The article analyzes the system of legal regulation of the higher education in Lithuania with the purpose to determine the boundaries of exercising the discretionary powers of the executive institutions in the field of higher education. The article is made of two parts. Discretionary powers of the executive institutions in legislative field are discussed in the first part. The power of legislative discretion is described as a right to set the legal regulation by way of a subject who is granted (...) such discretionary power. Problems may arise in cases when the law granting such discretionary powers is too abstract or declarative. The main criteria in determining the boundaries of exercise of discretionary powers are the provisions of Constitution and laws, and constitutional law principles. The system of delegation of legislative powers in the field of regulation of the higher education in Lithuania is analyzed in the second part of the article. The permanent changes in administrative legal regulation of higher education and studies determined by a vast amount of subjects issuing post-legislative legal acts in this field, as well as rather tedious legal regulation which, in turn, calls for frequent changes in legal acts, raises doubts regarding a possibility to implement main principles of the studies, such as freedom of creation and scientific research or academic freedom and autonomy. (shrink)

This article analyzes the epistemological aims and justification of character education legislation passed by the North Carolina General Assembly. I take this specific state law as representative of the broader national trends in the character education movement. I primarily use the work of Richard Rorty as the theoretical lens for the analysis and critique. I conclude by commending aspects of the legislative effort, but I suggest that greater emphasis must be placed on strengthening students' ethics through democratic action inside (...) and outside schools and not on a right-leaning, conservative, and didactic curriculum. Further, as social foundations educators, it is imperative to make strides in our classrooms to expose preservice teachers to the apparent and hidden contradictions of using character education as a tool of educational reform. (shrink)

In Rousseau’s political theory, the Legislator’s task is to draft the best possible Constitution for a given people. His goal is to maintain the public liberties and to ensure the preservation and prosperity of the State. However, the main problem is “to put law above men” – that is: above the citizens in general and the members of the executive in particular. This paper examines how the Legislator takes up the problem by educating the citizens. The process of education implies (...) the development of reasonable thinking as well as the education of desire. Reasonable thinking is achieved through the formation of the general will. Education of human desire must be understood with respect to the distinction between amour-propre and amour-de-soi. The extension of amour-de-soi to a communityof fellow citizens plays a central role in the formation of the general will and contributes to the development of solidarity among the different social classes. Education of amour-propre plays a role in the development of a national identity. It plays also a role in the political governance of individual desires by means of an administration based on a hierarchy of functions, supervised by public opinion. However, the political governance of desire is challenged by the invisible power of money, which Rousseau tried to neutralize by limiting and slowing down the monetary circulation. (shrink)

The article examines the place and role of the conception of the so-called educational services in the Russian legislation, which is one of the topical ideological problems of modern Russian educational policy. The author argues that the discussion of this issue in Russian society, in scientific publications and media as well as in government structure does not have a purely theoretical content but includes the most important practice-oriented aspects and raises the issues of the goals of education, (...) of the essence of the evolving system of educational relations, and, moreover, of the nature of the social system that has developed in Russia in general. According to the author, the conception of services is largely based on the desire to exclude the human factor from education, and it contradicts the specificity of educational relations, which implies the influence of a person on a person, the formation of a person by a person. The main content of the article is the analysis of alternative bills aimed at partial or complete exclusion of the conception of educational services from the legislation. The article analyzes the history of the issue, the arguments of supporters and opponents of the conception of educational services, as well as the parliamentary struggle and its results. The author substantiates that the discussed amendments to the Federal Law On Education in the Russian Federation is at best a half-way solution to the problem, and the work to improve federal legislation in this direction should be continued. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article investigates a virtue-centered approach to normative legal theory in the context of legislation. The core idea of such a theory is that the fundamental aim of law should be the promotion of human flourishing, where a flourishing human life is understood as a life of rational and social activities that express the human excellences. Law can promote flourishing in several ways. Because peace and prosperity are conducive to human flourishing, legislation should aim at the establishment and (...) maintenance of these conditions. The human excellences are developed in childhood and young adulthood by stable and nurturing families and by educational institutions: therefore, the law should support and foster families and schools. Although some critics have argued that an aretaic theory of legislation must support so-called “vice laws,” this is not the case. A virtue-centered approach must take into account the effects produced by criminalization of alcohol, drugs, gambling, and prosti... (shrink)

