Contemporary Legal Thought Research Articles

Impact of Roman Law on the European Convention on Human Rights

The article is dedicated to the analysis of the impact of Roman law on the modern system of human rights protection, established by the European Convention on Human Rights. The impact of Roman law on the contemporary legal thinking and reasoning in this area is analysed with regard to the proceedings stipulated by the Convention. An argument is made that certain important rules of the Convention procedure have been affected by Roman-law principles. Then analysis is made with regard to the substance of human rights standards under the Convention. In examining these issues, reference is made to the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights. It is in the practical application of the Convention that the real effect of the Roman-law concepts and doctrines becomes visible and can be appreciated.

A Social Psychological Interpretation of the Hermeneutic of Suspicion in Contemporary Legal Thought

The hermeneutic of suspicion is a disposition of participants in legal discourse to interrogate skeptically claims of legal necessity made to justify decision of a legal issue involving significant ideological stakes. The hermeneutic critiques a particular claim of legal necessity and alleges an ideologically motivated error. This article proposes a social psychological explanation of the hermeneutic as the projection of the actor onto his opponent of his own denied ideological motives. The projection lessens the pain of role conflict. Legal technique is supposed to purge ideological motives from legal judgment, but regularly puts the jurist in the position of choosing rather than following law, and requiring that he deny what he is doing. Cause lawyers, whether believers or realists, and legal neutrals, respond differently to the dilemma. Because they are bound to pursue substantive justice as well as legality in an unstable legal field, and substantive justice claims are today not distinguishable from ideological claims, all lawyers have to (should) doubt their own motives. Projection of the denied forbidden motive onto the opponent is solace. But ideology forms law through substance far more than through ideologically motivated error, and this too is elided by the projection.

TheGlobal Turnin Legal Theory

Familiar legal theories are epistemologically and politically stato-centric theories; they aim to rationalize intra- and inter-national legal systems. If this Westphalian approach were to be abandoned, then its replacement might be called Global Law, which invites theorizing that is not stato-centric. When that change happens, one would talk about aGlobal Turnin legal theory. Describing this turn is the aim of the paper.This description is articulated around two ideas about the history and geography of the globalizing of Law, and three intuitions about the fate of legal theory itself once thisGlobal Turnis taken. Namely, how theorizing Law from this perspective leads to focus on what is emerging and circulating, how the aesthetics of legal thinking shifts towards perspectivism and dissociation, and how more pluralistic, eclectic and pragmatic modes of reasoning and arguing about Law become dominant. What follows is neither a substantial or positivistic analysis, nor a prediction or a wish, but an attempt to point out tendencies which might be essential features of contemporary legal thinking.

Decolonising Indigenous water ‘rights’ in Australia: flow, difference, and the limits of law

This article addresses Indigenous Australian claims to water resources and how they inform and relate to current Australian law and contemporary legal thinking about future possibilities. It adopts a multidisciplinary approach, drawing from historical records, previous ethnographic investigation with Indigenous Australians, current legal scholarship, and social anthropological theory. In doing so, it analyses Indigenous dependencies on water, the history of settler colonial orientations to water bodies, the evolution of settler colonial–Indigenous relations to natural resources, and the development of the Australian legal system's regulation of water. This provides foundations for a discussion of the limitations of settler colonial notions of property and the failure of settler colonial law to understand and incorporate the dynamism of Indigenous relationships to water, particularly the meaning and productive capacity of water flows within Indigenous cosmologies and sociocultural and ecological systems. Calling for a decolonial turn in legal approaches to Indigenous access and water resource determination, the authors explore the ways in which Australian law may need to ‘unthink’ settler colonial notions of resource ownership as a prerequisite for reformulating future water policy and planning. This reformulation relies on a more extensive legal philosophical engagement with the concept of ‘flow’, a concept that already exists in both water law and planning, but which has not been adequately theorised and enacted. A more comprehensive legal understanding of flow in the context of Indigenous understandings of, and claims to, water provides more sustainable and equitable legal and analytical foundations for managing future water resources issues. The article creates the space for a more culturally relevant notion of ‘Indigenous water rights’ and for new ways of honouring the interrelationship between water flows, meaning-making practices, and cultural continuity.

