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Law and the Public Sphere in Africa: La Palabre And Other Writings (World Philosophies Ser.)
by Jean Godefroy Bidima Laura HengeholdJean Godefroy Bidima's La Palabre examines the traditional African institution of palaver as a way to create dialogue and open exchange in an effort to resolve conflict and promote democracy. In the wake of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commissions and the gacaca courts in Rwanda, Bidima offers a compelling model of how to develop an African public space where dialogue can combat misunderstanding. This volume, which includes other essays on legal processes, cultural diversity, memory, and the internet in Africa, offers English-speaking readers the opportunity to become acquainted with a highly original and important postcolonial thinker.
The Law as a Moral Agent: Making People Good (SpringerBriefs in Law)
by Charles Foster Jonathan HerringThis book examines the controversial and repercussive contention that an objective of the law should be to promote personal morality - to make people ethically better. It surveys a number of domains, including criminal law, tort law, contract law, family law, and medical law (particularly the realm of moral enhancement technologies) asking for each: (a) Does the existing law seek to promote personal morality? (b) If so, what is the account of morality promoted, and what is the substantive content? (c) Does it work? and (d) Is this a legitimate objective?
Law as Institution
by Massimo La TorreThe book's argument moves from discussing the relation between law and power. Theories defending the primacy of law over power are played against doctrines which center around the prevailing role of law. Legal positivism and natural law are here the real issue at stake. Constitutionalism and the rule of law are then seen as a development of the modern natural law tradition. But the book's main move is a consideration of law as a phenomenon possibly connected with language. Once traditional imperativist strategies are seen as unsatisfactory, and nevertheless law is accepted as being a social fact, there is the possibility of addressing such fact as somehow analogically linked with a system of language. In a sense, language is thought of as fundamental or primordial ontological dimension, so that this can offer the key to address and understand the question of what reality is. The question of meaning overlaps that of being, not only as far as the being of the world is concerned but also with respect to the nature of law. The concept of law -could not be approached without addressing the issue of law as a language. To this purpose "use theory" is assessed and taken as a possible candidate to build up a sensible theory of legal validity. From this angle institutionalism is then seen to be the most fruitful approach to conceptualize the ontology of law, though some reform in the standard theory and in its more recent developments is proposed to render more plausible the notion of "institution". Finally, the strong normative side of a (legal) institution is studied. The relation of law and morality is assessed by pointing out the difference between the "constitutive" character of law and the "regulative" core of morality. However, an institution is both an "is" and an "ought", while law is at the same time "facticity" and "normativity.
Law as Politics: Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism
by David DyzenhausWhile antiliberal legal theorist Carl Schmitt has long been considered by Europeans to be one of this century's most significant political philosophers, recent challenges to the fundamental values of liberal democracies have made Schmitt's writings an unavoidable subject of debate in North America as well. In an effort to advance our understanding not only of Schmitt but of current problems of liberal democracy, David Dyzenhaus presents translations of classic German essays on Schmitt alongside more recent writings by distinguished political theorists and jurists. Neither a defense of nor an attack on Schmitt, Law as Politics offers the first balanced response to his powerful critique of liberalism. One of the major players in the 1920s debates, an outspoken critic of the Versailles Treaty and the Weimar Constitution, and a member of the Nazi party who provided juridical respectability to Hitler's policies, Schmitt contended that people are a polity only to the extent that they share common enemies. He saw the liberal notion of a peaceful world of universal citizens as a sheer impossibility and attributed the problems of Weimar to liberalism and its inability to cope with pluralism and political conflict. In the decade since his death, Schmitt's writings have been taken up by both the right and the left and scholars differ greatly in their evaluation of Schmitt's ideas. Law as Politics thematically organizes in one volume the varying engagements and confrontations with Schmitt's work and allows scholars to acknowledge--and therefore be in a better position to negotiate--an important paradox inscribed in the very nature of liberal democracy. Law as Politics will interest political philosophers, legal theorists, historians, and anyone interested in Schmitt's relevance to current discussions of liberalism.Contributors. Heiner Bielefeldt, Ronald Beiner, Ernst-Wolfgang Bockenforde, Renato Cristi, David Dyzenhaus, Robert Howse, Ellen Kennedy, Dominique Leydet, Ingeborg Maus, John P. McCormick, Reinhard Mehring, Chantal Mouffe, William E. Scheuerman, Jeffrey Seitzer
Law as Refuge of Anarchy: Societies without Hegemony or State (Untimely Meditations #15)