This new study of modern educational thought relates the selected thinkers and theories to a profound change in the way in which men have come to understand themselves and the world. The theories of Rousseau, Kant, Froebel, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche contemporary English-speaking philosophers and schemes of education, Sartre, Helvetius and B.F. Skinner, are shown, in separate studies, to be variations upon the theme of man as a self-defining and self-legislating subject in a world that does nothing to present him (...) with any Law or Way. Education therefore becomes a problem, a matter of arbitrary selection of what the young are to be taught and to do. (shrink)

This article takes the interlinkages between law and politics as its starting point. It analyzes recent changes in the legislative style of education governance in Sweden as not only a spec...

The theme of the Church's influence on the political life of the state is one that is constantly focused on the attention of the scientific community, the media and its own politics. The current legislation in Ukraine clearly separates the church from the state. However, both the church and the state are important social institutions that can not but influence one another. The official position of the state in the relevant relations is outlined again by the law. Each of (...) the confessions of the country, through democratic freedoms and within them, is able to implement its own concept of relations with the state. Moreover, the positions of even the largest churches in Ukraine here are significantly different and significantly affect the social realities, which determines the relevance of the topic. (shrink)

The democratic transformations that have taken place in our country since independence have laid the foundations for new state-church relations. The relations between the state and the Church in this situation have acquired fundamentally new qualities, which, unlike the past, are characterized by a generally stable partnership, mutual respect and cooperation. Such relations are enshrined in the Constitution of Ukraine, the Law of Ukraine "On Freedom of Conscience and Religious Organizations", other legislative acts and international legal agreements.

In this paper I will deal with the question of the religious education in the public schools in Romania, from the point of view of the relationship between Church and State. My quantitative and qualitative analysis of the bills concerning religious education, the way in which law has been applied and some of the consequences of this application wants to circumscribe the meaning of some concepts such as religious liberty and the new religious forms. The basic consequence of this I (...) hope will be the redefining of the notion of public space and of the role played by religion with its characteristic aspects: the relationship between state and religious organizations. This will clearly show the essential bond between two main aspects of religious liberty: the formal aspect - legal and institutional - and the informal aspect – an aspect connected to the personal and social attitudes regarding the new forms of religious behaviour. (shrink)

A review of the life and works of Jeremy Bentham, the "philosopher of legislation" and an analysis of his legacy in law and politics.

_Misapprehensions of culture and religion are used for the early marriages of women in Pakistan, which generates few significant challenges for women to pursue their higher education. The present study identifies such challenges for married women in higher education. These challenges are relevant to women’s post-marriage lifespan in rural Pakistan. Building upon Fredrickson’s (2001) and Hobfoll’s (2001) theories focused on post marriages issues, the study has developed open-ended questions for collecting in-depth information. Therefore, 43 in-depth interviews with married women were (...) conducted and through qualitative data analysis using NVIVO software, the study has highlighted that early marriages of girls have become a cultural norm, and education priorities of the girls are insignificant for parents to decide the marriage date. Married women pursuing education at marriage do not get any support from husbands and in-laws as the patriarchal norms prohibit women from stepping out from home. In these circumstances, women may get subject to the victim of many unlawful practices, including intimate partner violence (IPV). Thus, the present study findings imply that married women's participation in higher education is negligible due to weak legislation on women’s rights and strong illegitimate tribal practices._. (shrink)