Back in Style

In recent years Duncan Kennedy has turned to the question, what is Contemporary Legal Thought? For the most part, his answers have focused on the modes of legal argument he believes are indigenous to Contemporary Legal Thought in the United States, and possibly, at a transnational or global level as well. In this article, I bracket the question of content and ask instead, if we are interested in exploring the category of a legal ‘contemporary’, how do we do so? What historiographic methods are well-suited to the task of constituting ‘Contemporary Legal Thought’? My focus here is entirely on legal structuralism, the historical method I associate with Kennedy’s work beginning in the 1970s. By the mid-1980s, legal structuralism was under assault and quickly fading from the repertoire of available styles of doing history on the left. By the turn of the century, legal structuralism appeared to have vanished. I think that this was regrettable and unnecessary, and in this article I argue for a return to structuralist historiography. I do not pretend, however, that this return entails a second coming of the totalizing, originary center. Rather, I encourage thinking about legal structuralism in the way that I understand Roland Barthes, Hayden White, and to a large extent Duncan Kennedy himself to have thought about it: as a style. And as a style, legal structuralism is worth reawakening, a style back in style once more.

La expansión de la hermenéutica filosófica en el Derecho

El giro hermenéutico-ontológico que se produjo en el siglo xx proporcionó un nuevo enfoque de la hermenéutica, ahora filosófica. A lo largo de este giro radical, podemos ver tres fases, a saber: la hermenéutica como una técnica especial de interpretación (hermenéutica especial), como una teoría general de la interpretación y como hermenéutica fundamental. Sin embargo, aún con todos los cambios que se producen dentro de una teoría crítica, con la superación de la hermenéutica clásica, todavía hay una gran resistencia a aceptar la recepción de la Hermenéutica Filosófica por el derecho de los campos tradicionales de pensamiento jurídico contemporáneo.

REVISITANDO O GARANTISMO DE LUIGI FERRAJOLI: uma discussão sobre metateoria, teoria do direito e filosofia política

The present study pretends to revisit the so called Legal Garantism Theory formulated by Luigi Ferrajoli from the end of the 1980s, specially with the publication of Diritto e Ragione taking into consideration the importance of it for the contemporary legal thinking. For that it is sought to rebuild the first great discussion to which guarantism was submitted, still on the 1990s, when many metatheoretical, theoretical and political philosophical questions were raised. In summary it is a study focused on the diffusion of a garantism dimension which has been being neglected by jurists in terrae brasilis where the readings done during the last decades limited itself to aspects of criminal and criminal procedure law. Keywords: garantism, debate, metatheory, legal theory, political philosophy

Power in Contemporary Legal Thought: Postmodernism versus Behavioral Biology

This paper will contrast views of power under postmodernism and behavioral biology and how these views affect law, government, and society. Part II will discuss power and postmodernism. It will examine the postmodern concept of power, then analyze offshoots of postmodernism, such as critical legal studies, feminism, and critical race studies in connection with power and law. Part III will present a theory of power and law based on behavioral biology. It will examine behavioral biology and power, contrast behavioral biology and postmodernism concerning power, and contrast notions of power under behavioral biology and offshoots of postmodernism. This paper will conclude that postmodern notions of power are faulty and unworkable, while behavioral biology offers useful ideas on power.

