This book presents an analysis of global legal history in Modern times, questioning the effect of political revolutions since the 17th century on the legal field. Readers will discover a non-linear approach to legal history as this work investigates the ways in which law is created. These chapters look at factors in legal revolution such as the role of agents, the policy of applying and publicising legal norms, codification and the orientations of (...) class='Hi'>legal writing, and there is a focus on the publicization of law. The author uses Herbert Hart's schemes to conceive law as a human artefact or convention, being the union between primary rules of obligations and secondary rules conferring powers. Here we learn about those secondary rules and the legal construction of the Modern state, and we question the extent to which codification and law reporting were likely to revolutionize the legal field. These chapters examine the hypothesis of a legal revolution that could have concerned many countries in modern times. To begin with, the book considers the legal aspect of the construction of Modern States in the 17th and 18th centuries. It goes on to examine the consequences of the codification movement as a legal revolution before looking at the so-called "constitutional" revolution, linked with the extension of judicial review in many countries after World War II. Finally, the book enquires into the construction of an EU legal order and international law. In each of these chapters, the author measures the scope of the change, how the secondary rules are concerned, the role of the professional lawyers and what are the characters of the new configuration of the legal field. This book provokes new debates in legal philosophy about the rule of change and will be of particular interest to researchers in the fields of law, theories of law, legal history, philosophy of law and historians more broadly. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Solidarity: From Civic Friendship to a Global Legal CommunityPaul HendricksonThe University of South Carolina. Hauke Brunkhorst. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005. Pp. xxv + 262. $42.50, hardcover.Public appeals to solidarity have been pervasive throughout the storied history of political dissent and democratic politics. From the French Revolution and the European revolutions of 1848 to decolonization, Polish Solidarność, and the antiglobalization movement, solidarity has been invoked as (...) a means of reinventing citizenship, rights, and community. Yet political theorists have not generally accorded the concept of solidarity a degree of attention comparable to that afforded other core political concepts, such as freedom, equality, and deliberation. In Solidarity, Hauke Brunkhorst seeks to remedy this neglect, arguing that the concept of solidarity should be deemed fundamental to democratic theory and practice: "In modern societies, solidarity coincides with the concept of democracy" (xxiii). Brunkhorst presents this thesis as a corrective to current theory, but he also develops it—in the spirit of much Frankfurt School theorizing—as a Zeitdiagnose, as a timely diagnosis, regarding the threats globalization poses to democratic self-governance: "Power, law, and money are globalized [today] at the expense of democratic solidarity" (7).Solidarity, as Brunkhorst understands it, is a thoroughly modern concept. The "ideas of 1789"—in particular, the fraternité of the French Revolution—provided the historical foundation for an egalitarian and democratic model of solidarity. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the concept of solidarity [End Page 343] gradually replaced that of fraternity in the wake of industrialization. Drawing on Marx, Brunkhorst argues that what promoted working-class solidarity was "not the local sympathy of communal relations or the friendly affection... of a tightly structured polis," but rather the railway, the steamship, and the telegraph (60). Brunkhorst's historiography is woven into a broad social-theoretic framework. Following Durkheim, he reasons that the modern division of labor is not founded on the mechanical solidarity of Gemeinschaft, on a shared sense of affinity, ritual, and communal belonging, but on the organic solidarity of Gesellschaft, on the integration of an individualized, pluralist, and functionally differentiated society.To readers acquainted with contemporary German appropriations of the sociological tradition, many of Brunkhorst's conceptual moves will seem familiar. But his unique fusion of social-theoretic and historical argumentation yields a fascinating and novel characterization of solidarity. For Brunkhorst, solidarity is not a form of sentiment or emotional bond; it is not premised on compassion for "tormentable bodies" (Brecht) or on a "flexible feeling of sympathy" (Rorty); rather, "it is nothing but the democratic realization of individual freedom" (3). This normative model of solidarity is guided by the regulative ideal of a political association without domination; it envisages a polity in which the individual is neither servant nor master to her compatriots. As modes of governance become increasingly globalized, democratic forms of solidarity must reach beyond the rights traditions of particular nation-states to include a "human-rights patriotism."Brunkhorst traces this ideal back to Greco-Roman antiquity and the Judeo-Christian tradition. Drawing principally on the writings of Greek and Roman philosophers, he argues that civic friendship (philia) provided a space for mutual freedom, emancipated individuals from the bonds of kinship, generalized friendship into a form of patriotism (philia politike), and realized the universal essence of man as a political being. But this civic-republican model remained profoundly elitist, excluding the many on the basis of gender, class, and citizenship status. More suggestive and original is Brunkhorst's treatment of Jewish and Christian thought. The intersection between rhetoric and philosophy is central to his interpretation of the Exodus story and covenant theology as a form of collective countermemory and as a prophetic practice of critique. Through his reading of the Jotham fable and other biblical narratives, he argues that the Jewish prophets and the Christian New Testament avowed "the equal proximity of all humans to God" and contributed to a "prophetic project of egalitarian solidarity" (33, 36). [End Page 344]Brunkhorst's historical reconstructions culminate in the French Revolution. On his view, the otherworldly universalism of the Judeo-Christian tradition was secularized and institutionalized in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789) and the first French... (shrink)

