Ethics and Law of Intellectual Property


Book Description

Divided into three parts, this edited volume gives an overview of current topics in law and ethics in relation to intellectual property. It addresses practical issues encountered in everyday situations in politics, research and innovation, as well as some of the underlying theoretical concepts. In addition, it provides an insight into the process of international policy-making, showing the current problems in the area of intellectual property in science and research. It also highlights changes in the fundamental understanding of common and private property and the possible implications and challenges for society and politics.




Ethics, Law and the Politics of Information


Book Description

This book provides a detailed discussion of the theoretical and practical implications of the change driven by ICTs. Such a change is often much more profound than an emphasis on information technology and society can capture, for not only does it bring about ethical and policy vacuums that call for a new understanding of ethics, politics and law, but it also “re-ontologizes reality”, as propounded by Luciano Floridi’s philosophy and ethics of information. The informational turn is transforming our understanding of reality by challenging the conventional ways we have of thinking about our world and our identities in terms of stable and enduring structures and beliefs. The information age we inhabit brings to completion our self-understanding as informational systems that produce, process, and exchange information with other informational systems, in an environment that is itself made up of information. The present volume provides us with a better understanding of the normative nature and role of information, helping us to grasp the sense and extent to which informational resources serve as “constraining affordances” guiding our behaviours. It does so by delineating the background against which we build our beliefs about reality, make decisions, and behave, through our interactions with a multi-agent system that is increasingly dependent on ICTs. The book will be of interest to a vast audience, ranging from information technologists, ethicists, policy makers, social and legal scholars, and all those willing to embrace the following three tenets: we construct our world and ourselves informationally; by constructing our world and ourselves we thereby become aware of our limits; it is precisely these limits that make us become human beings.




Scarlet A


Book Description

Winner of the NCTE George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language Although Roe v. Wade identified abortion as a constitutional right in1973, it still bears stigma--a proverbial scarlet A. Millions of Americans have participated in or benefited from an abortion, but few want to reveal that they have done so. Approximately one in five pregnancies in the US ends in abortion. Why is something so common, which has been legal so long, still a source of shame and secrecy? Why is it so regularly debated by politicians, and so seldom divulged from friend to friend? This book explores the personal stigma that prevents many from sharing their abortion experiences with friends and family in private conversation, and the structural stigma that keeps it that way. In public discussion, both proponents and opponents of abortion's legality tend to focus on extraordinary cases. This tendency keeps the national debate polarized and contentious, and keeps our focus on the cases that occur the least. Professor Katie Watson focuses instead on the cases that happen the most, which she calls "ordinary abortion." Scarlet A gives the reflective reader a more accurate impression of what the majority of American abortion practice really looks like. It explains how our silence around private experience has distorted public opinion, and how including both ordinary abortion and abortion ethics could make our public exchanges more fruitful. In Scarlet A, Watson wisely and respectfully navigates one of the most divisive topics in contemporary life. This book explains the law of abortion, challenges the toxic politics that make it a public football and private secret, offers tools for more productive private exchanges, and leads the way to a more robust public discussion of abortion ethics. Scarlet A combines storytelling and statistics to bring the story of ordinary abortion out of the shadows, painting a rich, rarely seen picture of how patients and doctors currently think and act, and ultimately inviting readers to tell their own stories and draw their own conclusions. The paperback edition includes a new preface by the author addressing new cultural developments in abortion discourse and new legal threats to reproductive rights, and updated statistics throughout.