Idea prawa narodowego na łamach „Prawa” (1928–1939) i „Współczesnej Myśli Prawniczej” (1935–1939)

The Idea of National Law on the Pages of “Law” and “Contemporary Legal Thought” “Contemporary Legal Thought” At the turn of the twenties and thirties of the twentieth century, the idea to elaborate Polish national law was born among some law students of Polish universities. The place where this concept was being shaped was the student journal “Law”, which from mid-thirties represented the majority of the academic law circles existing at law faculties of Polish universities, and then “Contemporary Legal Thought” on whose pages law faculty graduates presented their ideas. The aim set by young lawyers was to formulate a legal doctrine whose centre would be constituted by a nation understood as a community based on centuries-old tradition of experiences. The form of national organisation which the publishers of the above mentiones journals attempted to create was a national state. The shaping of national law was to be the consequence of the process of its nationalization (to make it national and free from foreign influences). This process was to take place in three areas: normative, axiological and psychological one. Therefore, in the first sphere, the eff orts were to be undertaken in order to make law national by basing it on historical sources of Polish constitutional tradition. The objective of the activities in the second area was to define the main ideas, that is, moral imperatives which had been developed in Polish politico-legal thought in its historical evolution, and in the third one — fundamental principles were to be determined deriving from the Polish nation’s experiences in its spiritual development. The idea of national law formulated by these young lawyers should be perceived as the response to the conviction about the crisis of civilization prevailing in Europe at that time. This crisis, in their opinion, had moral, economic and political dimensions. They saw improvement of the contemporary relations in each of the mentioned spheres in the reception of national law in political practice.

The Rule of Law as the Rule of Reasons

This paper argues that in contemporary legal thinking, the concept of the rule of law has become inseparable from the idea that legal decision-makers should give reasons to justify their decisions. Yet, how far can the concept of the rule the law be understood as establishing a rule of reasons? I examine whether reason giving is necessarily connected with the rule of law in the sense that a legal system would not conform to the rule of law if its decisions were not supported by publicly articulated reasons. I proceed by arguing that the focus on reason giving vindicates both procedural and substantive conceptions of the rule of law. In my view, reason giving is an essential component of the procedural conception because all the procedural account seems to require is that the state does whatever it does in a predictable and consistent way and justify it by reasons. Likewise, reason giving can serve to characterize the core of the substantive proposal. Substantive conceptions of the rule of law claim that the rule of law's central purpose is to ensure certain just outcomes. In that perspective, requiring that legal decision-makers give reasons is more apt to protect us against abuse than other forms of decision-making. In line with this reframing, I conclude that theoretical reflections on the rule of law should pay more attention to the legal duty to give reasons than has been done in the past, thereby leading to a context-sensitive assessment of the rule of law and its virtue(s).

Contemporary Legal Thought in International and European Law: A Synopsis

A brief capsule summary of the leading trends in contemporary legal theory. A synoptic overview intended to provide other researchers the broadest outlines so that they can best coordinate their in-depth inquiries into specific fields with an overall awareness of contemporary legal theory.

Law, Buddhism and Social Change: A Conversation With the 14th Dalai Lama

In September of 2006, the Dalai Lama of Tibet came to the University at Buffalo School, SUNY, to speak at a conference, Law, Buddhism, and Social Change. It was the first time he has publicly addressed issues concerning the law and the religious foundations of a legal system and the result was a major event of great significance for contemporary legal thinking. He spoke at length about Buddhist values in political situations, the role of law in social life, and the nature of the legal process. His answers were particularly incisive because of the range of his sixteen conversants: a local judge and well-known legal practitioner, Asian historians, philosophers, legal anthropologists working in Tibetan cultures, Buddhist scholars, the Head of the Tibetan Manuscript Division of the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives in India, two law professors who work in Asia and two law scholars who work in American religion. These articles present several of the major ideas of the conference. After a brief introduction, the second article, The Dalai Lama Speaks on Law is an attempt by the organizer, Rebecca French, to make the radical meaning of his words available to others. It is laid out as a basic jurisprudential primer of his thought: what is the nature of law? What is the role of lawyers? What are immoral laws? Do we need tolerance? How important is economic well-being for a society? Should there be a union or separation of religion and law? Should there be a death penalty? How should we address criminal punishment? Throughout, the impact of Buddhism on his thinking is apparent. Following this introduction are seven short articles written by the participants outlining and contextualizing the Dalai Lama's approach to law for several different disciplines. And finally, a complete transcript of his comments and the eight questions prepared by the participants are included in the appendix for reference and review.

