Law Commons^™

. . . And Law?, John Henry Schlegel

Contributions to Books

Published as Chapter 18 in Searching for Contemporary Legal Thought, Justin Desautels-Stein & Christopher Tomlins, eds.

The locution “law and . . . (some other discipline)” implicitly asserts the primacy of legal doctrine and institutions narrowly conceived for coming to understand phenomena in which law takes a part. The ordinary story of American legal theory – formalism then realism then contemporary legal thought – can be understood to repeat the triumphalism implicit in “law and . . .” Of course, the story of American legal theory could possibly be read differently -- as a series of responses to the inability …

Putting “Human Rights” Back Into The U.N. Guiding Principles On Business And Human Rights: Shifting Frames And Embedding Participation Rights, Tara J. Melish

Contributions to Books

Published as Chapter 4 in Business and Human Rights: Beyond the End of the Beginning, Cesar Rodriguez-Garavito, ed.

Gene Drives, Nature, Governance: An Ethnographic Perspective, Irus Braverman

Contributions to Books

Published as chapter 3 in Gene Editing, Law, and the Environment, Irus Braverman, ed.

Synthetic gene drives raise ethical, ecological, and legal questions that are sometimes difficult to grasp. What is clear, however, is that the power to directly alter not just a singular form of life but the genetics of entire populations and species are currently both under-regulated and under-theorized. In place of state regulations, what seems to be emerging is a form of self-regulation by the gene drive scientists themselves. My chapter draws on in-depth interviews with several prominent gene drive scientists to explore their approach toward nature, …

Agency In State Agencies, Anya Bernstein

Contributions to Books

Published as Chapter 5 in Distributed Agency, N. J. Enfield & Paul Kockelman, eds.

The democratic state is an administrative state: the actual work of representative governance is done primarily in administrative agencies, which interpret and implement the often vague ambitions inscribed in statutes. When we talk about agency in the state, then, we must primarily be talking about agency in agencies. That may seem odd. Bureaucracy seems like the absence of agency: just mechanistic gear-grinding continuing things begun by other, distant, powerful actors. Where can agency find a foothold amid the faceless people, the featureless buildings, the infinite red …