Law Commons^™

Universidade: Um Manifesto Pelo Sonho, Paulo Ferreira Da Cunha

Paulo Ferreira da Cunha

Por muito vilipendiado que seja, e é-o praticamente todos os dias por sociedades que recusam ser educadas e se comprazem na sua má-educação e incultura, além de por políticos impreparados, e mesmo por colegas não solidários, o Professor que o é por vocação está como Lutero: aqui está, aqui fica, não pode fazer de outra maneira. Só este professor por vocação e por sonho ainda faz a Escola valer. Até quando continuará a haver professores destes? E até onde irá a sua inadaptação com as condições em que tem de sobreviver, fazendo um papel que lhe não é reconhecido, tantas …

Concretizar A Constituição, Paulo Ferreira Da Cunha

Paulo Ferreira da Cunha

O presente artigo pondera observações sobre a Constituição Portuguesa: é ela realmente normativa, ou inefectiva? Impõe-se uma análise das críticas ao statu quo constitucional: dirigem-se elas à Constituição em si ou apenas ao seu deficiente cumprimento? Finalmente, em que medida é que a Constituição, parecendo a alguns impecilho para a resolução da crise, contudo pode ser adjuvante para a sua superação.

Crítica Da Razão Jurídica, Paulo Ferreira Da Cunha

Paulo Ferreira da Cunha

A razão jurídica racionalista fez-se abstraccionismo e dogmatismo e tornou-se legalismo. O Direito ficou, em muitos casos, empedernido e injusto. Abrir o Direito aos sentidos e aos sentimentos, na senda, por exemplo, de um Luis Alberto Warat, sendo fascinante e iconoclasta, não é tarefa fácil, se for empresa prudente. Precisamente porque os juristas, mesmo muitos dos mais radicias, se habituaram a certos limites, e mesmo na semiótica dos seus lugares, dos seus modos e vestes reconheceríamos sombras avessas às paixões. As quais podem ser, porém, um vício oposto ao racionalismo. O desafio é reinventar a razão jurídica sem o normativismo …

'Mass Of Madness': Jurisprudence In E.M. Forster's A Passage To India, Allen P. Mendenhall

Allen Mendenhall

Law-and-literature scholars have paid scant attention to E. M. Forster’s oeuvre, which abounds in legal information and which situates itself in a unique jurisprudential context. Of all his novels, A Passage to India (1924) interrogates the law most rigorously, especially as it implicates massive programs of ‘liberal’ imperialism and ‘humanitarian’ intervention, as well as less grand but equally dubious legal apparatuses – jail, bail, discovery, courtrooms – that police and pervert Chandrapore, the fictional Indian city in which the novel is set. The study of law in Anglo-India is particularly telling, if troubling, because India served as ‘a model for …

When ‘Digital Borders’ Meet ‘Surveilled Geographical Borders’. Why The Future Of Eu Border Management Is A Problem, Gloria Gonzalez-Fuster, Serge Gutwirth

Serge Gutwirth

The European Union (EU) has been powerfully supporting over the last decades the construction of so-called ‘digital borders’, composed of large-scale databases massively processing information on third-country nationals on the move, focusing on the examination of who crosses, wishes or needs to cross its external borders. Simultaneously, the EU has been placing under increased surveillance its ‘physical’ external borders, axing such surveillance on the scrutiny of whatever happens at such geographical space. Recent policy and technological developments appear to announce an interconnection of both modalities of ‘borders’, dangerously occurring at the edge of the EU legal framework for the insurance …

"For Every Wrong There Is A Remedy": Changing Law And Fleeing Wives In Nineteenth-Century America , Jerome J. Nadelhaft

Jerome J Nadelhaft

Wife abuse was much in the public eye in the nineteenth century. Throughout the century a large but unknown number of wives sought to preserve their lives by abandoning their homes. It was never easy, but at least some were not themselves abandoned by the courts, which dealt with the many issues raised: for example, whether relatives and neighbors were allowed to assist them and even encourage them to flee. Fortunately, the American Revolution inspired a judicial belief that problems could be solved. Equity courts flourished and the chancellors who presided felt comfortable acting where the law was silent. More …

Transnational Law: An Essay In Definition With A Polemic Addendum, Allen P. Mendenhall

Allen Mendenhall

What is transnational law? Various procedures and theories have emanated from this slippery signifier, but in general academics and legal practitioners who use the term have settled on certain common meanings for it. My purpose in this article is not to disrupt but to clarify these meanings by turning to literary theory and criticism that regularly address transnationality. Cultural and postcolonial studies are the particular strains of literary theory and criticism to which I will attend. To review “transnational law,” examining its literary inertia and significations, is the objective of this article, which does not purport to settle the matter …

Shakespeare's Place In Law-And-Literature, Allen P. Mendenhall

Allen Mendenhall

Nearly every Anglo-American law school offers a course called Law-and-Literature. Nearly all of these courses assign one or more readings from Shakespeare’s oeuvre. Why study Shakespeare in law school? That is the question at the heart of these courses. Some law professors answer the question in terms of cultivating moral sensitivity, fine-tuning close-reading skills, or practicing interpretive strategies on literary rather than legal texts. Most of these professors insist on an illuminating nexus between two supposedly autonomous disciplines. The history of how Shakespeare became part of the legal canon is more complicated than these often defensive, syllabus-justifying declarations allow. This …

The German Constitutional Court Judgement On Data Retention: Proportionality Overrides Unlimited Surveillance (Doesn't It ?), Katja De Vries, Rocco Bellanova, Paul De Hert, Serge Gutwirth

Serge Gutwirth

On 15 March 2006, the Data Retention Directive, demanding the retention of telecommunications data for a period of six months up to two years, was adopted. Since then, this seemingly straightforward directive has ‘generated’ quite an impressive number of court judgments. They range from the European Court of Justice (ECJ) to the administrative (e.g. Germany and Bulgaria ) and constitutional courts (e.g. Romania ) of some Member-States. In particular, the judgment of the German Federal Constitutional Court, delivered on 2 March 2010, has already caught the attention of several commentators, from civil society, lawyers, journalists and politicians (cf. infra). In …

Zizek/Questions/Failing, Nick J. Sciullo

Nick J. Sciullo

In this article I am primarily concerned with presenting Slavoj Žižek3 as a legal theorist. Žižek has been a valuable contributor to critical theory and deserves a place in the pantheon of legal thinkers.

While his diverse writings are often relegated to other disciplines, they also position him as an important contributor to law and public discourse. I seek to illuminate how he mediates and interrogates the law by demonstrating how his scholarship is important to the lives of legal thinkers, questions of success and the law, capitalism, political practice, and terrorism. Because Žižek’s work is interdisciplinary and expansive, this …