Law

The core animating feature of administrative justice scholarship is the desire to understand how justice is achieved through the delivery of public services and the actions, inactions, and decision-making of administrative bodies. The study of administrative justice also encompasses the redress systems by which people can challenge administrative bodies to seek the correction of injustices. For a long time now, scholars have been interested in administrative justice, but without necessarily framing their work as such. Rather than existing under the rubric of administrative justice, much of the research undertaken has existed within sub-categories of disciplines, such as law, sociology, public policy, politics, and public administration. Consequently, although aspects of the topic have attracted rich contributions across such disciplines, administrative justice has rarely been studied or taught in a manner that integrates these areas of research more systematically. This Handbook signals a major change of approach. Drawing together a group of world-leading scholars of administrative justice from a range of disciplines, The Oxford Handbook of Administrative Justice shows how administrative justice is a vibrant, complex, and contested field that is best understood as an area of inquiry in its own right, rather than through traditional disciplinary silos.

The Oxford Handbook of American Sports Law explores the growing field of sports law in the United States. Through thirty articles by leading scholars, this book explains the essential components of sports law in the twenty-first century. Each article addresses a distinct sports law topic and informs the reader of critical interpretations, theories and practical applications. Legal topics covered in the book span the spectrum of those found in the sports world. They include traditional themes, such as labor and antitrust controversies in professional sports leagues, and contemporary ones, such as whether college athletes ought to be paid and how emerging technologies require rethinking of long-standing sports law conventions.

The rise of comparative constitutional studies has made our world much smaller and more accessible than ever before. We are in an era of unprecedented interest in understanding and learning from others as individuals and institutions invest enormous amounts of time and resources into facilitating cross-national exchange and education in constitutional law. Yet some parts of the globe are still waiting to be discovered. With few exceptions, the Caribbean has remained understudied and underappreciated outside of the region itself. Not only on its own terms as a part of the larger world, but for how the lived experiences of the countries in the region can help illuminate new and productive approaches to challenges facing constitutional democracies across the globe. This book begins to fill the enormous void in our comparative knowledge of the constitutional systems of the world. The Caribbean is home not only to many different constitutional systems, but also to different traditions of constitutionalism, making it more appropriate to speak of the various Caribbean constitutionalisms. The book seeks to both inform readers about these traditions of constitutionalism and to illuminate their implications for constitutional adjudication, evolution, interpretation, and reform. What results is a rich diversity of historical and modern constitutional experience that puts an end, once and for all, to the conventional misunderstanding of Caribbean constitutions as being one and the same.

This volume of collected essays by many of the world’s leading scholars of child welfare and law combines thorough research on a comprehensive range of legal issues salient in children’s lives with the most sophisticated theoretical and policy analysis of the law, informed by the most current empirical research on child development and welfare. The book’s organization follows the life of a child, more or less, chronologically from pre-birth to adolescence and, correspondingly, a sequence of ever-widening social spheres, from the womb to family to society to the world. The topical range is great, encompassing assisted reproduction, protection of fetuses, parentage, child maltreatment, medical care, education, custody disputes, children’s privacy, delinquency, minimum age laws, and strategies for advocating for youths. There is also substantial geographic breadth; the authors of the volume’s chapters represent four continents and roughly a dozen countries. A unifying feature of the volume is that all chapters put children at the center of attention; the authors write about topics relating to children within their respective areas of expertise from a perspective that focuses first and foremost on how the law impacts children’s wellbeing and experience of life. This often produces unfamiliar, thought-provoking conclusions. The Handbook constitutes an invaluable reference as well as a stimulating course text.

Children’s rights law is a relatively young but rapidly developing discipline. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the field’s core legal instrument, is the most widely ratified human rights treaty in history. Yet, like children themselves, children’s rights are often relegated to the margins in mainstream legal, political, and other discourses, despite their application to approximately one-third of the world’s population and every human being’s first stages of life. Now thirty years old, the CRC signaled a definitive shift in the way children are viewed and understood—from passive objects subsumed within the family to full human beings with a distinct set of rights. Although the CRC and other children’s rights law have spurred positive changes in law, policies, and attitudes toward children in numerous countries, implementation remains a work in progress. We have reached the state in which more critical evaluation and assessment is needed of both the CRC and the large body of children’s rights law and policies that this treaty has inspired. We have moved from conceptualizing and adopting legislation to focusing on implementation and making the content of children’s rights meaningful in the lives of all children. This book provides a critical evaluation and assessment of children’s rights law, including the CRC. With contributions from leading scholars and practitioners from around the world, it aims to elucidate the content of children’s rights law, explore the complexities of implementation, and identify critical challenges and opportunities for children’s rights law.

