Pluralism And Law State Nation Community Civil Society

Contents Luigi Ferrajoli: Past and Future of the State under Law u Mauro Zamboni: oRechtsstaato: What is it that Swedish development assistance, organisatons oexporto? u Hans Gribnau: Legal Principles and Legislative Instrumentalism u Maria Jose Falcon y Tella: Justified Illegality: The Question of Civil Disobedience u Hideo Sasakura: How should we discuss the Right of Resistance today? u K. Papageorgiou: Nations, persons, rights and responsibilities u M.N.S. Sellers: The Right to Secede u Stephan Kirste: Constitution and Time u Nicholas Aroney: Towards a General Theory of the Formation and Amendment of Federal Constitutions: A Comparative Study u Adriaan Anderson: Prosecuting Crime in a Constitutional State: The Recent South African Experience u Luis Villar-Borda: The Role of the Constitutional Court in the Advance of Law in a Developing Country u Marcela Forero: Colombia: a Multisovereignty State u Samuli Hurri: What of Tomorrow's Citizenship? Universal and Politics in Hannah Arendt and Jurgen Habermas u Marcelo Campos Galuppo: Constitutional Hermeneutics and Pluralism u Francoise Michaut: Pluralism in Law in Robert Cover's Writings u E. A. Huppes-Cluysenaer: Informal Rules do not Exist u Niels F. van Manen: The legal recognition of distinct communities u Peter Koller: Law and Virtue u Carl Lebeck: Coercion, co-ordination and normativity - towards a refined distinction between positive and negative rights u Sheldon Wein: Moral Pluralism and the Rule of Law.

Explores ways to make democracy work better, with particular focus on the integral role of local institutions.

“South America is not the poorest continent in the world, but it may very well be the most unjust.” This statement by Ricardo Lagos, then president of Chile, at the Summit of the Americas in January 2004 captures nicely the dilemma that faces Latin American countries in the wake of the transition to democracy that swept across the continent in the last two decades of the twentieth century. While political rights are now available to citizens at unprecedented levels, social and economic rights lag far behind, and the fledgling democracies struggle with long legacies of poverty, inequality, and corruption. Key to understanding what is happening in Latin America today is the relationship between the state and civil society. In this ambitious book, Philip Oxhorn sets forth a theory of civil society adequate for explaining current developments in a way that such controversial neoconservative theories as Francis Fukuyama’s liberal triumphalism or Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” cannot. Inspired by the rich political sociology of an earlier era and the classic work of T. H. Marshall on citizenship, Oxhorn studies the process by which social groups are incorporated, or not, into national socioeconomic and political development through an approach that focuses on the “social construction of citizenship.”

"The role of the state in resolving social tensions rooted in competing "sets of ultimate commitments" among citizens, and the role of the law in resolving such moral conflicts between the citizen and the state. How, and why, differences ought to be accommodated in a free and democratic society. The issues explored are becoming intensely pertinent as Canada's religious diversity increases, the state expands into areas traditionally seen as private, and state actors seek to promote certain 'values'."--

English political pluralism is a challenging school of political thought, neglected in recent years but now enjoying a revival of interest. It is particularly relevant today because it offers a critique of centralized sovereign state power. The leading theorists of the pluralist state were G.D.H. Cole, J.N. Figgis and H.J. Laski, and this volume brings together their most important ideas, making accessible a crucial body of work on radical political theory. It includes their major writings, mostly out of print and difficult to obtain, and here gathered together in an anthology for the first time. Current in the first two decades of this century, English political pluralism offered a convincing critique of state sovereignty and proposed a decentralized and federated form of authority - pluralism - in which the affairs of society would be conducted by self-governing and independent associations. Paul Hirst's comprehensive introduction situates English political pluralism historically and gives a critical account of its main theoretical themes and the debate surrounding them. The book will be of interest to those who see radical reform as vital for the future health of democracy, to students of political theory and the history of political thought and also to students of jurisprudence and legal theory interested in the pluralist debate as it affects the concept of legal sovereignty.

Jirí Pribán's book contributes to the field of systems theory of law in the context of European legal and political integration and constitution-making. It puts recent European legislative efforts and policies, especially the EU enlargement process, in the context of legal theory and philosophy. Furthermore, the author shows that the system of positive law has a symbolic meaning, reflecting how it also contributes to the semantics of political identity, democratic power and moral values, as well as the complex relations between law, politics and morality.