by Hermann AmbornA study of communities in the Horn of Africa where reciprocity is a dominant social principle, offering a concrete countermodel to the hierarchical state.Over the course of history, people have developed many varieties of communal life; the state, with its hierarchical structure, is only one of the possibilities for society. In this book, leading anthropologist Hermann Amborn identifies a countermodel to the state, describing communities where reciprocity is a dominant social principle and where egalitarianism is a matter of course. He pays particular attention to such communities in the Horn of Africa, where nonhierarchical, nonstate societies exist within the borders of a hierarchical structured state. This form of community, Amborn shows, is not a historical forerunner to monarchy or the primitive state, nor is it obsolete as a social model. These communities offer a concrete counterexample to societies with strict hierarchical structures.Amborn investigates social forms of expression, ideas, practices, and institutions that oppose the hegemony of one group over another, exploring how conceptions of values and laws counteract tendencies toward the accumulation of power. He examines not only how the nonhegemonic ethos is reflected in law but also how anarchic social formations can exist. In the Horn of Africa, the autonomous jurisdiction of these societies protects against destructive outside influences, offers a counterweight to hegemonic violence, and contributes to the stabilization of communal life. In an era of widespread dissatisfaction with Western political systems, Amborn's study offers an opportunity to shift from traditional theories of anarchism and nonhegemony that project a stateless society to consider instead stateless societies already in operation.
Law, Debt, and Merchant Power: The Civil Courts of 18th Century Halifax
by The Osgoode Society James MuirIn the early history of Halifax (1749-1766), debt litigation was extremely common. People from all classes frequently used litigation and its use in private matters was higher than almost all places in the British Empire in the 18th century. In Law, Debt, and Merchant Power, James Muir offers an extensive analysis of the civil cases of the time as well as the reasons behind their frequency. Muir's lively and detailed account of the individuals involved in litigation reveals a paradoxical society where debtors were also debt-collectors. Law, Debt, and Merchant Power demonstrates how important the law was for people in their business affairs and how they shaped it for their own ends.
Law, Ethics and Emerging Military Technologies: Confronting Disruptive Innovation (War, Conflict and Ethics)
by George LucasThis book addresses issues of legal and moral governance arising in the development, deployment, and eventual uses of emerging technologies in military operations. Proverbial wisdom has it that law and morality always lag behind technological innovation. Hence, the book aims to identify, enumerate, and constructively address the problems of adequate governance for the development, deployment, and eventual uses of military technologies that have been newly introduced into military operations or which will be available in the near future. Proposals for modifications in governance, the book argues, closely track the anxieties of many critics of these technologies to the extent that they will proliferate, prove destructive in unanticipated ways, and partially or wholly escape regulation under current treaties and regulatory regimes. In addition to such concerns in domestic and especially in international law, the book addresses ethical norms in the professions involved in the design and eventual use of specific technologies, principally involving the professional norms of practice in engineering and the military (as well as biomedical and health care practice), which impose moral obligations on their members to avoid reckless endangerment or criminal negligence in the course of their activities. Thus, in addition to exploring the application of existing legal regimes and moral norms, the book examines how these professions might develop or improve the voluntary constraints on forms of malfeasance that are enshrined in their histories and codes of best practices. This book should prove of great interest to students of ethics, military studies, philosophy of war and peace, law, and international relations.
Law, Ethics and the Biopolitical
by Amy SwiffenLaw, Ethics and the Biopolitical explores the idea that legal authority is no longer related to national sovereignty, but to the ‘moral’ attempt to nurture life. The book argues that whilst the relationship between law and ethics has long been a central concern in legal studies, it is now the relationship between law and life that is becoming crucial. The waning legitimacy of conventional conceptions of sovereignty is signalled the renewal of a version of natural law, evident in discourses of human rights, that de-emphasises the role of a divine law-giver in favour of an Aristotelian conception of the natural purpose of life and the ‘common good’. Synthesising elements of legal scholarship on sovereignty, theories of biopolitics and biopower, as well as recent developments in the domains of ethics, Amy Swiffen examines the invocation of ‘life’ as a foundation for legal authority. The book documents the connection between law, life and contemporary forms of biopolitical power by critically analysing the fundamental principles of the bioethical paradigm. Unique in its critical and cross-disciplinary approach, Law, Ethics and the Biopolitical will be of interest to students and teachers in the areas of law and society, law and literature, critical legal studies, social theory, bioethics, psychoanalysis, and biopolitics.