Critical theory spelled out as learning progress in the medium of law can hardly do anything but retrospectively smooth out any elements of social struggles that deviate from the objective spirit. This comment argues that the voices of those who neither are in nor have been allowed entry into the learning process are hardly visible any more in the gray light of the coming twilight from which the learning processes are described. It does so by questioning the role of the (...) global South in Brunkhorst’s book and aims at scenting out blind spots in Brunkhorst’s narration of the connection between international law and the liberation movements of the South. (shrink)

Bad philosophy is responsible for the climate and nature crises, and other global problems too that threaten our future. That sounds mad, but it is true. A philosophy of science, or of theatre or life is a view about what are, or ought to be, the aims and methods of science, theatre or life. It is in this entirely legitimate sense of “philosophy” that bad philosophy is responsible for the crises we face. First, and in a blatantly obvious way, (...) those institutions, organizations, corporations, businesses, endeavours, and activities of humanity that cause the crises and global problems we face, do so because of the aims they pursue (profit perhaps, or power, or heat and light for homes), and the methods adopted in pursuit of those aims – the philosophy in other words, built into the institution, organization, business, human activities, or whatever it may be. It is the philosophy of these institutions, organizations and activities that we need to change to put a stop to, or at least lessen the severity of, the crises we face, the global problems that confront us, above all the climate and nature crises. One institution has an especially crucial role in this respect: our universities. They are dominated in a multitude of ways by a particularly disastrous philosophy, a philosophy of inquiry which may be called knowledge-inquiry. This holds that the basic aim of the university is to acquire and apply knowledge. First, knowledge is to be acquired; once acquired, it can be applied to help solve social problems. But this philosophy of knowledge-inquiry is an intellectual disaster. As a result, universities are, in devastating and almost entirely unrecognized ways, humanitarian disasters too. Judged from the standpoint of helping to promote human welfare, the university shaped by the philosophy of knowledge-inquiry violates THREE of the four most elementary rules of rational problem solving conceivable in a wholesale, structural fashion, and it is this gross, wholesale, structural irrationality of the university, unnoticed by all but a few scientists and scholars, that is in part responsible for the creation of our grave global problems, and our current incapacity to learn how to solve them. The pursuit of knowledge, conducted in universities, within the framework of knowledge-inquiry over the decades and centuries, has produced much of great benefit to humanity. It has made the modern world possible. It has led to modern power production, modern industry and armaments, modern agriculture, modern hygiene and medicine, modern travel and communications, and the internet. But these very successes have also created many of our most serious current global problems: the climate crisis; the destruction of natural habitats, the catastrophic loss of wild life, and impending mass extinction of species (the nature crisis); the lethal character of modern war; the impact on the natural world of the rapid growth of the human population; the menace posed by nuclear weapons; pollution of earth, sea and air; threats to democracy caused in part by the internet and social media. All these grave global problems have been made possible by modern science and technology, pursued largely in universities within the framework of knowledge-inquiry. Nevertheless, it is not science and technology as such that are the problem, but science pursued in a way that is dissociated from a more fundamental task of the university to help humanity resolve conflicts and problems of living in increasingly cooperatively rational ways, so that progress may be made to a better world. Science and technology, pursued within the framework of knowledge-inquiry, create for some of us the power to act, but not the power to act wisely – not the power to learn how to resolve conflicts and problems of living in increasingly cooperatively rational ways. For that, we need our institutions of learning, above all our universities, to take as their primary task to help humanity learn how to do it. In order to do that, the philosophy of inquiry put into practice by universities needs to be dramatically transformed. We urgently need to bring about a revolution in the overall aims and methods of academic inquiry – a revolution in the philosophy of the university, all around the world, wherever possible, so that the basic aim becomes to seek and promote wisdom, construed to be the capacity, active endeavour, and perhaps desire, to realize what is of value in life, for oneself and others, wisdom in this sense including knowledge, understanding and technological know-how, but much else besides, methods being dramatically modified too so as to help achieve the new academic aim. The basic task of the university would be, not to solve problems of knowledge, but rather to help people in the social world beyond the university to resolve conflicts and problems of living so that what is of value in life may be realized by everyone, insofar as that is possible. The pursuit of knowledge would be vital, but not intellectually fundamental. The intellectual and institutional revolution we so urgently need in our universities would affect