The tension between external forces for better ethics in organizations, represented by legislation such as the Sarbanes–Oxley Act (SOX), and the call for internal forces represented by increased educational coverage, has never been as apparent. This study examines business school faculty attitudes about recent corporate ethics lapses, including opinions about root causes, potential solutions, and ethics coverage in their courses. In assessing root causes, faculty point to a failure of systems such as legal/professional and management (external) and declining (...) personal values (internal). We also found that faculty recommend external forces as a remedy more often than increased ethics educational coverage; we contextualize this finding with recent ethics education literature. We conclude by proposing that neither legislation nor ethics education alone are complete when addressing widespread unethical corporate acts and offer a multi-faceted approach to ethics educational opportunities. (shrink)

Educational Legislation and Administration of the Colonial Governments is an unchanged, high-quality reprint of the original edition of 1899. Hansebooks is editor of the literature on different topic areas such as research and science, travel and expeditions, cooking and nutrition, medicine, and other genres. As a publisher we focus on the preservation of historical literature. Many works of historical writers and scientists are available today as antiques only. Hansebooks newly publishes these books and contributes to the preservation of (...) literature which has become rare and historical knowledge for the future. (shrink)

Congress's national-security legislation will often require clear and specific congressional authorization before the executive can undertake certain actions. The War Powers Resolution, for example, prohibits any law from authorizing military hostilities unless it "specifically authorizes" them. And the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 required laws to amend FISA or repeal its "exclusive means" provision before they could authorize warrantless electronic surveillance. But efforts to legislate clear-statement regimes in national-security law have failed to induce compliance. The Clinton Administration inferred (...) congressional "authorization" for the 1999 Kosovo War from an appropriations statute that failed to specifically authorize the conflict. And the Bush Administration inferred congressional "authorization" for the NSA surveillance program from ambiguous language in the post-September 11th Authorization to Use Military Force. In both situations, executive-branch lawyers employed expansive theories of implied repeal and constitutional avoidance to evade the codified clear-statement requirements, and Congress and the courts acquiesced to the President's actions. Recent proposals to strengthen the clear-statement requirements in Congress's national-security framework legislation are unlikely to be effective without institutional mechanisms, such as points of order, that can deter future legislators from enacting vague or ambiguous legislation from which the executive might claim implicit congressional "authorization," and that can induce Congress to confront Presidents that act without specific congressional authorization. Simply enacting more narrow or explicit clear-statement requirements, or adding funding restrictions to Congress's framework legislation, fails to counter the aggressive interpretive doctrines that executives of both political parties have used to concoct congressional "authorization" from vague or ambiguous statutory language. (shrink)

This article examines the social development of Hong Kong's cultural and national identity since its return from the UK to the People's Republic of China nearly six years ago, focusing on the extent to which Hong Kong students are now inculcated in traditional Chinese music and express their devotion to the PRC through singing the national anthem. Hong Kong music teachers experience conflicts concerning their roles as music teachers and as purveyors of values education. These observations raise fundamental questions concerning (...) the sociopolitical function of values education in the music classroom. (shrink)

Throughout his political works, Plato takes the aim of politics to be the virtue and happiness of the citizens and the unity of the city. This paper examines the roles played by law in promoting individual virtue and civic unity in the Republic, Statesman, and Laws. Section 1 argues that in the Republic, laws regulate important institutions, such as education, property, and family, and thereby creating a way of life that conduces to virtue and unity. Section 2 argues that in (...) the Statesman, the political expert determines the mean between extremes and communicates it to citizens through laws that guide their judgment and conduct, so that they become virtuous themselves and the city is unified; this account of the role of law suggest how even non-expert legislation can contribute to virtue and unity. Section 3 argues that the Laws affirms and develops the idea that citizens should know and accept the laws to become virtuous themselves and to unify the city, and explains how the persuasive preludes and the sanction for violation attached to laws contribute to citizen virtue and civic unity. (shrink)