Law, Human Agency and Autonomic Computing: The Philosophy of Law Meets the Philosophy of Technology
by Mireille Hildebrandt Antoinette RouvroyLaw, Human Agency and Autonomic Computing interrogates the legal implications of the notion and experience of human agency implied by the emerging paradigm of autonomic computing, and the socio-technical infrastructures it supports. The development of autonomic computing and ambient intelligence – self-governing systems – challenge traditional philosophical conceptions of human self-constitution and agency, with significant consequences for the theory and practice of constitutional self-government. Ideas of identity, subjectivity, agency, personhood, intentionality, and embodiment are all central to the functioning of modern legal systems. But once artificial entities become more autonomic, and less dependent on deliberate human intervention, criteria like agency, intentionality and self-determination, become too fragile to serve as defining criteria for human subjectivity, personality or identity, and for characterizing the processes through which individual citizens become moral and legal subjects. Are autonomic – yet artificial – systems shrinking the distance between (acting) subjects and (acted upon) objects? How ‘distinctively human’ will agency be in a world of autonomic computing? Or, alternatively, does autonomic computing merely disclose that we were never, in this sense, ‘human’ anyway? A dialogue between philosophers of technology and philosophers of law, this book addresses these questions, as it takes up the unprecedented opportunity that autonomic computing and ambient intelligence offer for a reassessment of the most basic concepts of law.
Law in the Time of Oxymora: A Synaesthesia of Language, Logic and Law (Juris Diversitas)
by Rostam J. NeuwirthWhat do different concepts like true lie, bad luck, honest thief, old news, spacetime, glocalization, symplexity, sustainable development, constant change, soft law, substantive due process, pure law, bureaucratic efficiency and global justice have in common? What connections do they share with innumerable paradoxes, like the ones of happiness, time, globalization, sex, and of free will and fate? Law in the Time of Oxymora provides answers to these conundrums by critically comparing the apparent rise in recent years of the use of rhetorical figures called "essentially oxymoronic concepts" (i.e. oxymoron, enantiosis and paradoxes) in the areas of art, science and law. Albeit to varying degrees, these concepts share the quality of giving expression to apparent contradictions. Through this quality, they also challenge the scientific paradigm rooted in the dualistic thinking and binary logic that is traditionally used in the West, as opposed to the East, where a paradoxical mode of thinking and fuzzy logic is said to have been cultivated. Following a review of oxymora and paradoxes in art and various scientific writings, hundreds of "hard cases" featuring oxymora and a comprehensive review of the legal literature are discussed, revealing evidence suggesting that the present scientific paradigm of dualism alone will no longer be able to tackle the challenges arising from increasing diversity and complexity coupled with an apparent acceleration of change. Law in the Time of Oxymora reaches the surprising conclusion that essentially oxymoronic concepts may inaugurate a new era of cognition, involving the ways the senses interact and how we reason, think and make decisions in law and in life.
Law Is a Moral Practice
by Scott HershovitzA powerful argument for the essential role of morality in law, getting at the heart of key debates in public life.What is law? And how does it relate to morality? It’s common to think that law and morality are different ways of regulating our lives. But Scott Hershovitz says that this is a mistake: law is a part of our moral lives. It’s a tool we use to adjust our moral relationships. The legal claims we advance in court, Hershovitz argues, are moral claims. And our legal conflicts are moral conflicts.Law Is a Moral Practice supplies fresh answers to fundamental questions about the nature of law and helps us better appreciate why we disagree about law so deeply. Reviving a neglected tradition of legal thought most famously associated with Ronald Dworkin, Hershovitz engages with important legal and political controversies of our time, including recent debates about constitutional interpretation and the obligations of citizens and officials to obey the law.Leavened by entertaining personal stories, guided by curiosity rather than ideology, moving beyond entrenched dichotomies like the opposition between positivism and natural law, Law Is a Moral Practice is a thought-provoking investigation of the philosophical issues behind real-world legal debates.
Law, Legal Culture and Society: Mirrored Identities of the Legal Order (Studies in the Sociology of Law)
by Alberto FebbrajoThis volume addresses the pluralistic identity of the legal order. It argues that the mutual reflexivity of the different ways society perceives law and law perceives society eclipses the unique formal identity of written law. It advances a distinctive approach to the plural ways in which legal cultures work in a modern society, through the metaphor of the mirror. As a mirror of society, it distinguishes between the structure and function of legal culture within the legal system, and the external representation of law in society. This duality is further problematized in relation to the increasing transnationalisation of law. Based on a multi-level interpretation of the concept of legal culture, the work is divided into three parts: the first addresses the mutual reflections of social and legal norms that support a pluralist representation of internal legal cultures, the second concentrates on the external legal cultures that constantly enable pragmatic adjustments of the legal order to its social environment, and the third concludes the book with a theoretical discussion of the issues presented.
