This paper seeks to establish a connection between the existence of a legal system and the ideal of the rule of law. Its point of departure is the phenomenon of a transitional regime that is attempting to restore or institute the rule of law. Lon Fuller's formulation of the canons of the rule of law as an internal morality of law is expounded as well as his notion of legal pathology as symptomatic of departure from the canons' requirements. The existence (...) of a legal system, it is argued, is a matter of degree, covariant with the degree to which the rule of law is realized. Problems inherent to the implementation of the rule of law are examined, such as the effect of the passage of time on reasonable expectations. While legal pathology is always a matter of degree, police states are shown to suffer seriously from it. Among the examples discussed are Nazi Germany and Communist East Germany, though it is granted that there are moral differences between them. Finally, a response is made to some contemporary critiques of the rule of law. (shrink)

Charting new routes for film ethics, _Transformational Ethics of Film_ develops a critical account of the ethics of personal transformation at work within the ‘film as philosophy’ debate.

This paper deals with three topics: types of rights, the development of the terminology of rights, and the question of the primacy of welfare rights. Because these topics are interrelated, my exposition does not observe rigid boundaries among them. There is no pretence at all that any of these subjects is fully covered here; nor is it proposed, except for one writer, to touch upon the contemporary literature on rights, as noteworthy as some of that literature is. In order to (...) gain entrance into the field, on which the writing has grown to massive proportions, I shall begin with an interesting historical phenomenon, some of whose philosophical import I want to explore. I should say at the outset, however, that the general motivation of this paper is the problem of the significance of the language of “rights.” Does it really make a difference, for instance, to speak of the “rights of man” rather than the “common duties of humanity”? Does the term “rights” add anything of special significance or is its only significance rhetorical and ideological? Can we dispense with the language of rights and still say everything we need to say about our moral relations? I confess to a moderate skepticism about the necessity of the language of rights in the last analysis. At any rate, this paper is intended as a contribution, however small, to this problem. The historical phenomenon with which I am going to begin will enable us to bring into focus the issue of the meaning of “rights.”. (shrink)

This first volume in the four-volume series The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law focuses on the "harm principle," the commonsense view that prevention of harm to persons other than the perpetrator is a legitimate purpose of criminal legislation. Feinberg presents a detailed analysis of the concept and definition of harm and applies it to a host of practical and theoretical issues, showing how the harm principle must be interpreted if it is to be a plausible guide to the lawmaker.

Because of immigration in the West, increased cultural diversity poses a variety of problems for the criminal justice system. This paper examines whether a so‐called “cultural defense” ought to be allowed as a freestanding defense to a criminal charge. Such a defense would “negate or mitigate criminal responsibility where acts are committed under a reasonable good‐faith belief in their propriety, based on the actor's cultural heritage or tradition.” The cultural defense, as a formal defense, and the use of cultural evidence (...) in order to buttress one of the traditional defenses, are distinguished. Three cases are discussed to illustrate the issues. The possible similarity of the cultural defense to an ignorance or mistake of law defense is then considered. The latter is accepted by such theorists as Gunther Arzt and George P. Fletcher and also apparently in German law, but it is rejected by Jerome Hall on the ground that it undermines the objectivity of the criminal law. The similarity, however, is shown not to hold. It is concluded that a freestanding cultural defense should not be allowed. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Questions About Responsibility The Holmesian Approach: Objective Liability Aristotle on Voluntary Action and Responsibility The Model Penal Code and Voluntariness Responsibility as a Defeasible Concept: H.L.A. Hart Individual Responsibility: Antony Duff Individual Responsibility: Norrie's Critique of Duff The Abandonment of Responsibility: Wootton The General Rationale of Excuses: H.L.A. Hart Conclusion References Further Reading.