Constitutional Failure: Carl Schmitt in Weimar by Ellen Kennedy (review)

Book Reviews 247 Kennedy seeks to illuminate the manner in which the sections on the sociology of law related to contemporary legal thinking. That is four essays out of fourteen in which Weber's 'book' is explicated, dissected, or expounded. Apart from Guenther Roth's opening biographical essay, the rest of the contributions belong to the famil iar routine of Weber the sociologist. The editors clearly think differently. 'This volume provides a critical and up-to date introduction to Weber's magnum opus. While much has been published about the various parts of Economy and Society, this is the first book to cover all its major sec tions and themes, as well as to discuss the methodological vision that unites them' we can read on the back cover. Exactly whose methodological vision might that be, one might reasonably ask? And what sort of vision is it? Mommsen is the only contributor who outlines the tortured history of the Grun driss der Sozialökonomik, the delays in its completion, Weber's drafting of the first four chapters, and the assembly of the remaining chapters by Marianne Weber and Melchior Palyi from the various papers left by Weber on his death. But Mommsen's essay was already published in History and Theory in 2000, since when the argument has naturally moved on. The editorial committee of the Gesamtausgabe has taken the view that the corpus of writing published in the early 1920s under the title Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, and subsequently edited by Johannes Winckelmann, was little more than that—a corpus—and publication is proceeding section by section, each with a different editor. In so doing they have also returned to the original edition, consider ing Winckelmann's editorial interventions to have compromised the most recent edi tions to such an extent that they can no longer form the basis of a scholarly edition. All of which might seem bookish pedantry to the sociologist, but it is as well to spend some time considering quite how 'the most important single work in sociology' (the back cover again) has come down to us and gained this eminence. That is what one might reasonably expect of a critical companion—historically-informed analysis of a text presented to us as a structured whole but whose unity, sequence and hence meaning—beyond the first four chapters—is now increasingly questioned. Keith Tribe The King's School, Worcester Ellen Kennedy, Constitutional Failure: Carl Schmitt in Weimar (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), xii + pp. 256. ISBN 0-8223-3230-2 (hbk); 0-8223-3243-4 (pbk). Most scholars who are interested in Carl Schmitt have known for some time that Ellen Kennedy has been busy writing a new book on Schmitt's involvement in pol itics and political debate in the Weimar Republic. Many of these scholars have also anticipated that, amidst the recent deluge of books on Schmitt, this might be the out standing one, against which others should be measured. The outcome of Kennedy's research on Schmitt is indeed a very good book. This book contains many deeply intriguing ideas and studies, it throws new light on some of the most constitutive aspects of Schmitt's thought, especially in its theological undercurrents, and it sets out an excellent sequence of dense local analyses of the interdisciplinary debates and controversies which shaped the theoretical horizon of Weimar political debate, and which determined Schmitt's theoretical trajectory in the period of his greatest importance. Moreover, Kennedy's detailed knowledge of Schmitt's professional© Max Weber Studies 2008. 248 Max Weber Studies activities, and of his consultative positions at the fringes of government in the late Weimar interim of 1930-1933 and after 1933, provides the basis for an exceptionally solid and authoritative account of exactly how Schmitt contributed to constitu tional developments and affected constitutional policy in the Weimar Republic and in the first years of Hitler's regime. The discussions of constitutional controversies between the lawyers affiliated to the NSDAP in the early 1930s are also particularly informative (pp. 24-25), and they greatly illuminate some of the murkiest places in twentieth-century theoretical history. Naturally, some of the historical claims which Kennedy makes are...