Law, Legislation and Liberty: A new statement of the liberal principles of justice and political economy (Routledge Classics)
by F. A. HayekWith a new foreword by Paul Kelly 'I regard Hayek's work as a new opening of the most fundamental debate in the field of political philosophy' – Sir Karl Popper 'This promises to be the crowning work of a scholar who has devoted a lifetime to thinking? about society and its values. The entire work must surely amount to an immense contribution to social and legal philosophy' - Philosophical Studies Law, Legislation and Liberty is Hayek's major statement of political philosophy and one of the most ambitious yet subtle defences of a free market society ever written. A robust defence of individual liberty, it is also crucial for understanding Hayek’s influential views concerning the role of the state: far from being an innocent bystander, he argues that the state has an important role to play in defending the norms and practices of an ordered and free society. His arguments had a profound influence on the policies of Thatcher in the 1980s and resonate today in visions of the ‘Big Society’. First published in three separate volumes, this Routledge Classics edition makes one of his most important books available in a single volume. Essential reading for understanding the background to the recent world economic turmoil and financial crisis, it also foreshadows the subsequent heated debate about regulation and political governance if such disasters are to be avoided in the future.
Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Volume 19: A New Statement Of The Liberal Principles Of Justice And Political Economy (Routledge Classics Ser. #19)
by F.A. HayekA new edition of F. A. Hayek’s three-part opus Law, Legislation, and Liberty, collated in a single volume In this critical entry in the University of Chicago’s Collected Works of F. A. Hayek series, political philosopher Jeremy Shearmur collates Hayek’s three-part study of law and liberty and places Hayek’s writings in careful historical context. Incisive and unrestrained, Law, Legislation, and Liberty is Hayek at his late-life best, making it essential reading for understanding the philosopher’s politics and worldview. These three volumes constitute a scaling up of the framework offered in Hayek’s famed The Road to Serfdom. Volume 1, Rules and Order, espouses the virtues of classical liberalism; Volume 2, The Mirage of Social Justice, examines the societal forces that undermine liberalism and, with it, liberalism’s capacity to induce “spontaneous order”; and Volume 3, The Political Order of a Free People, proposes alternatives and interventions against emerging anti-liberal movements, including a rule of law that resides in stasis with personal freedom. Shearmur’s treatment of this challenging work—including an immersive new introduction, a conversion of Hayek’s copious endnotes to footnotes, corrections to Hayek’s references and quotations, and the provision of translations to material that Hayek cited only in languages other than English—lends it new importance and accessibility. Rendered anew for the next generations of scholars, this revision of Hayek’s Law, Legislation, and Liberty is sure to become the standard.
Law, Liberty and State
by Dyzenhaus, David and Poole, Thomas David Dyzenhaus Thomas Poole"Oakeshott, Hayek and Schmitt are associated with a conservative reaction to the 'progressive' forces of the twentieth century. Each was an acute analyst of the juristic form of the modern state and the relationship of that form to the idea of liberty under a system of public, general law. Hayek had the highest regard for Schmitt's understanding of the rule of law state despite Schmitt's hostility to it, and he owed the distinction he drew in his own work between a purpose-governed form of state and a law-governed form to Oakeshott. However, the three have until now rarely been considered together, something which will be ever more apparent as political theorists, lawyers and theorists of international relations turn to the foundational texts of twentieth-century thought at a time when debate about liberal democratic theory might appear to have run out of steam"--
Law, Liberty, and the Rule of Law
by Imer B. Flores Kenneth E. HimmaIn recent years, there has been a substantial increase in concern for the rule of law. Not only have there been a multitude of articles and books on the essence, nature, scope and limitation of the law, but citizens, elected officials, law enforcement officers and the judiciary have all been actively engaged in this debate. Thus, the concept of the rule of law is as multifaceted and contested as it's ever been, and this book explores the essence of that concept, including its core principles, its rules, and the necessity of defining, or even redefining, the basic concept. Law, Liberty, and the Rule of Law offers timely and unique insights on numerous themes relevant to the rule of law. It discusses in detail the proper scope and limitations of adjudication and legislation, including the challenges not only of limiting legislative and executive power via judicial review but also of restraining active judicial lawmaking while simultaneously guaranteeing an independent judiciary interested in maintaining a balance of power. It also addresses the relationship not only between the rule of law, human rights and separation of powers but also the rule of law, constitutionalism and democracy.
