The topic of the impact of artificial intelligence on law, the legal profession and legal culture, in general, has not yet been sufficiently discussed in the Croatian scientific community. This paper aims to encourage a more comprehensive analysis of the relationship between the increasing use of artificial intelligence in our daily lives and the specifics of practising the legal profession in such an environment. Artificial intelligence is still a broad and heterogeneous field. It is therefore justified to ask the question: (...) Which of the many technologies currently being developed can be applied in the field of law? Which legal matters can be “entrusted” to the new technologies? To answer such and similar questions, it is necessary to have an excellent knowledge of both artificial intelligence and the law, as well as the areas in which they intersect. We have chosen criminal law, which is a part of public law and the ultimate social mechanism for responding to undesirable behaviour, as our object of study. We pay particular attention to its two important aspects: the element of culpability in a criminal offence and the possibility of autonomous decision-making in criminal law. The reflections have shown that Croatian criminal law may have the ability and potential to adapt to the challenges of artificial intelligence when it comes to culpability. On the other hand, the necessity and value of artificially intelligent decisions are questionable given the fundamental characteristics of criminal law. In conclusion, the authors express a departure from views of artificial intelligence as a decision-making substitute in criminal law but support the view that artificially intelligent legal technologies are an aid to decision-making. (shrink)

The paper deals with the critical questioning of the relation between legitimate imposed legal obligations and the rights to refuse these obligations based on the right of the freedom of conscience, i.e. conscientious objection. The critical perspective that is applied to conduct the questioning is a legal profession because, in Croatian legal culture, there is no articulated answer to the question of how to reconcile these two obligations within the legal profession. The paper draws on the comprehension of John Rawls’s (...) theory of conscientious objection since it is a systematic analysis of justice that shall submit subjective understanding of the good to the principle of right. In practice, the focus is on the grounds for acknowledging conscientious objection among lawyers as well on the obstacles to exercising this right. (shrink)

Environmental issues are among the most critical scientific and social problems of today. The human environment is an environment of inequality and crisis, and a platform for debate on the fairness of social order. The crisis is the result of human behaviour, which reflects the failure of development and unjust distribution of consequences. The gap between rich and poor on a global scale is evident in the disproportionate climate change impacts on countries and their ability to cope. In this respect, (...) the economic and political inequalities between First and Third World countries are fortified by ecological ones. The development of international environmental mechanisms such as the Kyoto Agreement is instrumental in this kind of change. The pursuit of tackling and controlling climate change has its unforeseen consequences, whereas in specific communities the existent inequalities are emphasised in new forms. If mechanisms developed for the environment, such as the market of carbon emissions and the carbon balance, lead to environmental injustice and disproportionately affects vulnerable groups, it raises the question of their purpose. On the path of Rawl’s idea on the fairness of social institutions, such system demonstrates itself as contradictory and unjust. (shrink)

Pendant plus de quinze ans, Léon N. Tolstoï a travaillé sur son seul traité esthétique intitulé Qu'est-ce que l’art? dans lequel il écrit que l'art n'est ni l'apparition d'une mystérieuse idée ou de la beauté divine, ni le produit de l'énergie de l'homme ou de l'expression de ses émotions, mais un moyen de communication entre hommes, nécessaire à la vie et à l'aspiration vers la bonté de tout humain. Pour lui, l'art est une forme de création communicative qui unit les (...) hommes dans des émotions identiques parmi lesquelles se distingue particulièrement l'importance du Bien. C’est précisément dans le transfert des émotions à l'aide du langage symbolique que repose la principale caractéristique de l'art. L'objectif de ce travail est la lecture des approches de Tolstoï envers l'esthétique et l'art, dispersées dans ses différentes œuvres, afin d'arriver à la vision de l'art en tant que forme particulière d’ « à la recherche de » mais aussi du reflet du Bien. Ce travail est rédigé dans l'idée qu'une recherche plus exhaustive des pensées esthétiques de Tolstoï peut modestement contribuer à la « réhumanisation de l'art ». (shrink)

On the twentieth anniversary of the death of one of the most important contemporary political and social philosophers, John B. Rawls (1921–2002), in this paper the authors deal with his understanding of the relationship between civil disobedience and freedom within the framework of a liberal constitutional democracy based on the rule of law. The fundamental starting point of Rawls’s theory, and thus of this work, is that civil disobedience expresses disobedience to the law within the limits of fidelity to the (...) law, although it is at the outer edge thereof. If the freedom of thought expressing disobedience to unjust laws is one of the fundamental freedoms, then civil disobedience can be understood not only as a corrective to liberal constitutional democracy but also as a realistic attempt to “save” it. This is an important topic of contemporary political philosophy, considering the increasingly widespread discourse about the crisis of liberalism in general today, and the impact of that crisis on the institutions of liberal constitutional democracy, among which the state stands out, but in fact law and the legal system as a whole. (shrink)