Coll. Oxford Monographs in International Law, 208 pages

Présentation de l'éditeur

Conventionally, international legal scholarship concerned with norm conflicts focuses on identifying how international law can or should resolve them. This book adopts a different approach. It focuses on identifying those norm conflicts that law cannot and should not resolve. The book offers an unprecedented, controversial, yet sophisticated, argument in favour of construing such irresolvable conflicts as legal dilemmas. Legal dilemmas exist when a legal actor confronts a conflict between at least two legal norms that cannot be avoided or resolved. Addressing both academics and practitioners, the book aims to identify the character and consequences of legal dilemmas, to distil their legal function within the sphere of international law, and to encourage serious theoretical and practical investigation into the conditions that lead to a legal dilemma. 

The first part proposes a definition of legal dilemmas and distinguishes the term from numerous related concepts. Based on this definition, the second part scrutinises international law's contemporary norm conflict resolution and accommodation devices in order to identify their limited ability to resolve certain kinds of norm conflicts. Against the background of the limits identified in the second part, the third part outlines and evaluates the book's proposed method of dealing with legal dilemmas. In contrast to conventional approaches that recommend dealing with irresolvable norm conflicts by means of non liquet declarations, judicial law-making, or a balancing test, the book's proposal envisions that irresolvable norm conflicts are dealt with by judicial and sovereign actors in a complementary fashion. Judicial actors should openly acknowledge irresolvable conflicts and sovereign actors should decide with which norm they will comply. The book concludes with the argument that analysing various aspects of international law through the concept of a legal dilemma enhances its conceptual accuracy, facilitates more legitimate decision-making, and maintains its dynamic responsiveness.

Valentin Jeutner, Junior Research Fellow in Law, Pembroke College, Oxford; Postdoctoral Researcher, Lund University.

Sommaire

I: The Definition of a Legal Dilemma
II: The Possibility of a Legal Dilemma
III: The Decision of a Legal Dilemma

Présentation de l'éditeur

In the years between the Revolutionary War and the drafting of the Constitution, American gentlemen—the merchants, lawyers, planters, and landowners who comprised the independent republic's elite—worked hard to maintain their positions of power. Gentlemen Revolutionaries shows how their struggles over status, hierarchy, property, and control shaped the ideologies and institutions of the fledgling nation.

Tom Cutterham examines how, facing pressure from populist movements as well as the threat of foreign empires, these gentlemen argued among themselves to find new ways of justifying economic and political inequality in a republican society. At the heart of their ideology was a regime of property and contract rights derived from the norms of international commerce and eighteenth-century jurisprudence. But these gentlemen were not concerned with property alone. They also sought personal prestige and cultural preeminence. Cutterham describes how, painting the egalitarian freedom of the republic's "lower sort" as dangerous licentiousness, they constructed a vision of proper social order around their own fantasies of power and justice. In pamphlets, speeches, letters, and poetry, they argued that the survival of the republican experiment in the United States depended on the leadership of worthy gentlemen and the obedience of everyone else.

Lively and elegantly written, Gentlemen Revolutionaries demonstrates how these elites, far from giving up their attachment to gentility and privilege, recast the new republic in their own image.

Tom Cutterham is Lecturer in United States History at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom.

208 pages

Sommaire

Chapter 1. Inheritance 
Chapter 2. Obedience  
Chapter 3. Justice 
Chapter 4. Capital 
Chapter 5. Rebellion

Coll. Law in Context, 656 pages

Présentation de l'éditeur

Through an interdisciplinary analysis of the rulings of the Court of Justice of the European Union, this book offers 'thick' descriptions, contextual histories and critical narratives engaging with leading or minor personalities involved behind the scenes of each case. The contributions depart from the notion that EU law and its history should be narrated in a linear and incremental way to show instead that law evolves in a contingent and not determinate manner. The book shows that the effects of judge-made law remain relatively indeterminate and each case can be retold through different contextual narratives, and shows the commitment of the European legal elites to the experience of legal reasoning. The idea to cluster the stories around prominent cases is not to be fully comprehensive, but to re-focus the scholarship and teaching of EU law by moving beyond the black letter and unravel the lawyering techniques to achieve policy results.

• Revealing context and stories behind leading European Court of Justice rulings, the book will appeal to students interested in understanding the making and the functioning of EU law through the eyes of many interlocutors of the Court, including winners and losers in each case

• Retells stories by leading scholars or participants in the cases from a different perspective, and so the book reveals new insights, including lawyering techniques together with social and political contexts, into the established canon of EU law

• By bringing together lawyers, historians, political scientists and political economists, the volume achieves original cross-disciplinary insights into the field of EU law

Contributors : Bill Davies, Fernanda Nicola, Antoine Vauchez, Karen McAuliffe, Mathilde Cohen, Anne Boerger, Morten Ramussen, Will Phelan, Anne McNaughton, John Morijn, Dimitry Kochenov, Justin Lindeboom, Francesca Strumia, Roberto Mastroianni, Laurent Warlouzet, Kalypso Nicolaïdis, John Temple Lang, Martin Gelter, Antonio Bartolini, Angela Guerrieri, Vera Fritz, Evelyne Tichadou, Stéphanie Hennette Vauchez, Ioanna Tourkochoriti, Gisella Gori, Gábor Halmai, Peter Lindseth, Daniela Caruso, Joanna Geneve, Elaine Fahey, Michelle Egan, Mark Pollack

Coll. Studies in the History of Law and Justice, 217 pages

Présentation de l'éditeur

This book is based on an international project conducted by the Institute for European Studies of the University CEU San Pablo in Madrid and a seminar on Vitoria and International Law which took place on July 2nd 2015 in the convent of San Esteban, the place where Vitoria spent his most productive years as Chair of Theology at the University of Salamanca. It argues that Vitoria not only lived at a time bridging the Middle Ages and Modernity, but also that his thoughts went beyond the times he lived in, giving us inspiration for meeting current challenges that could also be described as “modern” or even post-modern.

There has been renewed interest in Francisco de Vitoria in the last few years, and he is now at the centre of a debate on such central international topics as political modernity, colonialism, the discovery of the “Other” and the legitimation of military interventions. All these subjects include Vitoria’s contributions to the formation of the idea of modernity and modern international law.

The book explores two concepts of modernity: one referring to the post-medieval ages and the other to our times. It discusses the connections between the challenges that the New World posed for XVIth century thinkers and those that we are currently facing, for example those related to the cyberworld. It also addresses the idea of international law and the legitimation of the use of force, two concepts that are at the core of Vitoria’s texts, in the context of “modern” problems related to a multipolar world and the war against terrorism.

This is not a historical book on Vitoria, but a very current one that argues the value of Vitoria’s reflections for contemporary issues of international law.