Bücher der Reihe New Trajectories in Law

This book examines the notion of ethics at the intersection of law and justice and argues that ethics can and should stand guard over whatever image of justice and/or just law one happens to believe in.

This book introduces readers to the concept of territory as it applies to law while demonstrating the particular work that territory does in organizing property relations.Territories can be found in all societies and at all scales, although they take different forms. The concern here is on the use of territories in organizing legal relations. Law, as a form of power, often works through a variety of territorial strategies, serving multiple legal functions, such as attempts at creating forms of desired behaviour. Landed property, in Western society, is often highly territorial, reliant on sharply policed borders and spatial exclusion. But rather than thinking of territory as obvious and given or as a natural phenomenon, this book focuses particularly on its relation to property to argue that territory is both a social product, and a specific technology that organizes social relations. That is: territory is not simply an outcome of property relations but a strategic means by which such relations are communicated, imagined, legitimized, enforced, naturalized and contested.Accessible to students, this book will be of interest to those working in the areas of sociolegal studies, geography, urban studies, and politics.

This book develops a new conceptualisation of lawfare that recognises the polysemantic nature of the term.Drawing on theoretical developments from legal anthropology, international relations, and social theory, the book scrutinises the multiple dimensions of this phenomenon. It illustrates the multifaceted character of lawfare with a wide range of historical and contemporary cases from across the globe and analyses the implications of actors pursuing political objectives through legal means. This includes the use of lawfare by states as a legal instrument to accomplish geopolitical objectives, domestic lawfare, or the use of legal instruments to undermine internal opposition, and state lawfare used by governments to 'protect' the state from internal territorial-secessionist challenges. Finally, the book shows that lawfare is not exclusively a tool for hegemonic actors, as it can also be used by civil society actors that aim to uphold their rights through legal instruments in asymmetric lawfare.This book contributes to new developments in lawfare without shying away from controversy, acknowledging its sometimes-brutal efficacy as well as its potential pitfalls. The book will appeal to scholars and students of law, international relations, political science, anthropology, and sociology.

This book analyses the conceptual and concrete relationships between rhythm and law.Rhythm is the unfolding of ordered and regulated movement. Law operates through the ordering and regulation of movement. Adopting a 'rhythmanalytical' perspective - which treats natural and social phenomena in terms of their rhythms, repetitions, motions, and movements - this book offers an account of how legal institutions and practices can be theorised and explained in terms of rhythm. It demonstrates how the category of rhythm has jurisprudential significance, from how Plato envisaged the functioning of the city-state, to the operation of the common law, as well as in our relationship to contemporary digital technology. In music, rhythm 'orders' the movement of sound, binding together the motions and vibrations of sound in such a way that is neither pure noise nor pure mechanics. In this way, rhythm can be deployed as a concept in the analysis of one of the central purposes of legal institutions and practices: to order the movements of bodies, whether the bodies of citizens in everyday life or of prisoners in rituals of punishment. This book engages with the mutual intersections and points of illumination between rhythm and law, such as ritual, measure, order, and change.This book is an experimental rhythmanalysis of law, offering conceptual and methodological starting points, as well as proposing directions that could be deployed in future research. It is aimed primarily at legal scholars intrigued by rhythmanalysis and rhythmanalysts more generally. This book will also be of interest to those in the fields of philosophy, political and legal theory, sociology, and other social sciences.

This book introduces the concept of the Anthropocene and examines its importance for environmental legal thinking, research and practice.Two main arguments are explored. The first is that much of the scholarship in environmental law that addresses the Anthropocene does not respond to Earth systems science or the difference in scale as we move from local to global systems. Key examples include a focus on anthropocentrism, attempts to constitutionalise environmental protections, the prevalence of legal rights and the idea of ecological integrity. The second argument is that these points of focus derive from the prevalence of idealism in environmental legal scholarship. Idealism in this context does not refer to naivety or the presentation of unrealistic goals. Rather, this book is concerned with idealism as a philosophical commitment to the power of ideas to determine reality and drive future change. As expressed in legal scholarship, this book also argues that idealism involves an abstraction from material reality and a refusal to directly engage those forces that have given rise to the Anthropocene. In response, this book uses a method of critique to uncover the presumptions and presuppositions that underlie environmental scholarship. As a counter to idealism, it also sketches out a framework for materialism in the Anthropocene.This book's engagement with these questions will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students in law, politics, philosophy or the ecological humanities. It will also be of interest to academics in these disciplines and libraries around the world.