Thomson Reuters Legal Solutions offers comprehensive books and digital tools for judicial rules research, including legal books, ProView eBooks and legal research software solutions. Filtered by jurisdiction and jurisdiction, find the legal book collection or publisher that best suits your law practice. No, you don`t. The rule of law is a more abstract issue. This raises questions about what the rule of law means and what the purpose of the law is. These are not questions that practitioners tend to ask. They occur before the dirty phase where you actually have problems that you need to solve. Tom Bingham`s book is a wise book that contains many other things beyond what we have just discussed: for example, his views on international law; or the sovereignty of Parliament. It is the result of a great experience. It is not entirely clear.
Essentially, he says that a decent society should want these things, and I totally agree with that. A decent society should want them. But you want them because they are desirable in themselves, not because they are eternal truths involved in the rule of law. Was there really no rule of law in England before the creation of the rights of which Tom Bingham speaks? In some cases, this was not the case until the Human Rights Act was passed in 1998. I am a legal positivist. I wouldn`t call myself a legal philosopher, but most legal philosophers today are positivists. And I think they`re right. The great positivist who constantly disagreed with Dworkin was Dworkin`s teacher, Herbert Hart, whose book The Concept of Law is probably the best modern statement of the positivist position. I would say that Victorian Britain was shaped by the rule of law, although many of the rights Tom Bingham talks about did not exist at the time. He certainly believed that the law was there to contain the tyranny of violence, but he believed that the only way to curb the tyranny of violence was to have an absolute ruler – it didn`t have to be a monarch, but obviously Hobbes thought in those terms, because in the seventeenth century most societies were monarchies. Hobbes said that the law is the instrument of government, and the purpose of government is to defend us against anarchy. He was an apologist for absolute government.
He believed that the law was a creation of human societies and not some kind of eternal moral truth. Societies consist of people who have ceded their freedom to an absolute ruler in exchange for security and protection from indiscriminate violence. So the law was what the sovereign ordered to achieve it. No. I think it`s different. Ronald Dworkin attempts to justify the thesis that moral principles take precedence over law and can limit legitimate laws for corporations. Tom Bingham`s book is much more practical and down-to-earth. It essentially describes how the law works in modern Britain.
He is certainly right when he says that human rights are an important part of it, but I find it hard to agree with him that it is inherent in the rule of law. This is not the case; They can have the rule of law, even if the laws are repugnant. There are societies that are undoubtedly governed by the rule of law. They prohibit arbitrary interference with people`s liberty and/or life, but they do not enjoy the full range of fundamental rights that we have. Nigel Warburton — philosopher, host and creator of the popular podcast Philosophy — picks five of the best public philosophy books published in 2021, including Defense of Just Wrath, an examination of the concept of “time management,” and an intellectual biography of political philosopher and Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt. 12. Playing by the Rules: The Search for Legal Foundations in Homosexuality Cases – Indonesia, Lebanon, Egypt, Senegal Considering legal rules not as determinants of behavior, but as reference points for behavior, this volume examines how rules are called, referenced, interpreted, put forward or blurred. It also questions the way in which lawyers and laymen conceive and participate in the construction of facts and rules, thus actively participating in the life of the law through decisions, defenses, pleas, files, evidence, interviews and documents. With a view to formulating concepts such as person, evidence, intent, cause and responsibility in the context of legal practice, Legal Rules in Practice provides the outline of a praxiological anthropology of law – an anthropology that focuses on words, concepts and reasoning as they are actively used to resolve conflicts through legal rules. As such, it will appeal to sociologists, anthropologists, and lawyers interested in ethnomethodology, rule-based behavior, and practical thinking. The book is not about animal rights! The title derives from an aphorism attributed to the archaic Greek poet Archilochus, that the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one great thing. So what he`s talking about is the difference between thinkers who bring ideas into one big idea (hedgehogs) and thinkers who simply skate across the entire surface of human knowledge (foxes).
Introduction: Legal Rules in Practice: An Exploration of Legal Life Five Books wants to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your book selection (or even just what you say about them), please email us at editor@fivebooks.com Since the resumption of the Scottish Parliament in 1999, nationalist and independence sentiment in Scotland has risen sharply. Here, political scientist Murray Leith of the University of West Scotland reflects on the transformation of Scottish identity and separatist visions by recommending five key books on Scottish nationalism. He doesn`t have one. This is the great weakness of his argument. They need a source of legitimacy. If the legitimacy of a moral rule is not conferred by collective social choices, what makes it legitimate? As you point out, in religious times, the answer would have been simply that moral laws came from God. The same could be said of totalitarian dictatorships.
Moral principles come from the ideology of their ruling groups. But when you have a democracy, as Dworkin assumes, it becomes extremely difficult to identify a source of legitimacy other than the direct or indirect election of the people. Hobbes needed God to create a moral rule. We now have the problem of developing moral rules without external authorities like God, but this was a refinement that Hobbes did not have to face. The criterion I wanted to use when choosing my five books is that each one should be challenging and have a high literary quality. And Mill writes wonderfully. His style couldn`t be more different from Hobbes`, but it`s elegant and thoughtful, like everything Mill wrote. His autobiography is a masterpiece. We live in an age that expects conformity and believes that moral judgments must be made collectively and imposed on those who disagree.
I think Mill would have regretted the pressure from social media to conform to certain ideas. He would have regretted all the laws that require us to act in a particular way, even if it does not harm others, for example the rules on fur farming. Much of modern law gives a coercive effect to moral principles on which we do not all agree and whose observance by one individual makes no difference to anyone else. It simply gives true believers the satisfaction of knowing that they have imposed their values on someone else. This was the essence of what Mill opposed. Again, The Rule of Law is a book with which I profoundly disagree on a very critical point, because Tom Bingham believed that the rule of law requires the recognition of a wide range of legal claims that are more or less consistent with the Convention on Human Rights. I find that very difficult. privacy, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly; Of course, these things are desirable, and a civilized society should want them, but a society can be governed by the rule of law regardless of the content of the law, with one exception.