Understanding the contemporary transformation of citizenship requires insights from many disciplines and perspectives. The Oxford Handbook of Citizenship brings together multidisciplinary and comparative contributions from legal academics, political scientists, sociologists, geographers, historians, and philosophers, to set a new agenda for both theoretical and practical explorations of citizenship. The main challenges and prospects in today's world of increased migration and globalization will be explored, and attention will also be given to new forms of membership and democratic participation beyond borders, as well as to the rise of European and multilevel citizenship-developments that are increasing the potential for citizenship to operate not only at the nation-state level, but also above and below it. The Handbook will be a major reference for those engaged with citizenship from a legal, political, and cultural perspective.

In this volume, distinguished experts, and leaders in the field, discuss a wide range of issues in administrative law from a comparative perspective. Administrative law is concerned with the conferral, nature, exercise, and legal control of administrative (or ‘executive’) governmental power. It has close links with other areas of ‘public law’, notably constitutional law and international law. It is of great interest and importance not only to lawyers but also to students of politics, government, and public policy. Studying public law comparatively helps to identify both similarities and differences between the way government power and its control is managed in different countries and legal traditions.

The field of comparative constitutional law has grown immensely over the past couple of decades. Once a minor and obscure adjunct to the field of domestic constitutional law, comparative constitutional law has now moved front and centre. Driven by the global spread of democratic government and the expansion of international human rights law, the prominence and visibility of the field, among judges, politicians, and scholars has grown exponentially. Even in the United States, where domestic constitutional exclusivism has traditionally held a firm grip, use of comparative constitutional materials has become the subject of a lively and much publicized controversy among various justices of the U.S. Supreme Court. The trend towards harmonization and international borrowing has been controversial. Whereas it seems fair to assume that there ought to be great convergence among industrialized democracies over the uses and functions of commercial contracts, that seems far from the case in constitutional law. Can a parliamentary democracy be compared to a presidential one? A federal republic to a unitary one? What about differences in ideology or national identity? Can constitutional rights deployed in a libertarian context be profitably compared to those at work in a social welfare context? Is it perilous to compare minority rights in a multi-ethnic state to those in its ethnically homogeneous counterparts? These controversies form the background to the field of comparative constitutional law, challenging not only legal scholars, but also those in other fields, such as philosophy and political theory. This text examines the history and methodology of the discipline, the central concepts of constitutional law, constitutional processes, and institutions — from legislative reform to judicial interpretation, rights, and emerging trends.

The study of environmental law has been relatively limited to date, with researchers either adopting a country-by-country approach or comparing a limited number of jurisdictions on some specific points, or, still, addressing a specific area or problem in detail without seeking to encompass environmental law as a whole. This book fills a gap in the disciplines of comparative law and environmental law by providing the first comprehensive analysis of comparative environmental law from an integrated perspective. In addition to the common approaches to the subject, the book also addresses the fundamental systems underpinning the diversity observed across countries as well as the interactions of environmental laws and instruments with their broader legal context. The former have received limited attention to date, while the latter are important not only because such interactions may heavily influence the effectiveness and resilience of environmental law but also because some non-environmental instruments may operate as extremely powerful vehicles of environmental protection. Combining commentaries by leading academics from around the world as well as observations by a new generation of scholars who have different perspectives on the questions being addressed, this book is a valuable resource for both academics and practitioners in the field.

This book ambitiously seeks to lay the groundwork for a new field of study and teaching known as “comparative foreign relations law.” Comparative foreign relations law compares and contrasts how nations, and also supranational entities such as the European Union, structure their decisions about matters such as entering into and exiting from international agreements, engaging with international institutions, and using military force, as well as how they incorporate treaties and customary international law into their domestic legal systems. The book consists of forty-six chapters, written by leading authors from around the world. Some of the chapters are empirically focused, others are theoretical, and still others contain in-depth case studies. In addition to being an invaluable resource for scholars working in this area, the book should be of interest to lawyers, judges, and law students. Foreign relations law issues are addressed regularly by lawyers working in foreign ministries, and globalization has meant that domestic judges, too, increasingly are confronted by them. In addition, private lawyers who work on matters that extend beyond their home countries often are required to navigate issues of foreign relations law. An increasing number of law school courses in comparative foreign relations law are also now being developed, making this volume an important resource for students as well.