ABSTRACTThe proportion of the American electorate that is “constrained” by ideology has risen dramatically since Philip E. Converse suggested, in the early 1960s, that ideology is the province of only a small fraction of the mass public. In part, the rise of ideological voters has been obscured by the tendency of scholars after Converse to equate them with those who use terms referring to ideological concepts, such as liberal and conservative, in open-ended interviews. These “concept ideologues,” however, are not the (...) only members of the public whose political opinions show evidence of ideological constraint. There is also a growing segment of the public, the “policy ideologues,” who take positions on three or more policy issues but do not happen to mention ideological concepts. Policy ideologues prove to be as politically knowledgeable as concept ideologues; their attitudes are nearly as constrained across issues and over time; and their policy stances usually “make sense” as liberal or conservative—not surprisingly, as they are almost as willing as concept ideologues to label themselves ideologically, when asked. By 2012, the portion of the public consisting of concept and policy ideologues had reached 42 percent. It declined to 38 percent in 2016, but was still a far cry from the 12 percent of the electorate whom Converse identified as ideologues or near ideologues as of 1956. (shrink)

Dealing with issues pivotal to Jewish law theory, this volume offers English-language readers a concise presentation of an important legal tradition. This volume touches on theological concerns of Judaism and the law, but it focuses on broader trends in legal theory. essays address the philosophy of law and jurisprudential analysis which have contributed to modern legal systems.

From the perspectives of Jewish tradition, particularly that of the Halakhah (Jewish law), this paper considers the policy problem of the balance in health care allocations between preventive and curative or crisis medicine. Since the value of human lives has a high degree of supremacy, and the duties to rescue imperiled life and to treat the sick are recognized, it might be argued that a basically curative policy should be favored. On the other hand, the duty of personal health maintenance (...) and safety would appear to argue in favor of a preventive policy. In balancing these considerations, it is suggested that the halakhic tradition can accommodate a preventive policy of health care because the duty to rescue is lessened or negatived by risk to the as-it-were rescuers. It is further suggested that Halakhah permits a non-divertable allocation of tax-generated funds to preventive health care. Keywords: Preventive medicine, curative medicine, value of human lives, duty to rescue, risk taking, Jewish law ( Halakhah ), charity tax CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

The principle of bivalence is the assertion that every statement is either true or else false. Its legal analog, however, must be formulated relative to particular legal systems and in terms of validity rather than truth. It asserts that every statement of law that can be formulated in the vocabulary of a given legal system is valid or else invalid in that system. A line of New York cases is traced, beginning with Thomas v. Winchester . This case, which involved (...) a poison mislabeled as a medicine, established an exception to the rule that a manufacturer or supplier is never liable for negligence to a remote purchaser. The court made an exception because a poison is an “imminently dangerous” thing. How far may this exception be applied to other fact‐situations? Some subsequent cases are examined, and it is considered whether there is no correct answer in these instances and, more dramatically, whether more than one correct answer is tenable. In either event the legal analog of bivalence would seem to fail. (shrink)

This book in effect consists of two parts. The first part contains seven chapters on Historia Ecclesiastica Carmine and related topics, written by Patricia Springborg over many years. While valuable, they will not be discussed here because these have been previously published. The second part is a critical text and translation, on facing pages, of Historia Ecclesiastica by Springborg, Patricia Stablein, and Paul Wilson, accompanied by extensive explanatory and interpretive notes by the same scholars. The work shows prodigious effort and (...) scholarship. This book, a large part of which, it seems, will also be published in the Collected Works of Thomas Hobbes , is a welcome addition to recent scholarship on the works of Hobbes.Hobbes' poem is a selective, static, ill-proportioned, and repetitious history of religious belief, practice, and abuse from the ancient Near East to the Reformation of Martin Luther. Much of the same history appears in the appendix to the Latin Leviathan and in An Historical Narration Concerning History. A problem with Hobbes' views stands out in Historia. (shrink)

In this paper we integrate a sorted unification calculus into free variable tableau methods for logics with term declarations. The calculus we define is used to close a tableau at once, unifying a set of equations derived from pairs of potentially complementary literals occurring in its branches. Apart from making the deduction system sound and complete, the calculus is terminating and so, it can be used as a decision procedure. In this sense we have separated the complexity of sorts from (...) the undecidability of first order logic. (shrink)