every discipline and aspect of the university; it would dramatically affect both research and education, and the whole way the university is related to the rest of the social world. The revolution, from knowledge-inquiry to wisdom-inquiry would dramatically enhance the intellectual integrity and rationality of natural science, social inquiry, the humanities and technology, the character of these disciplines and the relationships they have with one another. University education throughout the university would be dramatically improved. And academic inquiry as a whole would do what, on the whole, it fails to do at present: it would help humanity resolve conflicts and problems of living in increasingly cooperatively rational and, as a result, increasingly successful ways, progress at last being made to a genuinely good, civilized world – a world in which there is peace, justice, liberal democracy, individual freedom, education, reasonable equality, sustainable prosperity and worthwhile opportunities in life, all of these for everyone, insofar as this is possible. Why, it may be asked, has academic philosophy not noticed that we urgently need to transform the current bad philosophy of inquiry of knowledge-inquiry into the far more intellectually rigorous and humanly valuable philosophy of wisdom-inquiry, so that we can begin to do what so far we have failed to do so lamentably: learn how to avoid impending disasters, and even make progress to a better world, something that seems at present almost unthinkable given the horrors of war, poverty, political enslavement of the 20th century, and the horrors of this century so far too? The answer is that academic philosophy is in a particularly pitiful state, as philosophers themselves, are just beginning to realize and lament. That is why academic philosophers are blind to the intellectual and humanitarian disaster of the bad philosophy that dominates universities today, and inconceivable to them to them that they might have, as a disciplinary task, to ensure academic inquiry implements a good philosophy of inquiry, and advocate and argue for change if it does not. Once upon a time, in Europe at least, philosophy was an intellectual power in the world. In the 17th century it created modern science which massively increased and improved our knowledge and understanding of the world, which in turn led to the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution, and the modern world. Philosophy was once so intellectually powerful and influential that it changed the course of history. But philosophy also made in the past three disastrous intellectual blunders: the post-Cartesian blunder, the post-Newtonian blunder, and the Enlightenment blunder. Never acknowledged and corrected by subsequent philosophy right down to the present, these unrecognized intellectual blunders rendered academic philosophy the esoteric, pathetic, and powerless discipline it is today, so that throughout the last century and, so far, throughout this one, academic philosophy has remained blind to the intellectual disaster of knowledge-inquiry, and thus failed entirely to take up its proper disciplinary task of warning fellow academics of the structural irrationality of the philosophy that prevails in the university, and of proposing what steps need to be taken to put things right. Instead of performing such an urgently needed philosophical task, so-called analytic philosophy was reduced to analysing the meaning of words. Since then, there has been hardly any discernible improvement, even if analysis of concepts no longer dominates the scene. Bad academic philosophy is indeed responsible for intellectual and humanitarian failures of the university. What the three past intellectual blunders of philosophy are, why their persistence so dramatically reduces academic philosophy to a triviality, and why, furthermore, this results in the failure of scientists and scholars to see what is so blatantly bad about the philosophy prevailing in universities around the world – the failure to see what so urgently needs to be done to put right what has been wrong for so long: all this is made clear in this book. A new kind of philosophy emerges during the course of the argument, critical fundamentalism, which has as its task to keep alive imaginative and critical – that is rational – thinking about our fundamental problem: How can our human world, the world we experience and live in – the world of living things, people, consciousness, free will, meaning and value – how can all of this exist and best flourish embedded as it is in the physical universe? That problem encompasses all others of life, science and thought. Critical fundamentalism tries to improve answers to aspects of this problem; but it also seeks to encourage everyone to think about the problem, from time to time, and think about how it interacts, in both directions, with more urgent particular and specialized problems of life and thought. Critical fundamentalism sets out to help improve bad philosophy wherever it is to be found: in social, political, commercial, legal, financial, and international life; and especially in academia, in institutions of learning, so that they become devoted to enhancing the capacity of people to learn how to achieve what is of genuine value in this brief life of a few decades if we are fortunate. Critical fundamentalism does everything it can to bring about the revolution in our universities we so urgently need. If taken up by mainstream philosophy, it might really have an impact, and begin to transform universities for the better, in both intellectual and humanitarian terms, and thus, enable humanity to learn how, after the grim failures and horrors of the last century and this one, to make progress to a better world. -/- . (shrink)

