The Law Of Politics

This book is the first dedicated monograph on the law on democratic politics in Australia. It synthesises the law on elections, with a central focus on political parties, parliamentary elections and referenda at Federal and State levels.It unearths the rules that apply to elections and referenda, campaigning and political broadcasting, and political parties and money. It explains them in their political context and, while it draws on some local government case law, its focus is parliamentary politics. The longest chapter of the book is devoted to the role of courts in overseeing elections, particularly the jurisdiction of petitioning or challenging election outcomes.Orr uses all five sources of electoral law, its development, expression and interpretation, in Australia: constitutions; courts and tribunals; legislation; parliamentary committees; and electoral commissions. He documents the extraordinary detail of the legislation (there has to be a pencil in each electoral booth!) and the array of obscure cases the law has given rise to. Supported under a grant from The Law Foundation of South Australia.

For nearly fifty years, Professor Harry Glasbeek has been at the forefront of legal scholars and public intellectuals challenging assumptions and understandings about the injustices embedded in the economic, social, political and legal orders of Western capitalist democracies. His writings and teachings have influenced generations of law students, academics and activists. The Class Politics of Law brings together eleven incisive contributions from pre-eminent scholars across several disciplines activated by the same desire for democracy and justice that Glasbeek advances, showing how capitalism shapes the law and how the law protects capitalism. This collection foregrounds a class analysis of the law’s responses to corporate killing, workplace violence, surveillance, worker resistance and income inequality, among other issues.

The study of law and politics is one of the foundation stones of the discipline of political science, and it has been one of the most productive areas of cross-fertilization between the various subfields of political science and between political science and other cognate disciplines. This Handbook provides a comprehensive survey of the field of law and politics in all its diversity, ranging from such traditional subjects as theories of jurisprudence, constitutionalism, judicial politics and law-and-society to such re-emerging subjects as comparative judicial politics, international law, and democratization. The Oxford Handbook of Law and Politics gathers together leading scholars in the field to assess key literatures shaping the discipline today and to help set the direction of research in the decade ahead.

A new title in the Routledge Major Works series, Critical Concepts in Political Science, this is a four-volume collection of cutting-edge and canonical research on law and politics.

This book reconstructs and classifies, according to ideal-typical models, the different positions taken by the major contemporary legal theories as to whether and how law relates to politics. It presents a possible explanation as to why different legal theories, though often reaching diametric results, somehow must still begin from common basic points.

Drawing on classic and contemporary scholarship and empirical analysis of elections and public expenditures in 80 countries, the author argues for the existence of primary and secondary laws of politics. Starting with how basic elements of politics—leadership, organization, ideology, resources, and force—coalesce in the formation of states, he proceeds to examine the operations of those laws in democracies and dictatorships. Primary laws constrain the support that incumbents draw from the electorate, limiting their time in office. They operate unimpeded in democracies. Secondary laws describe the general tendency of the state to expand vis-à-vis economy and society. They exert their greatest force in one-party states imbued with a totalitarian ideology. The author establishes the primary laws in a rigorous analysis of 1,100 parliamentary and presidential elections in 80 countries, plus another 1,000 U.S. gubernatorial elections. Evidence for the secondary laws is drawn from public expenditure data series, with findings presented in easily grasped tables and graphs. Having established these laws quantitatively, the author uses Cuba as a case study, adding qualitative analysis and a practical application to propose a constitutional framework for a future Cuban democracy. Written in an engaging, jargon-free style, this enlightening book will be of great interest to students and scholars in political science, especially those specializing in comparative politics, as well as opinion leaders and engaged citizens.

In an era where government transparency and accountability are considered fundamental values, does Cabinet secrecy still have a place? Behind Closed Doors is the first comprehensive exploration of the legal and political rules protecting the confidentiality of collective decision-making at the highest executive level of the Canadian state. Yan Campagnolo defends Cabinet secrecy as essential to the proper functioning of responsible government while criticizing its associated statutory provisions as excessively broad and possibly unconstitutional. Comparing Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, this meticulous work proposes feasible, specific reforms that would achieve a better balance between transparency and confidentiality.

Articles previously published in the Canadian journal of law and jurisprudence.