Max Weber's 'Economy and Society': A Critical Companion by Charles S. Camic , Philip S. Gorski , David M. Trubek (review)

246 Max Weber Studies with a sense of naiveté and an absence of critical thinking really misses the point. For although commodification and consumption can doubtless involve stupidity, indo lence and whatever else, it can also 'enliven, energise, and, under the right circum stances, support ethical generosity' (p. 128), and this can then be added to an account of the creation of the self as a work of art, a work of enchantment, in a tradition that runs from Kant and Schiller to Michel Foucault. And in trying to circumnavigate the Marxist critique that this is really to aestheticize politics without any recourse to the strategies for changing the world that would actually allow people to transform their conditions, Bennett offers the following rejoinder: What is the content of my ethic of enchanted materialism, and what are the sources upon which it draws? The content, in important respects, is Thoreauian. Its appreciation of nonhuman, as well as human, sites of vitality—of what might be called its hyperecological sense of interde pendence—proceeds from and toward the principle of treading lightly on the earth... [But] The source or rationale for this ethic is more dif ficult to articulate. Why ought enchanted materialists tread lightly, be humble, remember interdependencies, pay attention to details? (pp. 157f.). The disposition 'in favour of life' (p. 158) is the unifying feature of this ethic, and it is an open-ended ethic of generosity and respect for others, both human and non human, that is grounded in the fluid ontology of enchantment. This is a provocative thesis about the ontological and ethical character of individuals understood materi ally, and offers a distinctive challenge to more traditional theories of ethics. It is itself also quite an enchanting book, which does, as one of the dust jacket adverts for the book suggests, actually make one think about the world in slightly new ways. To that end, it is certainly a fitting complement to Max Weber's own analyses of the dis enchanted world and the possibilities of maintaining ethical life within it. Duncan Kelly University of Cambridge Charles S. Camic, Philip S. Gorski and David M. Trubek (eds.), Max Weber's 'Economy and Society': A Critical Companion (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 385 + index. ISBN 0-8047-4717-2. $29.95. The essays collected in this volume were first presented in 2000 at a symposium held at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, whose working title was 'Economy and Society: Max Weber in 2000'. Consequently the presenters, mostly sociologists, gener ally addressed themselves to what Max Weber might contribute to our understand ing of the modern world. This is a rather different project to what might be expected from a 'critical companion'. We might reasonably anticipate that a 'critical compan ion' would be directed to specific sections or themes in Weber's Economy and Society, although of course the work that bears this title is only partly 'his book' — itself a problem that forms part of Wolfgang Mommsen's presentation but one which eludes most of the other contributors. A minority of the contributors adopt this approach: besides Mommsen's piece, Richard Swedberg considers the significance of chapter 2, Hans Kippenberg outlines the sections on religious communities, and Duncan© Max Weber Studies 2008. Book Reviews 247 Kennedy seeks to illuminate the manner in which the sections on the sociology of law related to contemporary legal thinking. That is four essays out of fourteen in which Weber's 'book' is explicated, dissected, or expounded. Apart from Guenther Roth's opening biographical essay, the rest of the contributions belong to the famil iar routine of Weber the sociologist. The editors clearly think differently. 'This volume provides a critical and up-to date introduction to Weber's magnum opus. While much has been published about the various parts of Economy and Society, this is the first book to cover all its major sec tions and themes, as well as to discuss the methodological vision that unites them' we can read on the back cover. Exactly whose methodological vision might that be, one might reasonably ask? And what sort of vision is it? Mommsen is the only contributor who outlines the tortured...

