Community And The Law

This publication takes up the fundamental question 'What is law?' through a comparative study of canon law and secular legal theory. The book also includes comparative consideration of the failure of canon law to address the clergy sexual abuse crisis the canon law of marriage, administrative law, the rule of law and much more.

Laws are a part of every community and government. This thought-provoking volume provides an accessible guide to these rules for readers who haven’t been involved in civic engagement or aren’t aware of how the law functions. Readers will learn about both the history of laws and legislatures as well as modern civil and criminal laws. Interest-provoking sidebars enhance the text, adding to essential vocabulary as well as posing questions that promote critical thinking about the rules and laws of society. Meanwhile, carefully selected photographs serve to support reading comprehension and add to the appeal of the book design.

These essays seek to re-locate the relationship between the traditional concerns of legal theory and the sociology of law by establishing a consistent theoretical approach to the analysis of law in contemporary Western societies.

This book analyzes the function and role of international law in a framework of increased global governance by focusing on how 'community interests' are articulated and protected in various areas, including the global commons, and human rights and security related issues.

This collection of socio-legal studies, written by leading theorists and researchers from around the world, offers original, perceptive and critical contributions to ideas and theories that have been expounded by Roger Cotterrell over a long and distinguished career. Engaging with the complexity and multiplicity of our contemporary legal world, the contributions are likely to become classics themselves as they tackle some of the most significant challenges that modern law faces.

This second edition of the pioneering Hyatt and French Community Association Law coursebook is an ideal vehicle for introducing students to this increasingly important subject. From housing just 2 million Americans in 1970, common interest communities had grown to house 57 million, or 19% of the American population, by 2006. Community associations, which manage these communities, bear similarities to not-for-profit corporations, municipal governments, and trusts, but are different. The evolving body of community association law draws from all these fields but reflects the unique character and needs of common interest communities. Reflecting the expertise of its authors, the book combines academic rigor and practical knowledge. Primary materials include important cases, statutes (including proposed revisions to UCIOA), the Restatement (Third) of Property, Servitudes, and references to the growing body of literature on gated communities, co-housing developments, private governments, and other property regimes used to avoid the tragedy of the commons in groups that hold common property.

The origins of civil society and the function of law -- Justice, ownership, and law -- Natural justice and conventional justice -- Justice and the trading order -- Adjudication and interpretation -- Morality, law, and legislation -- Natural law -- Rights -- The force of law -- The authority and legitimacy of law.

Against an ever-expanding and diversifying ‘rights talk’, this book re-opens the question of obligation from not only legal but also ethical, sociological and political perspectives. Its premise is that obligation has a primacy ahead of rights, because rights attach to practices and modes of being that are already saturated with obligations. Obligations thus lie at the core not just of law but of community. Yet the distinctive meanings, range and situations of obligation have tended to remain under-theorised in legal scholarship. In response, this book examines the sense in which we are multiply ‘bound beings’, to law and legal institutions, as much as we are to place, community, memory and the various social institutions that give shape to collective life. Sharing this set of concerns, each of the international group of scholars contributing to this volume traces the specificity of the binding force of obligations, their techniques and modes of expression, as well as their centrally important role in giving form to lawful relations. Together they provide an innovative and challenging contribution to legal scholarship: one that will also be of relevance to those working in politics, philosophy and social theory.