Revolution And The Rule Of Law

Offering insights into the origins, successes, and threats to revolutionary constitutionalism, Bruce Ackerman takes us to India, South Africa, Italy, France, Poland, Burma, Israel, Iran, and the U.S. and provides a blow-by-blow account of the tribulations that confronted popular movements in their insurgent campaigns for constitutional democracy.

The relationship between politics and law in the early People’s Republic of China was highly contentious. Periods of intentionally excessive campaign justice intersected with attempts to carve out professional standards of adjudication and to offer retroactive justice for those deemed to have been unjustly persecuted. How were victims and perpetrators defined and dealt with during different stages of the Maoist era and beyond? How was law practiced, understood, and contested in local contexts? This volume adopts a case study approach to shed light on these complex questions. By way of a close reading of original case files from the grassroots level, the contributors detail procedures and question long-held assumptions, not least about the Cultural Revolution as a period of “lawlessness.”

This book presents an analysis of global legal history in Modern times, questioning the effect of political revolutions since the 17th century on the legal field. Readers will discover a non-linear approach to legal history as this work investigates the ways in which law is created. These chapters look at factors in legal revolution such as the role of agents, the policy of applying and publicising legal norms, codification and the orientations of legal writing, and there is a focus on the publicization of law. The author uses Herbert Hart’s schemes to conceive law as a human artefact or convention, being the union between primary rules of obligations and secondary rules conferring powers. Here we learn about those secondary rules and the legal construction of the Modern state and we question the extent to which codification and law reporting were likely to revolutionize the legal field. These chapters examine the hypothesis of a legal revolution that could have concerned many countries in modern times. To begin with, the book considers the legal aspect of the construction of Modern States in the 17th and 18th centuries. It goes on to examine the consequences of the codification movement as a legal revolution before looking at the so-called “constitutional” revolution, linked with the extension of judicial review in many countries after World War II. Finally, the book enquires into the construction of an EU legal order and international law. In each of these chapters, the author measures the scope of the change, how the secondary rules are concerned, the role of the professional lawyers and what are the characters of the new configuration of the legal field. This book provokes new debates in legal philosophy about the rule of change and will be of particular interest to researchers in the fields of law, theories of law, legal history, philosophy of law and historians more broadly.

As the title suggests, A Revolution in the International Rule of Law: Essays in Honor of Don Wallace, Jr. is a European style Festschrift or Liber Amicorum, and compiles short essays by eminent scholars and practitioners who have known Prof. Wallace during his long and distinguished career as a Professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center and, among others, as the Chairman of the International Law Institute, the U.S. Delegate to UNCITRAL, the Legal Adviser to the USAID, President of the ABA Section on International Law, presiding officer of the UNIDROIT Foundation, and Of Counsel to a number of prominent international law firms including Winston & Strawn LLP, Morgan Lewis LLP, Arnold & Porter LLP, and Shearman & Sterling LLP. The primary topics covered in the book are: Foreign Investment and Political RiskInternational Investment Law and ArbitrationUnification of Private LawCommercial Law ReformPublic ProcurementRule of Law and Transitional JusticeInternational Business Law and Human RightsLegal Aspects of the United States' Foreign Affairs: Public International Law, Separation of Powers and Terrorism. Professor Wallace's friends, including the co-editors, have submitted 45 essays including a biographical piece prepared by the editors to this volume.

This insightful book investigates the historical, political, and legal foundations of the Chinese perspectives on the rule of law and the international rule of law. Building upon an understanding of the rule of law as an 'essentially contested concept', this book analyses the interactions between the development of the rule of law within China and the Chinese contribution to the international rule of law, more particularly in the areas of global trade and security governance.

Partial proceedings of the 17th World Congress of the International Association of Legal and Social Philosophy, held in Bologna, June 16-21, 1995.