Complexity Theory And Law

This collection of essays explores the different ways the insights from complexity theory can be applied to law. Complexity theory – a variant of systems theory – views law as an emergent, complex, self-organising system comprised of an interactive network of actors and systems that operate with no overall guiding hand, giving rise to complex, collective behaviour in law communications and actions. Addressing such issues as the unpredictability of legal systems, the ability of legal systems to adapt to changes in society, the importance of context, and the nature of law, the essays look to the implications of a complexity theory analysis for the study of public policy and administrative law, international law and human rights, regulatory practices in business and finance, and the practice of law and legal ethics. These are areas where law, which craves certainty, encounters unending, irresolvable complexity. This collection shows the many ways complexity theory thinking can reshape and clarify our understanding of the various problems relating to the theory and practice of law.

These essays examine complexity from a variety of perspectives and cover an array of case studies and topics that include market behaviour, medical interventions, aeronautical design, the governing of supranational states, ecology, road-building, meteorology and the science of complexity itself.

This is the first book to explore the application of complexity theory to difficult practice issues in criminal justice and social work and brings together experts in this emerging field to address complexity theory from a range of perspectives, providing a detailed but accessible discussion of the key issues to whole systems approaches.

This book is a major advancement in the area of complexity and corporate governance. By bringing together a range of leading experts in the fields of complexity and corporate governance, this book manages to knowledgeably wed the emerging field of complex systems thinking with the more established area of corporate governance. It brings a range of new and exciting concepts, such as emergence, co-evolution and selforganisation, and integrates them into an overarching and holistic understanding of corporate governance that is a clear benefit to corporate actors and stakeholders. The book is a major resource for both academic and practitioner audiences.

Complexity theory as a subject has gained increasing prominence across numerous disciplines including physics, biology, sociology and economics. Large interconnected systems such as the Internet display a number of inherent architectural characteristics deeming them well-suited to the study of complex dynamic networks. This important book uses various network science-based tools to explore the contentious issue of Internet regulation. The author demonstrates that the Internet as a global communications space is a self-organizing entity that has proven problematic for regulators, and that in order to regulate cyberspace, one must first understand how the network operates. In order to illustrate how the world wide web operates, Andres Guadamuz presents case studies in copyright policy, peer-production and cyber crime, providing in-depth analyses of the challenges posed by the Internet's complex dynamic networks. The book concludes that regulatory efforts that ignore empirical evidence will ultimately encounter serious problems. Networks, Complexity and Internet Regulation introduces network theory to legal audiences and applies some of the characteristics of large distributed self-organizing networks to the topic of Internet regulation. As such, this fascinating book will prove invaluable to researchers, academics and students in the fields of Internet regulation and policy, intellectual property law and information technology law. Contents: Introduction 1. The Science of Complex Networks 2. Complexity and the Law 3. Internet Architecture and Regulation 4. Copyright Networks 5. Peer-production Networks 6. Cybercrime and Networks Conclusion Bibliography Index

Complexity theory has its earliest origins in studies of self-organisation bwithin genetic and other biological systems, and in parallel developments elsewhere in the natural sciences. More recently still, complexity theory has begun to impact thinking in the social sciences and sicial theory. Philisophically, there are still strong links with both (post-) structuralist and phenomenological traditions, while in terms of social theory, complexity theory has tended to be treated as aspecies of systems theory, and hence linked to the normative-functionalist projects of Durkheim and Parsons. However, more recent work on the social science of complexity has stressed how complexity theory can transcend the statis inherent in classical functionalist thinking about the social order, by stressing the fluid, heterogeneous, unpredictable and increasingly global ordering of the social world.

Tax policy frequently targets the choices that women face in many aspects of their lives. Decisions regarding working away from home, having children, marrying, registering a partnership or cohabiting with a partner all entail tax consequences. The end of the twentieth century saw progress in women's legal and social equality, but many governments began to increase their reliance on the tax system as a means of influencing the choices that women make. The juxtaposition of this instrumentalist deployment of tax with persisting economic inequality for women is the starting point for this book. Employing a range of theoretical approaches, and grounding its investigations in sociological theory and cultural philosophy, it provides the foundation for a comparative, contextual consideration of the issues that arise at the intersection of women, tax policy and the law.

International human rights law has emerged as an academic subject in its own right, separate from, but still related to international law. This book explains the distinctive nature of this discipline by examining the influence of the idea of human rights on general international law. Rather than make use of a particular moral philosophy or political theory, it explains human rights by examining the way the term is deployed in legal practice, on the understanding that words are given meaning through their use. Relying on complexity theory to make sense of the legal practice of the United Nations, the core human rights treaties, and customary international law, the work demonstrates the emergence of the moral concept of human rights as a fact of the social world. It reveals the dynamic nature of this concept, and the influence of the idea on the legal practice, a fact that explains the fragmentation of international law and special nature of international human rights law.