We should now be able to come to some general conclusions about the main lines of Cuvier's development as a naturalist after his departure from Normandy. We have seen that Cuvier arrived in Paris aware of the importance of physiology in classification, yet without a fully worked out idea of how such an approach could organize a whole natural order. He was freshly receptive to the ideas of the new physiology developed by Xavier Bichat.Cuvier arrived in a Paris also torn (...) by many overlapping debates on the nature of classification, and in particular that between the natural and artificial systems. The very validity of the enterprise of classification was questioned in many quarters. Cuvier's achievement on his entry into the Parisian world of science was not simply to establish himself as a highly competent anatomist: far more important, he also began to use ideas from many different specialties to change completely the notion of what was involved in natural history.124 At the same time that he himself swung away from the guiding image of the field naturalist as the ideal of the specialty, he took ideas from the new physiology to answer questions about the order of the animal world, and from comparative anatomy to resurrect extinct creation — and to come to conclusions from that creation about the history of the forms of life and the manner of their succession. He showed himself able to alter the relationships between natural history and many other fields of study in a way that implied, rightly or wrongly, his own complete mastery over such a movement. Partly he was able to do this because the ideas he borrowed were not themselves logically articulated and thus could be easily adapted and refocused for many different specific purposes. The value of the heuristic possibilities inherent in the idea of life, for example, far outweighed its inability to generate full systems of classification. Cuvier also consistently refused to consider in science matters relating to the first causes of events. Freed from the consideration of first-order phenomena, he was able to use second-order explanations across a far wider field of applicability. Personal doubts about the validity of a theology that had used science in order to bolster its own claims were combined here with the strong influence of the Kantian critique of the limits of human reason.125Cuvier's characteristic mode of procedure was that of intellectual appropriation and a bold capacity for altering the relationships between different fields of knowledge, rather than, with the exception of taxonomy, the technique of expanding their subject matter. His claims to originality came, first, from this reappropriation and reorientation and, second, from the sheer scope of his work, which aimed at nothing less than the cataloging and classification of all animate objects.126 They rested also on his acute use of his assertion of a certain relationship with the past of his subject. Very often he would present this history in such a way as to obscure his own intellectual genealogy, and often too he would give differing accounts of the priority of use of an idea in order to distract attention from the questionable exactitude of his own claims to originality. Cuvier came to Paris at precisely the time when society and institutions were most profitably malleable for a newcomer; it was also a time when many scientific disciplines had reached a stage advanced in terms of their factual content, yet relatively inadequate in conceptual organization. They were ripe for takeover by large-scale organizing ideas such as the animal economy and the subordination of characteristics. Paleontology is a particularly good example of a specialty in this particular form of underdevelopment in 1795.Cuvier paid a high price for his initial success. His electic applications of large-scale organizing ideas tended to mean that little of his own work had complete coherence at all levels. Ideas, as we have seen, that proved capable of providing a complete reform of the larger groups of the animal kingdom were incapable of producing its detailed working-out in the taxonomy of smaller groups, which had to be supplied from observed analogical correlations. Further, his physiological approach to classification involved the breakdown of strict correspondence between organs and functions, which left the way open for workers such as Geoffroy St. Hilaire gradually to tilt the balance away from the study of the correlations of hierarchies of functions, and toward morphology as the basis of the order of nature. Cuvier's brilliant appropriations from physiology from the beginning, therefore, contained the seeds of conflict with Geoffroy.Cuvier's eclectic approach made it very nearly impossible for him to present a clear idea of the ways in which the life sciences could be said to be lawful. In spite of his efforts to assimilate them to the position of the physical sciences in this respect, he was forced in the end to accord only an ambiguous status as “laws” to observational correlations. From this area of failure came much of the attempt to give his own two laws — the correlation of parts and the subordination of characteristics — predictive qualities, particularly in relation to paleontological research.It is not surprising that Cuvier's title as the “legislator” of natural history should represent more a claim than a reality. How, then, was he able to emerge as the leading French naturalist of his day? First of all must be adduced the sheer scale of his undertakings. Then comes his expertise as a practical anatomist, and the range of different topics toward which he turned his interest. His collaborators cannot be given credit for his output nor, as we have seen, for slavish adherence to his ideas. Cuvier was able to successfully claim to have dominated the underdeveloped specialties, such as paleontology, and turned them into a major heuristic input into both geology and comparative anatomy; but in other fields, such as physiology, he appropriated concepts and encouraged research but made little impact on the field himself. His attempts in 1812 to head off, or neutralize and absorb the growth of morphological studies landed him in a dangerously rigid position, which despite his encouragement of the new physiological research under the Restoration made further elaboration of his own conceptual underpinnings almost impossible.Cuvier's authority in the scientific world would in any case have been great because of his substantive achievement in taxonomy, but the rest of his work had enough ambiguities and dislocations for it to need the support of his political and social power. Cuvier's detractors seized on a vital fragment of the truth when they accused him of finding the political dimension all-important: it obscured the disjunctions in his theories and at the same time gave him the authority to make new claims for the status of the observational sciences - and for their relations of power with their surrounding specialties. Cuvier's science both thrived on and was halted by the power games of intellectual appropriation, manipulation of the past to confirm the present, and continual claims for hegemony. (shrink)