Law, Right, and Forgiveness

In Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, the identification of the singular individual with the universal is initially expressed by means of the concepts of law and right. Developed by Hegel in ethical life and state of right,' law and right enable a particular kind of being, self-knowledge, and interaction for their respective consciousnesses. These legal categories, however, virtually disappear in the remainder of the text, and whereas Hegel's critique of law in these sections is important in its own right, attempts to bring it to bear on contemporary legal theory risk anachronism. What I will argue in this essay, however, is that the problem of law re-enters the text in Hegel's discussion of forgiveness, and that we can look there for a modern resolution to the problematic dependence on law exhibited by the very different legal frameworks of ethical life and state of right. The ascendancy of forgiveness as a fundamental organizational principle results in a radical circumscription of the role of law. It also represents the enduring force of Antigone's political legacy, or so I will argue-both for Hegel and for us modern readers still grappling with her role in the Phenomenology. In addition to developing the import of these legal insights for interpretation of the Phenomenology, I will also suggest that forgiveness's resolution of the failed legal frameworks is helpful in the context of the contemporary skepticism (exhibited by feminist, race-theorist, queer, communitarian, and democratic perspectives, among others) regarding the purported critical efficacy and neutrality of legalism and the connection of legal advocacy with the "natural" aspects of human identity. Hegel's theory of forgiveness provides a strategy for exposing the inequalities in access to power that the liberal protection of freedom and equality has been accused of concealing. His view of its priority over law can be used to transform law into an expression of a relationship between universal and individual that is neither composed prior to the production of that relationship, nor constituted by an assertion of power by defenders of the status quo, who deny the impact of difference on the law's operation. I will argue that Hegel's theory of forgiveness is productive in this context because it construes individual action as central to the universels that regulate our interaction and provides a critical way of thinking and representing the social "we" holistically. In order to construct the ground upon which to show the relevance of Hegel's theory of forgiveness to his theory of law, I will discuss: a) the forms of social life in the Phenomenology that are organized according to law and right; b) forgiveness' resolution of the difficulties they confront; and c) the critical transformation of law that Hegel's account of forgiveness suggests. For the present I will limit myself to the internal logic of the Phenomenology and to the importance of forgiveness as a social-structural principle therein, and thus not address the more immediately practical resonance of forgiveness's as an alternative to contemporary legal thinking. The Law-Based Societies of the Phenomenology. Ethical life and state of right are the only social forms of consciousness in the Phenomenology that are based specifically on law and right, and both are for Hegel inadequate expressions of spirit. The characters of ethical life identify immediately with their respective laws (Creon with human and Antigone with divine law); the positive aspect of this identification is their implication and agency in the laws and forms of social interaction that structure their political life, in whose production they are thus immediately engaged. The immediacy of this identification, however, precludes any recognition and expression of their particularity. Ethical characters are submerged in the universal ethical substance, such that the role of their particularity in it is concealed until the "unsuppressable" assertion of the singular self renders ethical substance unsustainable. …

La Vraisemblance narrative en question: Walter Scott, Barbey d'Aurevilly

By Fiona McIntosh. Paris, Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2002. 364 pp. Pb €23.00. In this immensely solid, if rather densely written, study, Fiona McIntosh invites us to turn our attention away from the nineteenth century's apparent obsession with realism and to examine the seemingly regressive concern with vraisemblance that is shown by her to have formed the central preoccupation of both Walter Scott and his anti-Naturalist disciple, Barbey d'Aurevilly. Her analysis, which derives much of its authority from her familiarity with both the rhetoricians of the Scottish Enlightenment and such hands-on theorists of language and literature as Charles Nodier, is prefaced by a lucid and subtle discussion of post-Enlightenment responses to the poetics of Aristotle. McIntosh argues convincingly that, amid much semantic confusion and the presence of ‘zones de flou’, the fundamental elements of Aristotelian vraisemblance survived the assault on those aspects of the philosopher's poetics that the Romantics associated with the aesthetics of classical drama to form a context in which the central reference point was constituted by the scandalous ‘événement unique’. Not surprisingly, it was with regard to the historical novel that the engagement with the concept of vraisemblance was most acutely experienced, for it was therein that the novelist was obliged to confront most obviously the problematic combination of fiction and the ‘real’, with Scott, moreover, providing a provocative incorporation of the fantastic, arguably the most blatant literary embodiment of a suspect singularité. If McIntosh, who, incidentally, underlines the contribution of contemporary legal thinking to the debate, advances our understanding of the aesthetics of a genre that was perpetually seeking its own justification, it is largely because of her appreciation that the historical event, far from being in simple opposition to popular notions of the fictional, shared with the latter a capacity to produce ‘une rupture dans le cours normal des choses’. Yet individual authors (and critics) inevitably responded differently to the challenge presented by the need for vraisemblance. This diversity is amply demonstrated with the aid of a typology that extrapolates from the authors themselves four different types of ‘rhétorisation’, each of which brings its own contradictions and paradoxes. In revealing the privileged status of ‘la rhétorisation de l'auctor’, McIntosh's rigorous analyses lead to the rehabilitation of a form of fiction that depended for its authority on compromise and a respect for the imaginative input of the reader, and, she argues suggestively, invites respect for its recognition of its own limits.