The paper starts with a thesis on the dialectical structure of modern law that goes back the European revolutionary tradition and constitutes a legal structure that is at once emancipatory and repressive. Once it became democratic the modern nation states has solved more or less successfully the crises that emerged in modern Europe since the 16th Century. Yet, this state did not escape the dialectical snares of modern law and modern legal regimes. It’s greatest advance, the exclusion of (...) inequalities presupposed the exclusion of the internal other of blacks, workers, women etc, and the other that stemmed from the non-European world that furthermore was under European colonial rule or other forms of European, Northamerican and Japanese imperial control. Yet, the wars and revolutions of the 20th Century let to a complete reconstruction, new foundation and globalization of all national and international law. The evolutionary advance of the 20th Century was the emergence of world law, and this enabled the construction of international and national welfarism and the global expansion of the exclusion of inequalities. Nevertheless the dialectic of enlightenment came back again and led to new forms of postnational domination, hegemony, oppression and exclusion. The final section tries to detect some ideas and principles how to overcome the crisis. (shrink)

ABSTRACTArendt’s work on civil disobedience sets out an optimistic portrayal of the possibilities of such forms of action in re-energising the spirit of American politics in the late twentieth century. Civil disobedience should not simply be tolerated, she argued, but incorporated into the legal structure of the American political system. Her work is usually seen to promote an idea of civil disobedience that is thus bound to existing constitutional principles and essentially nonviolent. However, by looking at Arendt’s discussion and (...) critique of various practices of civil disobedience in 1960s and 1970s America, specifically in relation to the nonviolence movement influenced by Martin Luther King, and on the other side, the more militant Black Power movement, a different idea of civil disobedience emerges. This paper argues that whilst, for Arendt, civil disobedience within America certainly possesses the constitutionally restorative potential she assigns to it, in a broader sense – theoretically, globally, and even in terms of alternative ideologies within America – her conception of civil disobedience is in itself neither necessarily constitutional, nor nonviolent. It is, instead, a form of revolutionary action, whose limits are set only by politics itself, and specifically, Arendt’s criterion of publicity. (shrink)

This contribution deals with a number of challenges faced by translation historians of the French Revolution. First, the challenge of extending the translation category by including a range of transfer modalities that gravitate around translation. Second, the challenge of finding a balance between two historians’ viewpoints: those who want to know what the Revolution has meant for translation and those who want to know what translation has meant for the Revolution. Third, the challenge of relating the different (...) scales of translators’ activities taking simultaneously or successively place in local, national and transnational settings. (shrink)