Amid efforts to limit “divisive concepts” in educational settings, this article investigates the obstruction of a civic-focused early childhood curriculum. Joy Dangora Erickson and Winston Thompson analyze the challenges faced by a resourceful kindergarten teacher striving to uphold curriculum goals despite constraints imposed by the state legislature. Through an empirically informed exploration of political and pedagogical factors, this conceptual analysis elucidates the moral complexities of risks, costs, and outcomes as educators navigate non-ideal political conditions. By doing so, the authors (...) provide valuable insights to scholars and practitioners, suggesting productive avenues for future research on these and related dilemmas of practice. (shrink)

Of laws in general -- Of laws directly derived from the nature of government -- Of the principles of the three kinds of government -- That the laws of education ought to be relative to the principles of government -- That the laws given by the legislator ought to be relative to the nature of government -- Consquences of the principles of different governments, with respect to the simplicity of civil and criminal laws, the form of judgements, and inflicting of (...) punishments -- Consquences of the different principles of the three governments, with respect to sumptuary laws, luxury, and the condition of women -- Of the corruption of the principles of the three governments -- Of the laws in the relation they bear to defensive force -- Of laws, in the relation they bear to offensive force. (shrink)

According to the Standard Picture of how law works, the content of the law that is created by legal texts such as statutes and constitutional provisions is determined by the meaning of these texts. Most proponents of this picture claim more specifically that the relevant notion of meaning in play is the communicative content of legal texts and that communicative content is itself determined by considerations of the intentions of legal authorities. In recent years, the Standard Picture has become the (...) subject of heated philosophical debate. Focusing on statutes as the paradigmatic type of legal texts, this thesis aims to contribute to this debate in two central ways. First, it argues that the aforementioned ‘intention-based’ versions of the Standard Picture lack convincing responses to three important objections that have been raised by critics. First, they lack an adequate account of how legislative bodies can be reasonably ascribed the intentions that they would need according to such versions. Second, they fail to explain important aspects of legal practice. Third, they provide at best a parochial theory of the content of the law that is generated by statutes. The second contribution is to provide a more sustained defence of the Standard Picture by developing a new ‘commitment-based’ version of this view. This version is based on an alternative theory of communication and claims that communicative content is not determined by considerations of intentions but rather by the commitments that are incurred by means of communicative acts. It is argued that this version can deal with the objections that have been raised by critics and therefore provides a more robust version of the Standard Picture. (shrink)