Law, Literature and the Power of Reading: Literalism and Photography in the Nineteenth Century
by Suneel MehmiAt the intersection of law, literature and history, this book interrogates how a dominant contemporary idea of law emerged out of specific ideas of reading in the nineteenth century. Reading shapes our identities. How we read shapes who we are. Reading also shapes our conceptions of what the law is, because the law is also a practice of reading. Focusing on the works of key Victorian writers closely associated with legal practice, this book addresses the way in which the identity of the reader of law has been modelled on the identity of the political elite. At the same time, it shows how other readers of law have been marginalized. The book thus shows how a construction of the law has emerged from the ordering of a power that discriminates between different readers and readings. More specifically, and in response to the emerging media of photography – and, with it, potentially subversive ideas of exposure and visibility – the book shows that there have been dominant, hidden and unrecognised guides to legal reading and to legal thought. And in making these visible, the book also aims to make them contestable. This secret history of law will appeal to legal historians, legal theorists, those working at the intersection of law and literature and others with interests in law and the visual.
Law, Love and Language
by Herbert MccabeWhat is ethics all about? In this book Herbert McCabe suggests that it is about loving, obeying laws and talking to people. In doing so, he offers an introduction to ethical thinking for anyone with a serious interest in moral philosophy. He does so as someone who writes with a Christian audience in mind. Most of his arguments, however, do not presuppose a believing Christian readership.
Law, Memory, Violence: Uncovering the Counter-Archive
by Stewart Motha Honni Van RijswijkThe demand for recognition, responsibility, and reparations is regularly invoked in the wake of colonialism, genocide, and mass violence: there can be no victims without recognition, no perpetrators without responsibility, and no justice without reparations. Or so it seems from law’s limited repertoire for assembling the archive after ‘the disaster’. Archival and memorial practices are central to contexts where transitional justice, addressing historical wrongs, or reparations are at stake. The archive serves as a repository or ‘storehouse’ of what needs to be gathered and recognised so that it can be left behind in order to inaugurate the future. The archive manifests law’s authority and its troubled conscience. It is an indispensable part of the liberal legal response to biopolitical violence. This collection challenges established approaches to transitional justice by opening up new dialogues about the problem of assembling law’s archive. The volume presents research drawn from multiple jurisdictions that address the following questions. What resists being archived? What spaces and practices of memory - conscious and unconscious - undo legal and sovereign alibis and confessions? And what narrative forms expose the limits of responsibility, recognition, and reparations? By treating the law as an ‘archive’, this book traces the failure of universalised categories such as 'perpetrator', 'victim', 'responsibility', and 'innocence,' posited by the liberal legal state. It thereby uncovers law’s counter-archive as a challenge to established forms of representing and responding to violence.
Law, Necessity, and the Crisis of the State: The Early Writings of Santi Romano (Law and Politics)
by Mariano CroceThis book contains the first English translations of Santi Romano’s important essays, ‘On the Decree Laws and the State of Siege During the Earthquakes in Messina and Reggio Calabria’ (1909) and ‘The Modern State and its Crisis’ (1910). Before Santi Romano wrote his masterpiece The Legal Order in 1917–18, he lay the foundations for his ground-breaking theory of law in these two essays, which are still central to scholarly debates about his legacy. The main focus of ‘On the Decree Laws’ is the concept of necessity as a source of law. Such a controversial view anticipated the much more renowned conception of the state of exception advanced later by Carl Schmitt in his Political Theology and has provided a reference point for Giorgio Agamben. The second essay, ‘The Modern State and its Crisis’, is concerned with the emergence of social forces that the early 20th-century administrative state was struggling to tame. Pursuing an insight that he would develop in The Legal Order, Romano argued that a solution could be found in a public law theory that was able to reconcile the need for a shared constitutional frame with the internal orderings of nonstate movements. Indispensable for contemporary scholars to understand how Romano’s most revolutionary notions came about, as well as to fully appreciate the theoretical import of his concept of law, this book will appeal to legal and political theorists and others who are interested in how law deals and should deal with emergencies and social crises.