What is sovereignty? Often taken for granted or seen as the ideology of European states vying for supremacy and conquest, the concept of sovereignty remains underexamined both in the history of its practices and in its aesthetic and intellectual underpinnings. Using global intellectual history as a bridge between approaches, periods, and areas, The Scaffolding of Sovereignty deploys a comparative and theoretically rich conception of sovereignty to reconsider the different schemes on which it has been based or renewed, the public (...) stages on which it is erected or destroyed, and the images and ideas on which it rests. The essays in The Scaffolding of Sovereignty reveal that sovereignty has always been supported, complemented, and enforced by a complex aesthetic and intellectual scaffolding. This collection takes a multidisciplinary approach to investigating the concept on a global scale, ranging from an account of a Manchu emperor building a mosque to a discussion of the continuing power of Lenin’s corpse, from an analysis of the death of kings in classical Greek tragedy to an exploration of the imagery of “the people” in the Age of Revolutions. Across seventeen chapters that closely study specific historical regimes and conflicts, the book’s contributors examine intersections of authority, power, theatricality, science and medicine, jurisdiction, rulership, human rights, scholarship, religious and popular ideas, and international legal thought that support or undermine different instances of sovereign power and its representations. (shrink)

So-called climate-ready GM crops can be of great help in adapting to a changing climate. Climate change, caused in great part by anthropogenic greenhouse gases released in the atmosphere since the industrial revolution by the developed world, is felt much stronger in the developing world, causing unexpected droughts and floods that will cause large harvest loss, leading to more hunger and malnutrition, rising death tolls and disease vulnerability. The current intellectual property regime (IPR) strikes an unfair balance between profit (...) oriented seed industry giants and low-acreage farmers. The biotechnology industry, mainly headquartered in the developed world, has started to patent new seed varieties, taking biomaterials from developing countries, with the claim, that they will be more tolerant to flood, drought, heat, and cold. Special sales contracts prohibit saving seeds from the harvest for the next season, thus forcing the farmers to buy them every season anew, which goes against traditional farming. Using a widely accepted concept of global justice, that tackles the fact that around 10% of the world's population profits from 90% of the earth's resources, and by taking into account the feasibility of a fair IPR, we will discuss three issues. First, an ethically acceptable IPR should prevent unjust and unfair assignments of property rights (e.g. patents) that completely ignore small-scale farmers inventiveness and efforts to save agrobiodiversity. As a second task, this regime should encourage globally a just distribution of the objects of innovation that are covered by patents. Third, such a regime should encourage innovations at a rate that is effective to cope with climate change. (shrink)

This article reflects on William E Scheuerman’s The End of Law and the value of the liberal rule of law. It puts Scheuerman’s concerns about Schmitt’s attacks on the liberal rule of law in dialogue with Schmitt’s theory of ‘legal revolution’. It argues that, although Schmitt was neither a liberal nor a democrat, his work on legal revolution can help liberals respond to populist attacks on liberal constitutional essentials.

The global economy’s centre of gravity is shifting. Emerging and developing countries have been contributing over 50% of the global GDP since the onset of the 21st century, which is unprecedented since the Industrial Revolution. This article offers the first analysis of the creeping convergence of the BRIC world (ie Brazil, Russia, India and China) with global legal standards in a key area of International Law: the International Tax Regime (ITR). The ITR is a (...) class='Hi'>legal technology fundamentally designed by the League of Nations in the 1920s, when the BRICs played no relevant role. This article proposes a theory that aims to illuminate the core driving forces of the on-going trend towards global convergence in this area of International Law from both the static and dynamic dimensions. It is grounded on the logic of two-sided platforms. (shrink)

This article discusses an anti-sovranist variant of political theology. Recent work on the sociology of modern constitutionalism has identified its source in the so-called Papal legal revolution that proclaimed the autonomy of the Church in relation to the Empire. The claim is that this legal revo-lution contributed to the “secularization” or de-sacralization of political power and established legali-ty as the principle of legitimacy. This paper critically discusses this genealogy of constitutionalism. It proposes an alternative route to modern (...) secularism and constitutionalism that passes through the reception of Averroistic doctrines in the philosophy of Dante. (shrink)

A world of legal conflicts -- The limits of sovereigntist territoriality -- From universalism to cosmopolitanism -- Towards a cosmopolitan pluralist jurisprudence -- Procedural mechanisms, institutional designs, and discursive practices for managing pluralism -- The changing terrain of jurisdiction -- A cosmopolitan pluralist approach to choice of law -- Recognition of judgments and the legal negotiation of difference.