This article considers Dworkin's influential argument against legislative intent in chapter 9 of Law's Empire. The argument proves much less than is often assumed for it fails to address the possibility that the institution of the legislature may form and act on intentions. Indeed, analysis of Dworkin's argument lends support to that possibility. Dworkin aims to refute legislative intent in order to elucidate his own theory of statutory interpretation. That theory fails to explain plausibly legislative action. Dworkin's argument does not (...) refute legislative intent but instead suggests there is reason to think that the legislature is capable of intentional action. (shrink)

HIV-related state laws are being created transnationally though the use of omnibus model laws. In 2004, the US Agency for International Development funded the creation of one such guidance text known as the USAID/Action for West Africa Region Model Law, or N'Djamena Model Law, which led to the rapid spread of HIV/AIDS laws, including the criminalisation of HIV transmission, across much of West and Central Africa . In this article, I explicate how an epidemic of highly problematic legislation spread (...) across the region as a result of a text-mediated work process enabled through model laws. I theorise the textual genre of model laws arguing that these texts are best understood as ‘preoperative documents’ which, when activated, can lead to swift legislative reform in and beyond the field of HIV/AIDS governance. The legislative process being investigated was made visible through participant observation, archival research, textual analysis and informant interviews with national and international stakeholders . This involved ethnographic research in Canada, the USA, Switzerland, Austria, South Africa and Senegal . The untold policy processes and narratives explored in this article make evident how the work of contesting problematic HIV/AIDS model laws and newly drafted state laws involves both creating new texts and contesting the legitimacy and efficacy of others. (shrink)

Plato's Cretan City is a thorough investigation into the roots of Plato's Laws and a compelling explication of his ideas on legislation and social institutions. A dialogue among three travelers, the Laws proposes a detailed plan for administering a new colony on the island of Crete. In examining this dialogue, Glenn Morrow describes the contemporary Greek institutions in Athens, Crete, and Sparta on which Plato based his model city, and explores the philosopher's proposed regulations concerning property, the family, government, (...) and the administration of justice, education, and religion. He approaches the Laws as both a living document of reform and a philosophical inquiry into humankind's highest earthly duty. (shrink)

It would be unproblematically correct to say "the laws of Pennsylvania have it that a person is eligible to vote at age eighteen." But whether someone is actually mature enough to exercise his electoral franchise appropriately will very much depend on the individual. In setting the voting age by fiat, Society leaps in where Nature fears to tread. Many quantities that figure importantly in shaping our conduct of affairs are not specified by nature but are artifacts of human contrivance. At (...) what age, for example, is a person old enough to marry, drink alcoholic beverages responsibly, handle fireworks safely, manage his own property, enter into contracts, see a violent movie, serve on a jury, or hold a public office? These are not quantities writ large in nature's impersonal scheme of things but matters of social decision made for reasons of public polity and administrative convenience. They are legislated quantities. (shrink)

Of laws in general -- Of laws directly derived from the nature of government -- Of the principles of the three kinds of government -- That the laws of education ought to be relative to the principles of government -- That the laws given by the legislator ought to be relative to the nature of government -- Consquences of the principles of different governments, with respect to the simplicity of civil and criminal laws, the form of judgements, and inflicting of (...) punishments -- Consquences of the different principles of the three governments, with respect to sumptuary laws, luxury, and the condition of women -- Of the corruption of the principles of the three governments -- Of the laws in the relation they bear to defensive force -- Of laws, in the relation they bear to offensive force. (shrink)

