The rule of law is a political ideal today endorsed and promoted worldwide. Or is it? In a significant contribution to the field, Nick Cheesman argues that Myanmar is a country in which the rule of ...law is 'lexically present but semantically absent'. Charting ideas and practices from British colonial rule through military dictatorship to the present day, Cheesman calls upon political and legal theory to explain how and why institutions animated by a concern for law and order oppose the rule of law. Empirically grounded in both Burmese and English sources, including criminal trial records and wide ranging official documents, Opposing the Rule of Law offers the first significant study of courts in contemporary Myanmar. It sheds new light on the politics of courts during dark times and sharply illuminates the tension between the demand for law and the imperatives of order.
This volume brings together essays on Athenian law by Edward M. Harris, who challenges much of the recent scholarship on this topic. Presenting a balanced analysis of the legal system in ancient ...Athens, Harris stresses the importance of substantive issues and their contribution to our understanding of different types of legal procedures. He combines careful philological analysis with close attention to the political and social contexts of individual statutes. Collectively, the essays in this volume demonstrate the relationship between law and politics, the nature of the economy, the position of women, and the role of the legal system in Athenian society. They also show that the Athenians were more sophisticated in their approach to legal issues than has been assumed in the modern scholarship on this topic.
In December 2023, China’s national legislature, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPCSC), adopted the Decision on Improving and Strengthening the System of Recording and ...Review, a major bill aimed at reforming “recording and review” (R&R)—China’s system of parallel processes for resolving legislative conflicts. Under R&R, an enacting body—that is, a governmental body authorized to issue documents of a legislative nature—must file its legislation with the designated reviewing body for subsequent review. Some would give more teeth to the rectification process so that enacting bodies do not abuse the latitude they enjoy. How the new measures would work in practice and whether they would achieve the intended goals, however, remain to be seen.
This book addresses the question of why governments sometimes follow the law and other times choose to evade the law. The traditional answer of jurists has been that laws have an autonomous causal ...efficacy: law rules when actions follow anterior norms; the relation between laws and actions is one of obedience, obligation, or compliance. Contrary to this conception, the authors defend a positive interpretation where the rule of law results from the strategic choices of relevant actors. Rule of law is just one possible outcome in which political actors process their conflicts using whatever resources they can muster: only when these actors seek to resolve their conflicts by recourse to la, does law rule. What distinguishes 'rule-of-law' as an institutional equilibrium from 'rule-by-law' is the distribution of power. The former emerges when no one group is strong enough to dominate the others and when the many use institutions to promote their interest.
How should the European Union cope with Member States that no longer respect the basic values of the Union? This article reviews the responses of the major European Union institutions to Poland and ...Hungary as their governments removed checks on their power, eliminated the independence of judiciaries and failed to honour their European commitments. As the article demonstrates, the responses of EU institutions have so far been ineffective in bringing these Member States back into line with European values. We examine the various proposals that have been made to do better, concluding that there is promise in some legal strategies that are available now, but have yet to be tried.
As an important accomplishment of self-governance exploration for the Chinese nation, the Chinese legal system has contributed significantly to human rule-of-law civilization, and should be ...reinterpreted from three dimensions: historical tradition, prevailing practice, and future development. Following the constant logic of rule-of-law development in China, Chinese rule-of-law modernization marks a new era of the Chinese legal system and is a specific embodiment of Chinese modernization in the domain of rule of law. The Communist Party of China (CPC) has explored the China’s socialist rule-of-law practice with Chinese characteristics, carried forward the essence of fine Chinese rule-of-law culture, and learned from others’ important rule of-law achievements, modernizing the rule of law for the needs of China. Furthermore, XI Jinping Thought on the Rule of Law, adapting to the times to promote the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, understands and grasps the basic laws of national governance, the laws of socialist rule-of-law building and the principles of law-based humane civilization development. The Chinese legal system has thereby been revised and expanded through linking history with reality, the international scene with the domestic one, and theory with practice. Surely, the updated Chinese legal system with China characteristics and with world significance will return to global centre-stage in rule-of-law development. Also, the updated Chinese legal system in the new era will embrace the revival of Chinese rule-of-law civilization, while the Chinese rule-of-law modernization will advance the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.
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17.
FROM THE PUBLISHER Grimm, Paul W
Judicature,
01/2023, Volume:
107, Issue:
1
Journal Article
The modernization path of the Chinese rule of law reflects the glorious process of the Communist Party of China (CPC)'s continuous exploration of the rule of law development. It has created a new ...form of rule of law civilization for humanity, one that has not only profoundly changed China but is also deeply influencing the world historical process. Under the leadership of the CPC, the Chinese people have achieved the innovation of legal mechanisms, text, and discourse in their century-long endeavor for the rule of law. This highlights the distinctive features of the Chinese rule of law civilization. The innovation of legal mechanisms is the foundation of the modernization of the Chinese rule of law, indicating that through the Party's century-long endeavor for the rule of law, a legal leadership mechanism has been formed, in which the Party exercises overall leadership and coordinates the efforts of all sides; the innovation of legal text is the manifestation of modernization of the Chinese rule of law, indicating that through the Party's century-long endeavor for the rule of law, the socialist legal system with Chinese characteristics is gradually moving toward a new stage of codification in which the promulgation and implementation of the Civil Code of the People's Republic of China is a milestone; and the innovation of legal discourse is the core of modernization of the Chinese rule of law, indicating that through the Party's century-long endeavor for the rule of law, the continuous refinement of the Chinese legal discourse system is playing a key role in providing theoretical support and legal reasoning.
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For more than a decade now a profound rule‐of‐law crisis has gripped the European Union, and while the fight for the rule of law has topped not only the academic but also the judicial and political ...agenda, the results have been disappointingly meagre. This article argues that the main reason for that should be sought in a political strategic move of justifying the assaults on the rule of law by resorting to an “illiberal democracy.” This premeditated political narrative shift has unleashed onto the political sphere and onto public discourse at large comprehensive doctrines which had hitherto been left dormant thanks to an overlapping consensus on the rule of law as a central building block of the political conception of justice à la Rawls. Once this overlapping consensus was broken, the rule of law itself lost its neutral character as a referee on the right among the many conceptions of the good, itself becoming part of the highly politicized power play for dominance among irreconcilable—liberal and illiberal—comprehensive doctrines. The overlapping consensus in the EU is thus broken, but there are no conceptual reasons inherent to the rule of law itself for which it could not be rebuilt in the future.
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The contemporary U.S. legal culture is marked by ubiquitous battles among various groups attempting to seize control of the law and wield it against others in pursuit of their particular agenda. This ...battle takes place in administrative, legislative, and judicial arenas at both the state and federal levels. This book identifies the underlying source of these battles in the spread of the instrumental view of law - the idea that law is purely a means to an end - in a context of sharp disagreement over the social good. It traces the rise of the instrumental view of law in the course of the past two centuries, then demonstrates the pervasiveness of this view of law and its implications within the contemporary legal culture, and ends by showing the various ways in which seeing law in purely instrumental terms threatens to corrode the rule of law.
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