The Politics of International Law


Book Description

Today international law is everywhere. Wars are fought and opposed in its name. It is invoked to claim rights and to challenge them, to indict or support political leaders, to distribute resources and to expand or limit the powers of domestic and international institutions. International law is part of the way political (and economic) power is used, critiqued, and sometimes limited. Despite its claim for neutrality and impartiality, it is implicit in what is just, as well as what is unjust in the world. To understand its operation requires shedding its ideological spell and examining it with a cold eye. Who are its winners, and who are its losers? How - if at all - can it be used to make a better or a less unjust world? In this collection of essays Professor Martti Koskenniemi, a well-known practitioner and a leading theorist and historian of international law, examines the recent debates on humanitarian intervention, collective security, protection of human rights and the 'fight against impunity' and reflects on the use of the professional techniques of international law to intervene politically. The essays both illustrate and expand his influential theory of the role of international law in international politics. The book is prefaced with an introduction by Professor Emmanuelle Jouannet (Sorbonne Law School), which locates the texts in the overall thought and work of Martti Koskenniemi.




Ethics and World Politics


Book Description

The book opens with a discussion of different methods and approaches employed to study the subject, including analytical political theory, post-structuralism and critical theory. It then surveys some of the most prominent perspectives on global ethics, including cosmopolitanism, communitarianism of various kinds, theories of international society, realism, postcolonialism, feminism, and green political thought. Part III examines a variety of more specific issues, including immigration, democracy, human rights, the just war tradition and its critics, international law, and global poverty and inequality. -- Publisher description.




The Oxford Handbook of Law and Politics


Book Description

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.




The Politics and Ethics of Contemporary Work


Book Description

Bringing together leading international scholars within the fields of social and political theory and philosophy, this book explores how we should understand work and its role(s) in our lives and wider society. What challenges are posed by work in our changing economy and the new economic forms that are beginning to emerge, and how can we best address these challenges? In what ways do patterns of working, as well as work technologies, shape people’s lives within and outside work, in particular their life opportunities and their social and natural environment? How might we organize—or seek to reorganize—workplaces so that the experience of work better reflects our shared ethical ideals and normative principles? This volume examines these vital questions in a comprehensive and systematic manner in order to provide much needed theoretical insight and practical guidance in reflecting on the nature, problems, and possibilities of work currently. This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students and established academics in the areas of contemporary political theory and philosophy, social theory, legal philosophy, labour studies, the sociology of work, practical ethics, critical theory, and political activism.




Judith Butler: Ethics, Law, Politics


Book Description

The first to use Judith Butler’s work as a reading of how the legal subject is formed, this book traces how Butler comes to the themes of ethics, law and politics analyzing their interrelation and explaining how they relate to Butler’s question of how people can have more liveable and viable lives. Acknowledging the potency and influence of Butler’s ‘concept’ of gender as process, which occupies a well developed and well discussed position in current literature, Elena Loizidou argues that the possibility of people having more liveable and viable lives is articulated by Butler within the parameters of a sustained agonistic relationship between the three spheres of ethics, law and politics. Suggesting that Butler’s rounded understanding of the interrelationship of these three spheres will enable critical legal scholarship, as well as critical theory more generally, to consider how the question of life’s unsustainable conditions can be rethought and redressed, this book is a key read for all students of legal ethics, political philosophy and social theory.




Ethical Legal


Book Description

This book is about legality in its relation with morality. It is to explore dialectical dynamics in-between the two subject matters, i.e., legality and morality. It is because, in reality, the ethical foundation of legality is getting weaker and more ineffectual. That is why the authority of the law is getting weaker and less effective, as time goes on. That is consequently why there are more violence and crimes in American society, if not in the entire global community. This book is by no means to teach you the law. Legality has its own rich history and tradition, formal and informal conventions, and profound and diverse theories and doctrines. This book is simply geared to highlight the ethical dimension in the nature and function of the law. In brief, it is to “ethicalize” the law in its legislation, interpretation, and execution. Instead of discussing in detailed theories and doctrines of the law being entertained by its complexities and diversities, this book is to investigate philosophically major themes of the law, mainly in order to reveal their inherent connections with ethics and ultimately to emphasize the crucial necessity of ethics in legality. Unless we radically increase the ethical implication in legality, the humanity may not be able to entertain the twenty-second century.