The question examined in this study is not merely how a Nietzschean critique of law would look had Nietzsche ever applied his genealogical method to the question of law, but also what positive function Nietzschean philosophy may ascribe to law, and how law must then be transformed. The methodological parable imagines a “post-genealogy” or “pot-ressentiment” phase of the human condition, akin to the Marxist “post-revolutionary” phase: how would law look for the person of power - overman or otherwise - who (...) needs to live among others? How is normativity possible - what are its forms and functions - in a social world that has undergone a reevaluation of all values? The study traces three possible models for conceptualizing law in Nietzschean terms, each requiring a radical shift from traditional (in different contexts: liberal, Christian, bourgeois) conceptions. The first one is play: law as affirming and embracing the essence of the Dionysian, which is perpetual becoming. Play requires us to let go of law's role as the curtailer of arbitrariness. An integral part of the Nietzschean program, it requires a radical reevaluation: not just law's content is overcome, nor merely its bourgeois forms (in Pashukanis' critical terms), but its “internal” or “inherent” values of certitude and stability are overcome as well. The model I offer for play is not Zarathustra's dicethrow but Borges' The Lottery in Babylon. The second model is that of resistance, framed by Nietzsche's analysis of power and Deleuze's distinction between active and reactive forces. The insight here is that power requires resistance, and it is law's primary function to empower the other in order to invest value in meeting and confronting her; thus the monism of the will to power not only does not do away with normativity in the public sphere but actually requires it - but for goals opposite to those of liberalism. Resistance is linked to the third model, fashioned after Nietzsche's model of education: here, law performs not as a socializing agent but rather as a “liberator” of authenticity. Its function is analogous to that of a mentor whose role is to ultimately encourage the pupil into coming into her own will, shedding ressentiment and bad conscience in an active, i.e. non-conscious way; in its relation to consciousness it is the opposite of psychoanalysis. A fourth consideration is then offered, the role of normativity in self-overcoming, or self-legislating; namely, how does normativity figure in the will to power's most significant challenge. While all these models work from an interpretation of the will to power as becoming, the last two are especially dependent on the active-reactive distinction. The cornerstone is not to mix up power with representations of power; to realize that the case is not the will that desires power (as an object of desire, this would necessarily involve a representation of power) but power that wills becoming. In dealing with this metaphysical question I expound on a similar crucial interpretation, originally offered by Deleuze; however, I break off from Deleuze's claim that the will to power has nothing to do with any notion of struggle. If this discussion of the will to power is missed , or if it is wrong, the main argument of this article can not hold. Finally, I use this interpretation of the will to power to solve Kafka's riddle in The Trial: a necessary move once one realizes that, in the ethical history of western culture, Kafka's parable of the seeker of the law before its closed gates continues a sequence that began with Plato's fable of the cave and continued with Zarathustra's cave parable. I add three points that may be termed methodological or contextual. The first is positioning Nietzsche's limited discussion of law and politics as a derivative of his metaphysics of the will and treatment of moral psychology, not as an independent topic to be searched and indexed in some textual corpus. The second is to understand the question of normativity in its particularly Nietzschean sense, i.e. “what is X to me/to the overman?”, and not in the Kantian sense of uncovering the conditions that entail any synthetic, a-priori sentence (such as normative ones). The last comment places the Nietzschean project in a larger pattern that defined radical thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and whose other cases are Marx and Freud: a new metaphysics (will to power/materialism/id) that uncovers a state of bondage, psychological and material, in which law plays a pivotal role in its function of reinforcer and supplier of a legitimizing language (respectively, of ressentiment, of the relations of production, of Oedipus and the bourgeois family); and finally radical, yet partial ways of overcoming bondage that are not mutually translatable - genealogy, revolution, psychoanalysis. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Images of Legislation Legislation in Legal Theory Analytics of the Legislative Process Interpreting and Applying Legislation A Forum of Principle? References.

0n a lucid, concise volume, Jeremy Waldron defends the role of legislation, presenting it as an important mode of governance. Aristotle, Locke and Kant emerge as proponents of the dignity of legislation. Waldron's arguments are of obvious importance and topicality, especially in countries that are considering the introduction of a Bill of Rights. The Dignity of Legislation is original in conception, trenchantly argued and very clearly presented, and will be of interest to a wide range of scholars (...) and thinkers. (shrink)