Law, Obligation, Community (Critical Studies in Jurisprudence)
by Daniel Matthews Scott VeitchAgainst an ever-expanding and diversifying ‘rights talk’, this book re-opens the question of obligation from not only legal but also ethical, sociological and political perspectives. Its premise is that obligation has a primacy ahead of rights, because rights attach to practices and modes of being that are already saturated with obligations. Obligations thus lie at the core not just of law but of community. Yet the distinctive meanings, range and situations of obligation have tended to remain under-theorised in legal scholarship. In response, this book examines the sense in which we are multiply ‘bound beings’, to law and legal institutions, as much as we are to place, community, memory and the various social institutions that give shape to collective life. Sharing this set of concerns, each of the international group of scholars contributing to this volume traces the specificity of the binding force of obligations, their techniques and modes of expression, as well as their centrally important role in giving form to lawful relations. Together they provide an innovative and challenging contribution to legal scholarship: one that will also be of relevance to those working in politics, philosophy and social theory.
The Law of Cryonics: A Legal Philosophical and Financial Analysis
by Pierre de Gioia Carabellese Camilla Della GiustinaThis book, through the lens of interdisciplinary legal analysis, draws a subtle balance between bioethics and financial regulation, with the latter playing an unexpectedly crucial role in the way life may potentially be governed. The legal topic of human preservation or cryoconservation was initially developed in the United States in the case of Donaldson v. van de Kamp. More recently, the subject arose in Europe as a result of a decision of the High Court, Family Division, London. This new theme of cryoconservation has unfolded through multifaceted forms, including its impact on regulation. In an area that may, at least prima facie, be regarded as belonging to the traditional realm of medical law, the findings presented here suggest that its potential has strong economic implications. The work argues that it is necessary also to look at this subject from a more interdisciplinary perspective, drawing a fil rouge between two otherwise seemingly opposing areas of law: medical law and financial regulation. The legal framework draws on the Anglo-American, and the United Kingdom in particular, along with civil law analysis from Italy. The work will be of interest to researchers and academics in the areas of medical law, legal philosophy, financial law, property law and insurance law.
The Law Of Democracy: Legal Structure Of The Political Process
by Samuel Issacharoff Pamela Karlan Richard Pildes Nathan PersilyThis book created the field of the law of democracy, offering a systematic account of the legal construction of American democracy. This edition is the most significant revision in a decade. With the addition of Nathaniel Persily, the book now turns to a changed legal environment following such blockbuster Supreme Court decisions as Citizens United and Shelby County. This edition streamlines the coverage of the Voting Rights Act, expands the scope of coverage of campaign finance and political corruption issues, and turns to the new dispute over voter access to the ballot. The basic structure of the book continues to follow the historical development of the individual right to vote; current struggles over gerrymandering; the relationship of the state to political parties; the constitutional and policy issues surrounding campaign-finance reform; and the tension between majority rule and fair representation of minorities in democratic bodies.
The Law of God: The Philosophical History of an Idea
by Rémi BragueThe law of God: these words conjure an image of Moses breaking the tablets at Mount Sinai, but the history of the alliance between law and divinity is so much longer, and its scope so much broader, than a single Judeo-Christian scene can possibly suggest. In his stunningly ambitious new history, Rémi Brague goes back three thousand years to trace this idea of divine law in the West from prehistoric religions to modern times—giving new depth to today’s discussions about the role of God in worldly affairs. Brague masterfully describes the differing conceptions of divine law in Judaic, Islamic, and Christian traditions and illuminates these ideas with a wide range of philosophical, political, and religious sources. In conclusion, he addresses the recent break in the alliance between law and divinity—when modern societies, far from connecting the two, started to think of law simply as the rule human community gives itself. Exploring what this disconnection means for the contemporary world, Brague—powerfully expanding on the project he began with The Wisdom of the World—re-engages readers in a millennia-long intellectual tradition, ultimately arriving at a better comprehension of our own modernity. “Brague’s sense of intellectual adventure is what makes his work genuinely exciting to read. The Law of God offers a challenge that anyone concerned with today’s religious struggles ought to take up.”—Adam Kirsch, New YorkSun “Scholars and students of contemporary world events, to the extent that these may be viewed as a clash of rival fundamentalisms, will have much to gain from Brague’s study. Ideally, in that case, the book seems to be both an obvious primer and launching pad for further scholarship.”—Times Higher Education Supplement
The Law of Peoples
by John RawlsThis work consists of two parts: the essay The Idea of Public Reason Revisited, first published in 1997, and The Law of Peoples, a major reworking of a much shorter article by the same name published in 1993. Taken together, they are the culmination of more than 50 years of reflection on liberalism and on some of the most pressing problems of our times by John Rawls.