Ubiquitous Law

Ubiquitous Law explores the possibility of understanding the law in dissociation from the State while, at the same time, establishing the conditions of meaningful communication between various legalities. This book argues that the enquiry into the legal has been biased by the implicit or explicit presupposition of the State's exclusivity to a claim to legality as well as the tendency to make the enquiry into the law the task of experts, who purport to be able to represent the legal community's commitments in an authoritative manner. Very worryingly, the experts' point of view then becomes constitutive of the law and parasitic to and distortive of people's commitments. Ubiquitous Law counter-suggests a new methodology for legal theory, which will not be based on rigid epistemological and normative assumptions but rather on self-reflection and mutual understanding and critique, so as to establish acceptable differences on the basis of a commonality.

The main goal of this book is to emphasize the impact of ubiquity on scientific entrepreneurship and to promote practical ways to make scientific entrepreneurship ubiquitous within universities in order to create more startups, for economic and societal benefit. The book begins with a look at the state of research on ubiquity in humanities and information technology. First, the ubiquity of God in theology is analyzed, with a focus on the three major religions – Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. Also, ubiquity in the field of law is investigated to examine whether and how ubiquity is described in jurisprudence and in how far it adds to the concept of ubiquity. Second, the field of IT is focused, where ubiquity occurs in the area of ubiquitous computing. The analysis of the state of research in humanities and information technology than allows the identification of certain characteristics of ubiquity. These characteristics are used as determinants to develop a model, consisting of a general ubiquitous entrepreneurship framework and a ubiquitous entrepreneurship board. This model was developed to ensure that each university can use the identified characteristics for ubiquity from theology and IT to individually define itself as an entrepreneurial university, and derive methods and instruments to promote ubiquitous entrepreneurship holistically.

This book examines whether law, as a cultural practice, can apply across cultural boundaries to bind people with vastly different beliefs and practices.

The study and teaching of international human rights law is dominated by the doctrinal method. A wealth of alternative approaches exists, but they tend to be discussed in isolation from one another. This collection focuses on cross-theoretical discussion that brings together an array of different analytical methods and theoretical lenses that can be used for conducting research within the field. As such, it provides a coherent, accessible and diverse account of key theories and methods. A distinctive feature of this collection is that it adopts a grounded approach to international human rights law, through demonstrating the application of specific research methods to individual case studies. By applying the approach under discussion to a concrete case it is possible to better appreciate the multiple understandings of international human rights law that are missed when the field is only comprehended though the doctrinal method. Furthermore, since every contribution follows the same uniform structure, this allows for fruitful comparison between different approaches to the study of our discipline.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Ubiquitous Networking, UNet 2018, held in Hammamet, Morocco, in May 2018. The 35 full papers presented together with 5 short papers in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 87 submissions. The focus of UNet is on technical challenges and solutions related to such a widespread adoption of networking technologies, including broadband multimedia, machine-to-machine applications, Internet of things, security and privacy, data engineering, sensor networks and RFID technologies.

For almost a decade the European Union has been stuck in a permanent crisis. Starting with domestic constitutional crises, followed by an imported financial crisis, it has evolved into a fully formed political crisis. This book argues that none of the crises are exclusively internal to the EU and the responses to date, which have taken inward looking approaches, are simply inadequate. Resolution can only come when the EU engages more fully with transnational law. This highly topical book offers an innovative dual focus on both transnational and EU law together. It sets out the relationship between the two frameworks by exploring practical concrete problems that transnational law has posed to the EU. These problems are explored from the perspective of four key tenets of both systems, namely the rule of law, democracy, the protection of human rights, and justice. It does this by advancing the theoretical framework of principled legal pluralism. In so doing it offers clear normative guidance as to how the relationship between EU and transnational law should be developed and fostered.

This book proposes an interdisciplinary methodology for developing an intercultural use of law so as to include cultural differences and their protection within legal discourse; this is based on an analysis of the sensory grammar tacitly included in categorizations. This is achieved by combining the theoretical insights provided by legal theory, anthropology and semiotics with a reading of human rights as translational interfaces among the different cultural spaces in which people live. To support this use of human rights’ semantic and normative potential, a specific cultural-geographic view dubbed ‘legal chorology’ is employed. Its primary purpose is to show the extant continuity between categories and spaces of experience, and more specifically between legal meanings and the spatial dimensions of people’s lives. Through the lens of legal chorology and the intercultural, translational use of human rights, the book provides a methodology that shows how to make space and law reciprocally transformative so as to create an inclusive legal grammar that is equidistant from social cultural differences. The analysis includes: a critical view on opportunities for intercultural secularization; the possibility of construing a legal grammar of quotidian life that leads to an inclusive equidistance from differences rather than an unachievable neutrality or an all-encompassing universal legal ontology; an interdisciplinary methodology for legal intercultural translation; a chorological reading of the relationships between human rights protection and lived spaces; and an intercultural and geo-semiotic examination of a series of legal cases and current issues such as indigenous peoples’ rights and the international protection of sacred places.

A fresh theory on how individuals respond to inequalities occurring within their own communities. This original and insightful study draws on empirical research on the Santal people of Asia, examining power relations within social fields, and the state, to reveal a typology of power practices, and applies these to forced marriage in the West.