Kant famously insisted that “the idea of the will of every rational being as a universally legislative will” is the supreme principle of morality. Recent interpreters have taken this emphasis on the self-legislation of the moral law as evidence that Kant endorsed a distinctively constructivist conception of morality according to which the moral law is a positive law, created by us. But a closer historical examination suggests otherwise. Kant developed his conception of legislation in the context of his (...) opposition to theological voluntarist accounts of morality and his engagement with conceptions of obligation found in his Wolffian predecessors. In order to defend important claims about the necessity and immediacy of moral obligation, Kant drew and refined a distinction between the legislation and authorship of the moral law in a way that precludes standard theological voluntarist theories and presents an obstacle to recent constructivist interpretations. A correct understanding of Kant's development and use of this distinction reveals that his conception of legislation leaves little room for constructivist moral anti-realism. (shrink)

A comprehensive account of English legal thought in the age of Blackstone and Bentham for nearly a century, The Province of Legislation Determined advances an ambitious reinterpretation of eighteenth-century attitudes to social change and law reform. Professor Lieberman's bold synthesis rests on a wide survey of legal materials and on a detailed discussion of Blackstone's Commentaries, the jurisprudence of Lord Kames and the Scottish Enlightenment, the chief justiceship of Lord Mansfield, the penal theories of Eden and Romilly, and the (...) legislative science of Jeremy Bentham. The study relates legal developments to the broader fabric of eighteenth-century social and political theory, and offers a novel assessment of the character of the common law tradition and of Bentham's contribution to the ideology of reform. (shrink)

This article develops an account of the nature and limits of the state’s legislative authority that closely attends to the challenge of harmonizing Kant’s ethical and juridical theories. It clarifies some key Kantian concepts and terms, then explains the way in which the state’s three interlocking authorities – legislative, executive, and judicial – are metaphysically distinct and mutually dependent. It describes the emergence of the Kantian state and identifies the preconditions of its authority. Then it offers a metaphysical model of (...) the Kantian state and uses it to argue that the activity of juridical lawgiving is an act of the omnilateral will itself. Legislative authority is limited in the sense that it does not include the capacity to create juridical laws that are conceptually incompatible with the idea of universal external freedom. I argue that my proposed account of the legislative authority is wholly consistent with that authority’s exclusive lawgiving capacity and does not threaten the possibility of ‘distributive justice’ – the legal finality that is the sine qua non of a civil condition. (shrink)

Solidarity between the citizens of a country is both good and desirable, and public educational institutions are the clear site of education for such civil solidarity and its natural place is in Civics lessons. Nevertheless, this paper argues that it is impossible to educate for solidarity for all citizens in a liberal-democratic state when civic classes teach basic civil laws that exclude groups or minorities and expel them from the general civil population. Therefore, we can ask: What are the (...) modes of action that are open to Civics teachers and other educators who are caught in this trap when trying to educate for solidarity? As a reply to this question and by borrowing ideas from Michel Foucault’s thought, this paper equips teachers with some guidelines for pedagogical resistance to the excluding wave, that enable strengthening an inclusive civil solidarity, and demonstrates the applicability of these guidelines in the Israeli reality. (shrink)

Considerable attention has been given to the accessibility of legal documents, such as legislation and case law, both in legal information retrieval (query formulation, search algorithms), in legal information dissemination practice (numerous examples of on-line access to formal sources of law), and in legal knowledge-based systems (by translating the contents of those documents to ready-to-use rule and case-based systems). However, within AI & law, it has hardly ever been tried to make the contents of sources of law, and the (...) relations among them, more accessible to those without a legal education. This article presents a theory about translating sources of law into information accessible to persons without a legal education. It illustrates the theory by providing two elaborated examples of such translation ventures. In the first example, formal sources of law in the domain of exchanging police information are translated into rules of thumb useful for policemen. In the second example, the goal of providing non-legal professionals with insight into legislative procedures is translated into a framework for making available sources of law through an integrated legislative calendar. Although the theory itself does not support automating the several stages described, in this article some hints are given as to what such automation would have to look like. (shrink)