Law after Modernity


Book Description

How can we characterise law and legal theory in the twenty-first century? Law After Modernity argues that we live in an age 'after Modernity' and that legal theory must take account of this fact. The book presents a dynamic analysis of law, which focusses on the richness and pluralism of law, on its historical embeddedness, its cultural contingencies, as well as acknowledging contemporary law's global and transnational dimensions. However, Law After Modernity also warns that the complexity, fragmentation, pluralism and globalisation of contemporary law may all too easily perpetuate injustice. In this respect, the book departs from many postmodern and pluralist accounts of law. Indeed, it asserts that the quest for justice becomes a crucial issue for law in the era of legal pluralism, and it investigates how it may be achieved. The approach is fresh, contextual and interdisciplinary, and, unusually for a legal theory work, is illustrated throughout with works of art and visual representations, which serve to re-enforce the messages of the book.




Law, Modernity, Postmodernity


Book Description

This title was first published in 2003. This book examines the interrelationship between the unravelling of the post-war welfare state and legal change. By reference to theorists of postmodernity such as Zygmunt Bauman, Scott Lash and John Urry, and David Harvey, the principal argument is that contemporary law and legal institutions can be best understood as having changed in ways that mirror the recent transformation of the interventionist welfare state and its Fordist, Keynesian economic infrastructure. The key changes identified in the legal field include:- the shift toward marketized regulatory structures as reflected in privatization and deregulation, the attenuation of welfare rights, the privatization of justice, legal polycentricity, the reconfiguration of the welfare state’s social citizenship and the globalization of law. Empirical evidence from a number of jurisdictions is adduced to indicate the general direction of change.




Legal Modernism


Book Description

Modernism in legal theory is no different from modernism in the arts: both respond to a cultural crisis, a sense that institutions and traditions have lost their validity. Some doubt the importance of the rule of law, others question the objectivity of legal reasoning. We have lost confidence in the justice of our legal institutions, and even in our very capacity to identify justice. Legal philosopher David Luban argues that we cannot escape the modernist predicament. Accusing contemporary legal theorists of evading rather than confronting the challenge of modernity, he offers important and original objections to pragmatism, traditionalism, and nihilism. He argues that only by weaving together the broken narrative and forgotten voices of history's victims can we come to appreciate the nature of justice in modern society. Calling a trial the embodiment of the law's self-criticism, Luban demonstrates the centrality of narrative by analyzing the trial of Martin Luther King, the Nuremberg trials, and trial scenes in Homer, Hesiod, and Aeschylus. With these examples, Luban explores several of the tensions that motivate much more contemporary legal theory: order versus justice, obedience versus resistance, statism versus communitarianism. ". . . an illuminating account of how contemporary legal theory can be understood as an expression of 'the modernist predicament' by exploring the analogy between modernism in the arts and modernism in law, politics, and philosophy. . . . a valuable critical discussion of modern legal theory." --Choice David Luban is Morton and Sophia Macht Professor of Law at the University of Maryland and Research Scholar at the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy. His other books include Lawyers and Justice: An Ethical Study.




Law in Modern Society


Book Description

"Law in Modern Society" is a comparative study of the place of law in societies as well as a criticism of social theory. Under what conditions do different kinds of law emerge? What are the bases of the rule of law ideal that marks advanced liberal, capitalist societies? What can the study of law teach us about social hierarchy and moral vision in these societies, and, indeed, about the specificity of Western civilization? Why do we find it necessary to struggle for the rule of law and impossible to achieve it? What political possibilities are closed or opened by present-day changes in the established styles of legality and legal thought? Unger deals with these questions in a broad range of historical settings. But he also relates them to the central issues of social theory: the method of explanation, the conditions of social order, and the nature of 'modern' society. the book argues that to resolve its own internal dilemmas the science of society must once again become both metaphysical and political.




After Secular Law


Book Description

Bringing together scholars with a variety of perspectives and orientations, this work examines the interconnections between law and religion and the unexpected histories and anthropologies of legal secularism in a globalizing modernity.




Modernism and the Grounds of Law


Book Description

This book argues that law is both derived from and constitutive of surrounding cultural contexts.




The Natural Moral Law


Book Description

This book studies beliefs about the good and how it is known, and how such beliefs shape claims about the moral law.




Organising Modernity


Book Description

In this important theoretical and empirical statement John Law argues against the purity of post-enlightenment political and social theory, and offers an alternative post-modern sociology. Arguing in favor of a sociology of verbs, he suggests that power, organizations, mind-body dualisms, and macro-micro distinctions may all be understood as the local performance of recursive modes of social ordering. Drawing on a range of theoretical traditions including actor-network theory, verstehende sociology, and the writing of Michel Foucault, he explores the production of materials - including agents and architectures - and their importance for these modes of ordering. The book, which draws on organizational ethnography to develop its argument, is essential reading for all those interested in social theory, materialism, or the sociology of organizations at the end of the era of high modernity.




Jurisprudence


Book Description

This challenging book on jurisprudence begins by posing questions in the post-modern context,and then seeks to bridge the gap between our traditions and contemporary situation. It offers a narrative encompassing the birth of western philosophy in the Greeks and moves through medieval Christendom, Hobbes, the defence of the common law with David Hume, the beginnings of utilitarianism in Adam Smith, Bentham and John Stuart Mill, the hope for enlightenment with Kant, Rousseau, Hegel and Marx, onto the more pessimistic warnings of Weber and Nietzsche. It defends the work of Austin against the reductionism of HLA Hart, analyses the period of high modernity in the writings of Kelsen, Hart and Fuller, and compares the different approaches to justice of Rawls and Nozick. The liberal defence of legality in Ronald Dworkin is contrasted with the more disillusioned accounts of the critical legal studies movement and the personalised accounts of prominent feminist writers.




Singing the Law


Book Description

Singing the Law is about the legal lives and afterlives of oral cultures in East Africa, particularly as they appear within the pages of written literatures during the colonial and postcolonial periods. In examining these cultures, this book begins with an analysis of the cultural narratives of time and modernity that formed the foundations of British colonial law. Recognizing the contradictory nature of these narratives (i.e., both promoting and retreating from the Euro-centric ideal of temporal progress) enables us to make sense of the many representations of and experiments with non-linear, open-ended, and otherwise experimental temporalities that we find in works of East African literature that take colonial law as a subject or point of critique. Many of these works, furthermore, consciously appropriate orature as an expressive form with legal authority. This affords them the capacity to challenge the narrative foundations of colonial law and its postcolonial residues and offer alternative models of temporality and modernity that give rise, in turn, to alternative forms of legality. East Africa’s “oral jurisprudence” ultimately has implications not only for our understanding of law and literature in colonial and postcolonial contexts, but more broadly for our understanding of how the global south has shaped modern law as we know and experience it today.