This review article examines the conceptual possibility of ‘cosmopolitan pluralism’, a jurisprudential theory developed by Paul Schiff Berman in his recent book, Global Legal Pluralism: A Jurisprudence of Law Beyond Borders. Cosmopolitan pluralism is presented as a conceptual framework for understanding and managing situations of multiple legal orders which overlap and conflict. It seeks to avoid the pitfalls of both sovereigntist territorialism, which attempts to solve all legal disputes by exclusive application of the norms of some (...) single territorially-based jurisdiction, as well as universalism, which always looks for norms which transcend the differences of particular communities. Cosmopolitan pluralism maintains that conflicts ought to be preserved, not eliminated, and local variations should be recognized and accommodated to the greatest extent possible. Here I argue that while Berman has constructed a worthy and desirable goal for communities which find themselves in an increasingly globalized world, much work of an analytical kind remains to be done to show how such a goal is conceptually possible. As I shall attempt to demonstrate, Berman’s cosmopolitan pluralism asks for a radically revisionist understanding of the nature of law’s claim to authority, but it is not clear that such an account is available. (shrink)

Recently, extremist ‘populist’ parties have succeeded in obtaining large enough democratic electoral mandates both to legally make substantive changes to the law and constitution and to legally eliminate avenues to challenge their control over the government. Extremists place committed liberal democrats in an awkward position as they work to legally revolutionize their constitutions and turn them into ‘illiberal democracies’. This article analyses political responses to this problem. It argues that the twin phenomena of legal revolution and illiberal democracy (...) reveal a latent tension between the constitutional commitments to democracy and liberalism, that is, the equal chance to have one’s political goals enacted into law and individual basic rights. Political extremists make the latent tension real when they use the procedures of democratic legal change to abrogate constitutional commitments to liberalism, among other things. Although the two commitments normally coexist side by side, exceptional times raise an existential dilemma for liberal democracies: is it constitutional to democratically amend liberalism out of the constitution? After analysing the moral legitimacy of both the democratic and liberal arguments, this article concludes that liberal constitutionalism is constitutive of genuine democracy. In other words, it is unconstitutional to abrogate basic liberal commitments and it is legitimate to adopt constitutional mechanisms to guarantee liberalism – even if it means constraining democracy to do so. This article then situates ‘constrained democracy’ within the liberal current as a way to conceive of and respond to this pressing problem. It concludes by discussing four constitutional mechanisms – inspired by the German Grundgesetz – to guarantee liberalism: unambiguous lexically prior commitment to liberalism, limits on negative majorities, the eternity clause and party bans. It concludes that constrained democracy is an important constitutional guarantee of liberal democracy and that the four mechanisms, among others, are essential to enact constrained democracy. (shrink)

Global legal pluralism has become one of the leading analytical frameworks for understanding and conceptualizing law in the twenty-first century.

In his account of legal revolutions, Hauke Brunkhorst applies a dual perspective encompassing the approaches both of systems and discourse theory to social evolution: functional adaptation and group-based normative learning coexist as two mechanisms of societal change, the latter being conceptualized as occasional interruptions to an overall systemic process of societal evolution. This article argues that Brunkhorst’s ‘systems theory first’ perspective undermines his claim to be delivering critical theory and that while it is both possible and necessary to incorporate (...) a systems-theoretical perspective into discourse-theoretical social theory when devising a critical theory of law and democracy, the reverse does not apply. The building blocks of Habermas’ reconstructive approach to social evolution are presented as a conceptual framework that constitutes an alternative to Brunkhorst’s ‘systems theory first’ perspective but remains compatible with the basic premises of his account. A discourse-theoretical view that sees societal development in terms of a social learning process chimes with Brunkhorst’s dual perspective on the dialectics of legal evolution but at the same time upholds the aims of critical theory. (shrink)

Since classical antiquity debates about tyranny, tyrannicide and preventing tyranny's re-emergence have permeated governance discourse. Yet within the literature on the global legal order, tyranny is missing. This book creates a taxonomy of tyranny and poses the question: could the global legal order be tyrannical? This taxonomy examines the benefits attached to tyrannical governance for the tyrant, considers how illegitimacy and fear establish tyranny, asks how rule by law, silence and beneficence aid in governing a tyranny. (...) It outlines the modalities of tyranny: scale, imperialism, gender, and bureaucracy. Where it is determined that a tyranny exists, the book examines the extent of the right and duty to effect tyrannicide. As the global legal order gathers ever more power to itself, it becomes imperative to ask whether tyranny lurks at the global scale. (shrink)

