karl Llewellyn is the best known and most substantial jurist of the group of lawyers known as the American Realists. He made important contributions to legal theory, legal sociology, commercial law, contract law, civil liberties and legal education. This intellectual biography sets Llewellyn in the broad context of the rise of the American Realist Movement and contains an overview of his life before focusing on his most important works, including The Cheyenne Way, The Bramble Bush, The Common Law Tradition and the Uniform Commercial Code. In this second edition the original text is supplemented with a preface by Frederick Schauer and an afterword in which William Twining gives a fascinating account of the making of the book and comments on developments in relevant legal scholarship over the past forty years.

Law and the Technologies of the Twenty-First Century provides a contextual account of the way in which law functions in a broader regulatory environment across different jurisdictions. It identifies and clearly structures the four key challenges that technology poses to regulatory efforts, distinguishing between technology as a regulatory target and tool, and guiding the reader through an emerging field that is subject to rapid change. By extensive use of examples and extracts from the texts and materials that form and shape the scholarly and public debates over technology regulation, it presents complex material in a stimulating and engaging manner. Co-authored by a leading scholar in the field with a scholar new to the area, it combines comprehensive knowledge of the field with a fresh approach. This is essential reading for students of law and technology, risk regulation, policy studies, and science and technology studies.

An innovative and timely guide to housing law that integrates the disciplines of law and public policy so that readers see how the subject fits together - both the letter of the law and the way it is practised. The innovative three-part structure covers all the topics of a typical Housing Law module and it is written in a clear and conversational style, with a wide range of source material to show how the law is created, interpreted and used in real life. Students are expertly guided through the complexities of housing law by a leading academic who has taught the subject for more than 20 years. Where relevant, chapters end with a section on 'the future' that discusses proposed changes to the law and the impact of those changes. It also discusses the conceptual issues raised by the Human Rights Act.

Lawyering Skills and the Legal Process bridges the gap between academic and practical law for students undertaking skills-based and clinical legal education courses at university. It develops oral and written communication, group working, problem solving and conflict resolution skills in a range of legal contexts: client interviewing, drafting, managing cases, legal negotiation and advocacy. The book is designed specifically to help students to practise and develop skills that will be essential in a range of occupations; develop a deeper understanding of the English legal process and the lawyer's role in that process; enhance their understanding of the relationship between legal skills and ethics; and understand how they learn and how they can make their learning more effective. This book provides a stimulating, accessible and challenging approach to understanding the problems and uncertainties of practising law that goes beyond the standard approaches to lawyers' skills.

Commercial contract law is in every sense optional given the choice between legal systems and law and arbitration. Its 'doctrines' are in fact virtually all default rules. Contract Law Minimalism advances the thesis that commercial parties prefer a minimalist law that sets out to enforce what they have decided - but does nothing else. The limited capacity of the legal process is the key to this 'minimalist' stance. This book considers evidence that such minimalism is indeed what commercial parties choose to govern their transactions. It critically engages with alternative schools of thought, that call for active regulation of contracts to promote either economic efficiency or the trust and co-operation necessary for 'relational contracting'. The book also necessarily argues against the view that private law should be understood non-instrumentally (whether through promissory morality, corrective justice, taxonomic rationality, or otherwise). It sketches a restatement of English contract law in line with the thesis.

Extensively updated throughout, this new edition introduces students to a wide range of modern legal issues. Written in a clear and engaging style, the book expertly addresses the ways in which the rules and structures of law respond to and influence changes in economic and political life. It provides a clear understanding of the relationship between law and society, with particular emphasis on the importance of morality, dispute solution and business regulation. An Introduction to Law is a valuable resource for students of law, be they undergraduate law students, those studying law as part of a mixed degree, or students on business or social science courses in which legal studies are included.

New to English law? Need to know how rules are made, interpreted and applied? This popular and well-established textbook will show you how. It simplifies legal method by combining examples with an account of rules in general: the who, what, why and how of interpretation. Starting with standpoint and context, it identifies factors that give rise to doubts about the interpretation of a rule and recommends a systematic approach to analysing those factors. Questions and exercises integrated in the text and on the accompanying website will help you to develop skills in reading, interpreting and arguing about legal and other rules. The text is fully updated on developments in the legislative process and the judicial interpretation of statutes and precedent. It includes a new chapter on 'The European Dimension' reflecting the changes brought about by the Human Rights Act 1998.

A contextual analysis of the internal logics of EU health law through four themes: consumerism; (human) rights; interactions between equality, solidarity and competition; and risk. Leading authors in the emergent field explain the interactions and implications of EU health law through thematic reinterpretation of the law in context in key substantive areas, such as the regulation of health research, access of patients to high quality care, health care professional regulation, organisation and funding of health care services, and public health. This book offers a fresh perspective and thorough understanding of EU health law through individual and collective or systemic perspectives, and covers health law both within the EU and globally. Essential reading for anyone interested in health law in any EU Member State or in global health law.

The relationship between law and terrorism has re-emerged recently as a pressing issue in contemporary jurisprudence. Terrorism appears to take law to its limit, whilst the demands of counter-terrorism hold the cause of justice in contempt. At this point the case for engaging alternative intellectual approaches and resources is compelling. Ian Ward argues that through a closer appreciation of the ethical and aesthetical dimensions of terror, as well as the historical, political and cultural, we can better comprehend modern expressions and experiences of terrorism. For this reason, alongside juristic responses to modern expressions of terrorism, Law, Text, Terror examines a variety of supplementary literary texts as well as alternative intellectual approaches; from the drama of Euripides and Shakespeare, to the rhetoric and poetry of Burke and Shelley, the literary feminisms of Lessing and Rame, and the narrative existentialism of Conrad, Coetzee, Dostoevsky and DeLillo.