Law Commons^™

Review: A Philosophy Of International Law, Frank J. Garcia

Frank J. Garcia

No abstract provided.

Suicide Killing Of Human Life As Human Right - The Continuing Devolution Of Assisted Suicide Law In The United Kingdom, William Wagner

William Wagner

SUICIDE KILLING OF HUMAN LIFE AS A HUMAN RIGHT

The Continuing Devolution of Assisted Suicide Law

in the United Kingdom

PROF. WILLIAM WAGNER, PROF. JOHN KANE, AND STEPHEN P. KALLMAN

ABSTRACT

Since the beginning of time, divine, natural, and positive law traditions of the United Kingdom reflected an inviolable standard that people should not assist in the killing of human life. This article reviews and analyzes the ancient inviolable benchmark, explaining why the common and statutory law of Britain historically reflected its moral reference point to prohibit assisted suicide. We then proceed to analyze a contemporary jurisprudential shift in Britain’s …

The Age Of Lawfare, Dale Stephens

International Law Studies

No abstract provided.

Assessing Law’S Claim To Authority, Bas Van Der Vossen

Philosophy Faculty Articles and Research

The idea that law claims authority (LCA) has recently been forcefully criticized by a number of authors. These authors present a new and intriguing objection, arguing that law cannot be said to claim authority if such a claim is not justified. That is, these authors argue that the view that law does not have authority viciously conflicts with the view that law claims authority. I will call this the normative critique of LCA. In this article, I assess the normative critique of LCA, focusing predominantly on the arguments presented by its most incisive proponent Philip Soper. I defend a …

Legal Positivism As An Idea About Morality, Martin J. Stone

Faculty Articles

I ask what a proper critical target for 'legal positivism' might be. I argue that utilitarian moral theory, and more generally fully directive moral theories, are unacknowledged motivations for legal positivism. Contemporary debate about 'the nature of law' is, historically speaking, much more of a footnote to utilitarianism than has been recognized.

Planning For Legality, Jeremy Waldron

Michigan Law Review

What is law like? What can we compare it with in order to illuminate its character and suggest answers to some of the perennial questions of jurisprudence? Natural lawyers compare laws to moral propositions. A human law is an attempt by someone who has responsibility for a human community to replicate, publicize, and enforce a proposition of objective morality such as "Killing is wrong." Law is like moral reasoning, say the natural lawyers, and laws should be regarded as principles of right reason (principles that reason dictates as answers to the moral questions that need to be addressed in human …

Assessing The State Of The State Constitutionalism, Jim Rossi

Michigan Law Review

Robert Williams's The Law of American State Constitutions is an impressive career accomplishment for one of the leading academic lawyers writing on state constitutions. Given the need for a comprehensive, treatise-like treatment of state constitutions that transcends individual jurisdictions, Williams's book will almost certainly become the go-to treatise for the next generation of state constitutional law practitioners and scholars. The U.S. Constitution has a grip on how the American legal mind approaches issues in American constitutionalism, but an important recurring theme in Williams's work (as well as that of others) is how state constitutions present unique interpretive challenges. More than …

From Enlightened Positivism To Cosmopolitan Justice: Obstacles And Opportunities, Steven Ratner

Book Chapters

This paper explores the possibilities for linkages between various forms of positivism accepted by many international lawyers and various forms of cosmopolitanism advocated by scholars of global justice. Building on Bruno Simma's conception of "enlightened positivism," it identifies areas in which cosmopolitan trends have already seeped into the fabric of international law and the key gaps between positivist and cosmopolitan visions of international law and the international community. Emphasizing the contributions that philosophical inquiry can add to international legal scholarship, and vice-versa, it concludes with some thoughts on further integration of cosmopolitan thinking into positivist methodologies.

The Illegitimacy Of Preventing Ngo Participation, Steve Charnovitz

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This article discusses whether non-governmental organizations (NGOs) may be excluded from the international governance system. The article describes three ideological viewpoints of NGOs: 1) state positivism, which views states as the ultimate decision-maker and finds that an international organization (IO) cannot grant any role to NGOs that is outside of the IO’s founding treaty, 2) functionalism, which finds the IO to be the decision-maker regarding the role played by an NGO, and 3) the community view, which views the IO as a compilation of decision-makers and places an individual, rather than a state, at the center. Although the majority view …

The Search Of A Unifying Theory: Why Pluralism In Public International Law Isn't Such A Bad Thing, Michael Buenger

Michael Buenger

For well over 200 hundred years with the coining of the term “international law”, the world’s legal and international relations communities have struggled to develop coherent theories and methodologies to explain a phenomenon that is quite different from our concept of law as drawn from our domestic experiences. Over time this quest has produced various schools of thought and methodologies seemingly seeking, in one form or another, the same outcome: a unifying theory of or approach to the legal thinking that undergirds systems of public international law and explains why such systems work or in some cases do not work. …