The article is a review of Hauke Brunkhorst’s book on a _Critical Theory of Legal Revolutions_. The author addresses three points: Hauke Brunkhorst’s notion of history, and of what remains unseen; the dialectics of evolution and revolution, and whether the approach is sufficiently dialectic, according to its own promise; and the implicit notion of critique.

This paper uses a novel account of non-ideal political action that can justify radical responses to severe climate injustice, including and especially deliberate attempts to engineer the climate system in order reflect sunlight into space and cooling the planet. In particular, it discusses the question of what those suffering from climate injustice may do in order to secure their fundamental rights and interests in the face of severe climate change impacts. Using the example of risky geoengineering strategies such as sulfate (...) aerosol injections, I argue that peoples that are innocently subject to severely negative climate change impacts may have a special permission to engage in large-scale yet risky climate interventions to prevent them. Furthermore, this can be true even if those interventions wrongly harm innocent people. (shrink)

A political sociologist examines the concept of universal, egalitarian citizenship and assesses the prospects for developing democratic solidarity at the global level.

The basic thesis of this article is that with his book on legal revolution Brunkhorst rewrites a dialectic of enlightenment. According to Brunkhorst, learning processes, which lead to the revolutionary institutionalization of a new constitutional order, are triggered by negativity. This begs the following questions. What is the account of the belief in a concurrency of dialectics of enlightenment and the learning process? Why do extreme forms of exploitation and oppression still lead to the learning process?

This book focuses on sovereignty referendums, which have been used throughout different historical periods of democratization, decolonization, devolution, secession and state creation. Referendums on questions of sovereignty and self-determination have been a significant element of the international political and legal landscape since the French Revolution, and have been a central element in the resolution of territorial issues from the referendum in Avignon in 1791 until today. More recent examples include Quebec, East Timor, New Caledonia, Puerto Rico and South (...) Sudan. The global aim of this book is to achieve a better empirical and legal understanding of sovereignty referendums and related problems in international and national law and politics. Accordingly, it presents readers a comprehensive study of sovereignty referendums from the perspectives of both international and constitutional law. (shrink)

This paper examines the Saudi Food and Drug Authority’s (SFDA) Guidance on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technologies based Medical Devices (the MDS-G010). The SFDA has pioneered binding requirements designed for manufacturers to obtain Medical Device Marketing Authorization. The regulation of AI in health is at an early stage worldwide. Therefore, it is critical to examine the scope and nature of the MDS-G010, its influences, and its future directions. It is argued that the guidance is a patchwork of (...) existing international best practices concerning AI regulation, incorporates adapted forms of non-AI-based guidelines, and builds on existing legal requirements in the SFDA’s existing regulatory architecture. There is particular congruence with the approaches of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the International Medical Device Regulators Forum (IMDRF), but the SFDA goes beyond those approaches to incorporate other best practices into its guidance. Additionally, the binding nature of the MDS-G010 is complex. There are binding ‘components’ within the guidance, but the incorporation of non-binding international best practices which are subordinate to national law results in a lack of clarity about how penalties for non-compliance will operate. (shrink)

A legal system consists of a complex body of practices—primary and secondary—, particularly practices of reasoning and justification. The intellectual, theorized aspect of legal order is embodied in legal doctrine: the corpus of norm-sentences, norms and rules, principles, doctrines and concepts used as basis for legal reasoning and justification. It includes elaborate conceptual structures of principles and doctrines, explicit and sophisticated forms of reflection and criticism. It is only when we have understood the nature of (...) class='Hi'>legal doctrine that we can comprehend the workings of courts, lawyers and even legislatures. Concerning the need for a new conception of legal theory one question arises, above all, especially when external and internal observation as well as the critical reflection of the premises and presuppositions of all dealings with the law permit a degree of distance, the question, namely, whether it is not an increasing application of scientific methods that is needed, in the sense that the development of a legal theory from the beginning involves the integration of a norm-descriptive point of view and intellectual stand-point with the norm-prescriptive theory of law, by way of complementing each other, as it were (multi-level-approach to law). This, at least, appears to be the only way of clarifying also the relationship between le­gal theory and philosophy and the theory and sociology of law. The inevitable consequences of the development of a theory of norms and action also have to be drawn from this. (shrink)

