Legal Alchemy

Is scientific information misused by this country's court system and lawmakers? Today more than ever before, lawyers, politicians, and government administrators are forced to wrestle with scientific research and to employ scientific thinking. The results are often less than enlightened. In Legal Alchemy, David Faigman explores the ways the American legal system incorporates scientific knowledge into its decision making. Praised by both legal and scientific communities when it first appeared in hardcover, Legal Alchemy shows how science has been used and misused in a variety of settings, including • The Courtroom—from the O. J. Simpson trial to the Dow Corning silicone breast implant lawsuit to landmark cases such as Roe v. Wade. • The Legislature—where Congress uses scientific information to help enact legislation about clean air, cloning, and government science projects like the space station and the superconducting super collider. • Government Agencies—who use science to determine policy on a variety of topics, from regulating sport utility vehicles to reintroducing gray wolves to Yellowstone National Park. As Faigman describes these and other important cases, he provides disturbing evidence that many judges, juries, and members of Congress simply don't understand the science behind their decisions. Finally, he offers suggestions on how the science and legal professions can overcome their miscommunication and work together more effectively.

Albie Sachs gives an intimate account of his extraordinary life and work as a judge in South Africa. Mixing autobiography with reflections on his major cases and the role of law in achieving social justice, Sachs offers a rare glimpse into the workings of the judicial mind and a unique perspective on modern South African history.

Diary of a law professor.

Tal Golan charts the use of expert testimony in British and American courtrooms from the 18th century to the present day. He assesses the standing of the expert witness, which has in recent years declined amid courtroom drama and media jeering.

Who should define what constitutes ethical and lawful medical practice? Judges? Doctors? Scientists? Or someone else entirely? This volume analyses how effectively criminal law operates as a forum for resolving ethical conflict in the delivery of health care. It addresses key questions such as: how does criminal law regulate controversial bioethical areas? What effect, positive or negative, does the use of criminal law have when regulating bioethical conflict? And can the law accommodate moral controversy? By exploring criminal law in theory and in practice and examining the broad field of bioethics as opposed to the narrower terrain of medical ethics, it offers balanced arguments that will help readers form reasoned views on the ethical legitimacy of the invocation and use of criminal law to regulate medical and scientific practice and bioethical issues.

Law is widely assumed to provide contemporary society with its most important means of organizing responsibility. Across a broad range of areas of social life – from the activities of states and citizens, to work, business and private relationships – it is understood that legal regulation plays a crucial role in defining and limiting responsibilities. But Law and Irresponsibility pursues the opposite view: it explores how law organizes irresponsibility. With a particular focus on large-scale harms – including extensive human rights violations, forms of colonialism, and environmental or nuclear devastation – this book analyzes the ways in which law legitimates human suffering by demonstrating how legal institutions operate as much to deflect responsibility for harms suffered as to acknowledge them. Drawing on a series of case studies, it shows not only how law facilitates the dispersal and disavowal of responsibility, but how it does so in consistent and patterned ways. Irresponsibility is organized, and its organization is traced here to the legal forms, and the social and political conditions, that sustain ‘our’ complicity in human suffering. This innovative and interdisciplinary book provides a radical challenge to conventional thinking about law and legal institutions. It will be of considerable interest to those working in law, political and legal theory, sociology and moral philosophy.

La nuova edizione di questa Introduzione ai Sistemi giuridici comparati è stata aggiornata ed arricchita con una serie di illustrazioni seguendo il movimento del “Legal design”. Nel volume i sistemi giuridici sono visti come un insieme in cui ogni parte di essi è in relazione con le altre ed in un contesto globale con il quale sono in osmosi. Il volume è suddiviso in otto capitoli dedicati a: 1. Sistemi democratici. 2. Valori. 3. Il governo. 4. La dimensione economica. 5. Il ‘Welfare state’. 6. La repressione dei reati. 7. Giudici e giurisdizione. 8. Modelli per un mondo globalizzato.

Examining a wide variety of texts including Shakespeare's plays, Gilbert and Sullivan's operas, and modernist poetics, Poetic Justice and Legal Fictions explores how literary laws and values illuminate and challenge the jurisdiction of justice and the law.