Cultural Expertise, Law, and Rights introduces readers to the theory and practice of cultural expertise in the resolution of conflicts and the claim of rights in diverse societies. Combining theory ...and case-studies of the use of cultural expertise in real situations, and in a great variety of fields, this is the first book to offer a comprehensive examination of the field of cultural expertise: its intellectual orientations, practical applications and ethical implications. This book engages an extensive and interdisciplinary variety of topics – ranging from race, language, sexuality, Indigenous rights and women’s rights to immigration and asylum laws, international commercial arbitration and criminal law. It also offers a truly global perspective covering cultural expertise in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and North America. Finally, the book offers theoretical and practical guidance for the ethical use of cultural expert knowledge. This is an essential volume for teachers and students in the social sciences – especially law, anthropology, and sociology – and members of the legal professions who engage in cross-cultural dispute resolution, asylum and migration, private international law and other fields of law in which cultural arguments play a role. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
Perhaps no kind of regulation is more common or less useful than mandated disclosure-requiring one party to a transaction to give the other information. It is the iTunes terms you assent to, the ...doctor's consent form you sign, the pile of papers you get with your mortgage. Reading the terms, the form, and the papers is supposed to equip you to choose your purchase, your treatment, and your loan well.More Than You Wanted to Knowsurveys the evidence and finds that mandated disclosure rarely works. But how could it? Who reads these disclosures? Who understands them? Who uses them to make better choices?
Omri Ben-Shahar and Carl Schneider put the regulatory problem in human terms. Most people find disclosures complex, obscure, and dull. Most people make choices by stripping information away, not layering it on. Most people find they can safely ignore most disclosures and that they lack the literacy to analyze them anyway. And so many disclosures are mandated that nobody could heed them all. Nor can all this be changed by simpler forms in plainer English, since complex things cannot be made simple by better writing. Furthermore, disclosure is a lawmakers' panacea, so they keep issuing new mandates and expanding old ones, often instead of taking on the hard work of writing regulations with bite.
Timely and provocative,More Than You Wanted to Knowtakes on the form of regulation we encounter daily and asks why we must encounter it at all.
InWars of Law, Tanisha M. Fazal assesses the unintended consequences of the proliferation of the laws of war for the commencement, conduct, and conclusion of wars over the course of the past one ...hundred fifty years.
After a brief history of the codification of international humanitarian law (IHL), Fazal outlines three main arguments: early laws of war favored belligerents but more recent additions have constrained them; this shift may be attributable to a growing divide between lawmakers and those who must comply with IHL; and lawmakers have been consistently inattentive to how rebel groups might receive these laws.
By using the laws of war strategically, Fazal suggests, belligerents in both interstate and civil wars relate those laws to their big-picture goals. InWars of Law, we learn that, as codified IHL proliferates and changes in character-with an ever-greater focus on protected persons-states fighting interstate wars become increasingly reluctant to step over any bright lines that unequivocally oblige them to comply with IHL. On the other hand, Fazal argues, secessionists fighting wars for independence are more likely to engage with the laws of war because they have strong incentives to persuade the international community that, if admitted to the club of states, they will be good and capable members of that club.
Why have states stopped issuing formal declarations of war? Why have states stopped concluding formal peace treaties? Why are civil wars especially likely to end in peace treaties today? Addressing such basic questions about international conflict, Fazal provides a lively and intriguing account of the implications of the laws of war.
The Internet of Things as an emerging global Internet-based information architecture facilitating the exchange of goods and services is gradually developing. While the technology of the Internet of ...Things is still being dis-cussed and created, the legal framework should be established before the Internet of Things is fully operable, in order to allow for an effective introduction of the new information architecture. The regulatory framework must provide for provisions ensuring the security of the structure as well as the privacy of its users. Furthermore, legal barriers that may stand in the way of the coming into operation of the Internet of Things are to be considered. The Internet of Things has positive effects in different fields, such as the inclusion of developing countries in global trade and the use of search engines to the benefit of civil society.
How do a legal order and the rule of law develop in a war-torn state? Using his field research in Sudan, the author uncovers how colonial administrators, postcolonial governments and international ...aid agencies have used legal tools and resources to promote stability and their own visions of the rule of law amid political violence and war in Sudan. Tracing the dramatic development of three forms of legal politics - colonial, authoritarian and humanitarian - this book contributes to a growing body of scholarship on law in authoritarian regimes and on human rights and legal empowerment programs in the Global South. Refuting the conventional wisdom of a legal vacuum in failed states, this book reveals how law matters deeply even in the most extreme cases of states still fighting for political stability.
It has never been more important to understand how international law enables and constrains international politics. By drawing together the legal theory of Lon Fuller and the insights of ...constructivist international relations scholars, this book articulates a pragmatic view of how international obligation is created and maintained. First, legal norms can only arise in the context of social norms based on shared understandings. Second, internal features of law, or 'criteria of legality', are crucial to law's ability to promote adherence, to inspire 'fidelity'. Third, legal norms are built, maintained or destroyed through a continuing practice of legality. Through case studies of the climate change regime, the anti-torture norm, and the prohibition on the use of force, it is shown that these three elements produce a distinctive legal legitimacy and a sense of commitment among those to whom law is addressed.
Proportionality is a ubiquitous concept in law. While mostly associated with fundamental rights review, it also plays an important role in private law. In this context, proportionality requirements ...can be the result of both traditional private law reasoning and the influence of constitutional law. The present volume aims to explore different forms and functions of proportionality in selected private law contexts and jurisdictions. The contributions cover constitutional and theoretical underpinnings of proportionality's role in private law as well as specific examples of how proportionality affects private law in different areas and across different jurisdictions. They include perspectives on German and US-American private, procedural, and constitutional law as well as a special focus on the European dimension.
Abused dogs, prisoners tortured in Guantánamo and supermax facilities, or slaves killed by the state--all are deprived of personhood through legal acts. Such deprivations have recurred throughout ...history, and the law sustains these terrors and banishments even as it upholds the civil order. Examining such troubling cases,The Law Is a White Dogtackles key societal questions: How does the law construct our identities? How do its rules and sanctions make or unmake persons? And how do the supposedly rational claims of the law define marginal entities, both natural and supernatural, including ghosts, dogs, slaves, terrorist suspects, and felons? Reading the language, allusions, and symbols of legal discourse, and bridging distinctions between the human and nonhuman, Colin Dayan looks at how the law disfigures individuals and animals, and how slavery, punishment, and torture create unforeseen effects in our daily lives.
Moving seamlessly across genres and disciplines, Dayan considers legal practices and spiritual beliefs from medieval England, the North American colonies, and the Caribbean that have survived in our legal discourse, and she explores the civil deaths of felons and slaves through lawful repression. Tracing the legacy of slavery in the United States in the structures of the contemporary American prison system and in the administrative detention of ghostly supermax facilities, she also demonstrates how contemporary jurisprudence regarding cruel and unusual punishment prepared the way for abuses in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.
Using conventional historical and legal sources to answer unconventional questions,The Law Is a White Dogilluminates stark truths about civil society's ability to marginalize, exclude, and dehumanize.
