Role Of Law In Relation Research Articles

Implications of extinction in law: Preventing, declaring and learning from species extinctions

Abstract Biodiversity laws around the world differ, but, at their core, these laws promote the fundamental objective of preventing environmental decline and species extinctions. A variety of legal mechanisms have been implemented in domestic laws around the world to achieve this objective, including protection for habitat, environmental impact assessments and threatened species recovery plans. In many jurisdictions, if these mechanisms fail to protect a species, it may be legally declared extinct, or added to a formal list of those that have been lost. This article examines the conservation purpose and legal implications for laws about extinction. A legal power to recognise a species as extinct has the potential to foster ambition, transparency and rigorous measurement of progress against conservation goals. However, in practice, efforts to prevent extinction are applied selectively. Without an obligation to learn from extinctions, recognition of species extinctions in law may have perverse effects, or no effect at all. This article proposes a conceptual model for the role of law in relation to extinctions, highlighting opportunities to improve legal frameworks to achieve more productive and positive conservation outcomes, even as climate change and other pressures drive many more species towards extinction.

The Irreconcilable Goals of Transitional Justice

The goals of transitional justice advocacy and institutions are commonly portrayed as mutually reinforcing and complementary. This article argues that in evaluating the political significance of transitional justice, more attention should be given to their irreconcilable goals. This analysis is informed by the work of legal scholars and political theorists that have drawn attention to the dual role of law in relation to violence. While law can be a tool for regulating violence and exposing abuses of power, law is also utilized to obfuscate and legitimate abuses of power. Similarly, transitional justice institutions aim to challenge the legitimacy of prior political practices by confronting denial and transforming the terms of debate on past abuses, yet they also seek to establish their own legitimacy by minimizing the challenge that they pose to dominant frameworks for interpreting the past. This article demonstrates how a better understanding of this tension sheds light on problematic assumptions and unacknowledged trade-offs associated with the claims regarding the role of transitional justice institutions in advancing political reconciliation through measures designed to counter denial, expand dialogue, and address trauma. It concludes by discussing the implications of the analysis for transitional justice policy as well as debates on the general significance of expanding transitional justice advocacy.

Compulsory Schooling Legislation: An Economic Analysis of Law and Social Change in the Nineteenth Century

The role of law in relation to social change is not well understood. One reason for our ignorance is the lack of evidence on the causal role of legislation. Too often the efforts at social reform and the intended consequences of legislation are accepted as proof that behavior has been significantly altered. A case in point is legislation that compels children to attend school. Although it is commonly believed that such laws have been effective in increasing the participation of children in schooling systems in the United States over the last 100 years, there is little evidence to support or reject this belief. Some persons have questioned whether these laws have been the cause or the result of observed increases in school attainment. Still others have doubted the degree to which compulsory schooling laws have been enforced. Reports of widespread truancy in urban schools today call into question not only present enforcement difficulties but also whether these laws were effectively enforced from their inception in the nineteenth century. Yet, in spite of the contemporary and historical interest in compulsory school attendance laws, the basic question remains unanswered: what has been the effect, if any, of these laws on school enrollment and attendance?

Social Solidarity and the Enforcement of Morality

It is possible to extract from Plato's Republic and Laws, and perhaps from Aristotle's Ethics and Politics, following about role of law in relation to enforcement of morality: law of city state exists not merely to secure that men have opportunity to lead a morally good life, but to see that they do. According to this not only may law be used to punish men for doing what morally it is wrong for them to do, but it should be so used; for promotion of moral virtue by these means and by others is one of Ends or Purposes of a society complex enough to have developed a legal system. This theory is strongly associated with a specific conception of morality as a uniquely true or correct set of principles-not manmade, but either awaiting man's discovery by use of his reason or (in a theological setting) awaiting its disclosure by revelation. I shall call this theory the classical thesis and not discuss it further. From classical there is to be distinguished what I shall call the disintegration thesis. This inverts order of instrumentality between society on one hand and morality on other as it appears in classical thesis; for in this society is not instrument of moral life; rather morality is valued as cement of society, bond, or one of bonds, without which men would not cohere in society. This is associated strongly with a relativist conception of morality: according to it, morality may vary from society to society, and to merit enforcement by criminal law, morality need have no rational or other specific content. It is not quality of morality but its cohesive power which matters. What is important is not quality of creed but strength of belief in it. The enemy of society is not error but indifference.' The case for enforcement of morality on this view is that its maintenance is necessary to prevent disintegration of society.