Even the thinking of professional revolutionaries progresses, as evidenced today in legal revolution. According to the German constitutional jurist, Rudolf Smend, who died in 1975, the German people suffer from a “touching need for legality.” Smend came to this conclusion not only as historian of the Supreme Court of the German Reich, but also as observer of the positivistic normativism of his own time. Recently an old and experienced Spanish revolutionary, Santiago Carrillo, put forward the same notion in (...) a book about Eurocommunism and the State. Akhough his “touching need for legality” is politically of a different nature, Carrillo is expressly convinced that die more violent mediods of Lenin's and Trotsky's illegal revolution of October 1917 are now antiquated, mat they were only justifiable in the instance of an agrarian (peasant) society breaking dirough to a modern (industrial) society. (shrink)

A revolution is under way in telecommunications technology, and this is generating a new approach to governance in the field as well as new ethical dielmmas which are challenging the core values of the industry’s traditional approach. The author served in the Canadian Department of Communications before founding his own consultancy in communications and information technology. For the past five years he has been chief of the Strategic Planning Unit of the General Secretariat of the International Telecommunication Union, Place (...) des Nations, CH–1211 Geneva 20, Switzerland. (shrink)

This book presents a collection of philosophical essays on freedom and tolerance in the Netherlands. It explores liberal freedom and its limits in areas such as freedom of speech, public reason, sexual morality, euthanasia, drugs policy, and minority rights. The book takes Dutch practices as exemplary test cases for the principled discussions on these subjects from the perspective of political liberalism. Indeed, the Netherlands may be viewed as a social laboratory in human tolerance. During the Cultural Revolution of the (...) 1960s, Holland took the lead in a global emancipation process towards a society based on equal freedom. It was the first country to legalize euthanasia, soft drugs and gay marriage. In the final sections, the book examines the question of whether the political murders on the politician Pim Fortuyn and the film director Theo van Gogh, the reactions to Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s film Submission, as well as the success of the populist politician Geert Wilders are signs of the end of Dutch tolerance. Although it recognizes that the political climate has taken a conservative turn, the book shows that the Netherlands still shows remarkable tolerance. (shrink)

In both the literal and metaphorical senses, it seemed as if 1970s America was running out of gas. The decade not only witnessed long lines at gas stations but a citizenry that had grown weary and disillusioned. High unemployment, runaway inflation, and the energy crisis, caused in part by U.S. dependence on Arab oil, characterized an increasingly bleak economic situation. As Edward D. Berkowitz demonstrates, the end of the postwar economic boom, Watergate, and defeat in Vietnam led to an unraveling (...) of the national consensus. During the decade, ideas about the United States, how it should be governed, and how its economy should be managed changed dramatically. Berkowitz argues that the postwar faith in sweeping social programs and a global U.S. mission was replaced by a more skeptical attitude about government's ability to positively affect society. From Woody Allen to Watergate, from the decline of the steel industry to the rise of Bill Gates, and from Saturday Night Fever to the Sunday morning fervor of evangelical preachers, Berkowitz captures the history, tone, and spirit of the seventies. He explores the decade's major political events and movements, including the rise and fall of détente, congressional reform, changes in healthcare policies, and the hostage crisis in Iran. The seventies also gave birth to several social movements and the "rights revolution," in which women, gays and lesbians, and people with disabilities all successfully fought for greater legal and social recognition. At the same time, reaction to these social movements as well as the issue of abortion introduced a new facet into American political life-the rise of powerful, politically conservative religious organizations and activists. Berkowitz also considers important shifts in American popular culture, recounting the creative renaissance in American film as well as the birth of the Hollywood blockbuster. He discusses how television programs such as All in the Family and Charlie's Angels offered Americans both a reflection of and an escape from the problems gripping the country. (shrink)