Summum Ius Summa Iniuria-Comments on the Historical Background of a Legal Maxim of Interpretation

Interpretation based on maxims of legal logic occupies an honourable place among the possible methods of legal interpretation; this being done most frequently using basic concepts originating from the classical period of Roman law, which faciliate orientation among contradictory decrees and help to clarify the meaning of legal rules. The following principles belong hereby, widely known in Modestinus's formulation but dating from the period of the leges XII tabularum: "lex posterior derogat legi priori",the Papinian "lex specialis derogat legi generali", and the "lex primaria derogat legi subsidiariae". It is a basic interpretive principle, that the legal rule should be interpreted in its integrity, not by extracting certain parts of it. The following the letter of the law often leads to its evasion. During the interpretation one should take into account the legislator's intention. If this is doubtful, the more lenient solution should be preferred. All these ideas can be traced back into a highly philosophical, Celsian principle, which is-also widely accepted in contemporary legal thinking. It-declares the vocation of the Law to implement Justice, according to which "ius est ars boni et aequi", the Law is an art of the Good and the Just. Out of these, the procedure called in fraudem legis is connected to the statement that enforcing the letter of the law often leads to inequity contradictory with the spirit of the law, i. e. injustice. Cicero also quotes this proverbium, already widely spread in the age of the Republic, which remained in use in his formulation until today: "summum ius summa iniuria", i. e. the utmost enforcement of the law leads to the greatest injustice. The present paper has a modest aim. It does not offer a general survey, but rather an introspection into the problem. First it enumerates the occurences of this proverb in the sources of Roman literature (I.), then it sketches the development and semantic changes of the concept of interpretatio (II.), next it investigates the meaning of summum ius in the relation of the ars boni et aequi principle and the concept of Justice in legal sources and Cicero's works (III.), in the end it will consider the further reaching consequences of this proverbium in Adagia by Erasmus of Rotterdam, one of the most important humanists (IV.).

The Evolution and Impact of Legal Dictionaries

Lexicographers have had a profound impact on the development of legal systems in the English-speaking world. Since the time of John Rastell, legal dictionaries have not only defined key terms and concepts, but in many cases have also determined the very topics and issues that have come to dominate contemporary legal thinking. For these reasons, the Jamail Center for Legal Research has built an outstanding collection of rare legal dictionaries. The rich history of legal dictionaries offers fascinating insights into the evolution of legal thinking and also provides a better understanding of influences on the dynamic relationship between words and deeds. In November 1999, the Jamail Center for Legal Research acquired, as its Millionth Volume, a particularly special dictionary that would have many hidden surprises. Through a study of this particular volume, a great deal about the early publishing world and the evolution of law dictionaries can be learned.

The Fate, Violence, and Rhetoric of Contemporary Legal Thought Reflections on The Amherst Series, the Loss of Truth, and Law

The Fate, Violence, and Rhetoric of Contemporary Legal Thought Reflections on The Amherst Series, the Loss of Truth, and Law

The Fate, Violence, and Rhetoric of Contemporary Legal Thought: Reflections on The Amherst Series, the Loss of Truth, and Law

The Fate, Violence, and Rhetoric of Contemporary Legal Thought: Reflections on The Amherst Series, the Loss of Truth, and Law