A Matter Of Dispute

Law often purports to require people, including government officials, to act in ways they think are morally wrong or harmful. What is it about law that can justify such a claim? In A Matter of Dispute: Morality, Democracy, and Law, Christopher J. Peters offers an answer to this question, one that illuminates the unique appeal of democratic government, the peculiar structure of adversary adjudication, and the contested legitimacy of constitutional judicial review. Peters contends that law should be viewed primarily as a device for avoiding or resolving disputes, a function that implies certain core properties of authoritative legal procedures. Those properties - competence and impartiality - give democracy its advantage over other forms of government. They also underwrite the adversary nature of common-law adjudication and the duties and constraints of democratic judges. And they ground a defense of constitutionalism and judicial review against persistent objections that those practices are "counter-majoritarian" and thus nondemocratic. This work canvasses fundamental problems within the diverse disciplines of legal philosophy, democratic theory, philosophy of adjudication, and public-law theory and suggests a unified approach to unraveling them. It also addresses practical questions of law and government in a way that should appeal to anyone interested in the complex and often troubled relationship among morality, democracy, and the rule of law. Written for specialists and non-specialists alike, A Matter of Dispute explains why each of us individually, and all of us collectively, have reason to obey the law - why democracy truly is a system of government under law.

This work canvasses fundamental problems within the diverse disciplines of legal philosophy, democratic theory, philosophy of adjudication, and public-law theory and suggests a unified approach to unraveling them. It also addresses practical questions of law and government in a way that should appeal to anyone interested in the complex and often troubled relationship among morality, democracy, and the rule of law. --

A guide to the techniques and institutions used to solve international disputes, how they work and when they are used. This textbook looks at diplomatic (negotiation, mediation, inquiry and conciliation) and legal methods (arbitration, judicial settlement). It uses many, often topical, examples of each method in practice to place the theory of how things should work in the context of real-life situations and to help the reader understand the strengths and weaknesses of different methods when they are used. It also looks at organisations such as the International Court and the United Nations and has been fully updated to include the most recent arbitrations, developments in the WTO and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, as well as case law from the International Court of Justice.

This new edition considers a wide range of materials dealing with dispute processes and current debates on civil justice.

This book examines the role, the general framework and the empirical effectiveness of the main alternative dispute resolution tools (administrative appeals, mediation, and ombudsman) in administrative matters, within the broader context of the administrative justice system. The book uses approaches from the fields of law, public administration, public policy and political science to assess the importance of different instruments for alternative dispute resolution, with an emphasis on administrative appeals.

This book brings together articles from leading experts in the field of international dispute resolution. The main focus is on the situation in Asia, though the European perspective also plays an important part. Accordingly, the focus on the Asian dispute resolution market with a distinctly American and European “touch” is one of the book’s most unique features. The dispute resolution market is rapidly transforming, and dispute resolution law is changing with it –especially in Asia. This book highlights recent advances and outlines future trends in this area. Emphasis is especially placed on International Commercial Arbitration Law on the one hand; and on International Investment Arbitration Law on the other. Two dedicated sections address these two topics, while another is dedicated to a quite new phenomenon in the field of international dispute resolution, the emergence of International Commercial Courts not only in Asia, but also in other regions of the world (e.g. in the Netherlands). This raises a host of interesting legal questions, which the book addresses. The book’s final section investigates general trends in dispute resolution (e.g. the rising cost problem in arbitration in general).

This incisive book provides a comprehensive overview of the WTO dispute settlement practice from 1995 up until the present day, illustrating the need for it to be resurrected from its current state of crisis. The WTO Dispute Settlement System will prove an essential read for students and scholars of WTO law, as well as lawyers, political scientists and policy-oriented economists interested in the WTO dispute settlement system.

This book has its origins in an M.I.T. research project that was funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Our immediate objective was to prepare a set of case studies that examined bargaining and negotiation as they occurred between government, environmental advocates, and regulatees throughout the traditional regulatory process. The project was part of a larger effort by the EPA to make environmental regulation more efficient and less litigious. The principal investigator for the research effort was Lawrence Sus skind of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. Eight case studies were prepared under the joint supervision of Susskind and the authors of this book. Studying the negotiating behavior of parties as we worked our way through an environmental dispute proved enlightening. We observed missed oppor tunities for settlement, negotiating tactics that backfired, and strategies that ap peared to be grounded more in intuition than in thoughtful analysis. At the same time, however, we were struck by how often the parties ultimately managed to muddle through. People negotiated not out of some idealistic commitment to consensus but because they thought it better served their own interests. When some negotiations reached an impasse, people improvised mediation. These disputants succeeded in spite of legal and institutional barriers, even though few of them had a sophisticated understanding of negotiation.