The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Health Law addresses some of the most critical issues facing scholars, legislators, and judges. How, for example, can the law protect against threats to public health that can quickly cross national borders? How can it ensure access to affordable healthcare or regulate the pharmaceutical industry? Indeed, when matters of life and death literally hang in the balance, it is especially important for policymakers to get things right, and the making of policy can be greatly enhanced by learning from the successes and failures of approaches taken in other countries. Where there are “common challenges” in law and health, there is much to be gained from experiences elsewhere. Accordingly, this Handbook considers key health law questions from a comparative perspective. In health law, common challenges are frequent. In addition to those just mentioned, there are questions about addressing the social determinants of health (e.g., poverty and pollution), organizing health systems to optimize use of available resources, ensuring that physicians provide care of the highest quality, protecting patient privacy in a data-driven world, and properly balancing patient autonomy with the interest in preserving life when reproductive and end-of-life decisions are made. This Handbook’s wide scope and comparative perspective on health law are particularly timely. Economic globalization has made it increasingly important for different countries to harmonize their legal rules. The many paired and complementary chapters that cover law in American and European contexts represent a novel approach that should allow scholars, students, and policymakers to develop new insight into this complex field.

This second edition of The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Law provides a wide-ranging and highly diverse survey as well as a critical assessment of comparative law at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In the current era of globalization, this discipline is more relevant than ever, both on an academic and practical level. The book contains forty-eight essays, each of which provides an accessible, original, and critical account of comparative law in its respective area. Each essay also includes a short bibliography referencing the definitive works in the field. The book is divided into three main sections. Section I shows how comparative law has developed and where it stands today in various parts of the world. This includes not only traditional model jurisdictions, such as France, Germany, and the United States, but also other regions like Eastern Europe, East Asia, Latin America, and the Islamic countries. Section II discusses the major approaches to comparative law—its methods, goals, and its relationship with other fields, such as legal history, economics, and linguistics. Finally, Section III deals with the status of comparative studies over a range of subject matter areas, including the major categories of private, economic, public, and criminal law.

The history of constitutional law in Latin America offers a mosaic of national histories, political experiments, and institutional transitions. No matter how distinctive and country-specific these histories and trends might be, this handbook shows that there are a set of commonalities that transcend the geographical contiguity of these countries. The handbook seeks to identify the similarities between institutional outlooks, bodies of rights, declarations, ideological underpinnings, and canons of constitutional thought. The last wave of constitutional change shows that many countries in the region have gone through, which started by the end of the 1980s, was geared towards a commitment to equality in diversity, a recognition of the multi-ethnic origins of the respective societies and an attempt to deepen democracy via participatory channels. This handbook aims to depict the constitutional landscape of Latin America by shedding light on its most important differences and affinities, qualities and drawbacks, and by assessing its overall standing in the global enterprise of democratic constitutionalism.

This handbook offers a comparative and functional overview of corporate law and governance. It examines the shift from corporate law to corporate governance — from a largely legal emphasis to one that focuses on the corporation’s inputs, outputs and how they are managed and, ultimately, the ways in which governance interacts with other institutional elements that comprise a capitalist system. It also discusses the conventional goals and mechanisms of corporate governance, along with their limitations when applied to banks; the roles and functions of the board of directors, how boards fail, and the reforms that have been tried to improve their performance; how mergers and acquisitions are regulated; and the functions of corporate accounting and financial reporting worldwide. Other chapters deal with the ‘corporate law’ issues involved in the regulation of takeovers; the relationship between corporate governance and employment relations; fundamental issues of corporate insolvency law; legal and policy issues relating to transactions between a corporation and one of its ‘related parties’; current trends in the regulation and practice of executive remuneration; corporate governance in closely held corporations; and economic benefits and costs of external and internal asset partitioning in corporations.

This book deals with various aspects of criminal law, including its relationship to a wide range of disciplines such as philosophy, sociology, and technology. It first considers a range of approaches and methods used in the analysis of criminal law, including economics, feminist studies, critical race theory, criminology, history, and literature. It then traces the origins of modern criminal law to medieval canon law and examines indigenous legal traditions before discussing the collapse of pre-modern criminal justice and the transition to modernity. The book also reviews the general principles of criminal liability; topics covered include constitutional criminal law, actus reus, mens rea, corporate criminal liability, consent, self-defense, necessity, duress, insanity and intoxication, as well as jurisdiction and sentencing. Different types of crimes are analyzed, including public welfare offenses, inchoate crimes, offenses against the person and against sexual autonomy, property offenses, drug offenses, regulatory offenses, and terrorism. Throughout, the book takes a broadly comparative and contextual approach that regards criminal law as a global discipline.

This handbook examines various aspects of the criminal process, including the role of prosecutors in common law and civil law jurisdictions, the rights and duties of experts, victim rights in civil law jurisdictions, surveillance and investigation, criminal prosecution and its alternatives, evidence discovery and disclosure in common law systems, evidence law as forensic science, common law plea bargaining, appeals and post-conviction review, and procedure in international tribunals. The book is organized into eight parts covering topics ranging from criminal process in the dual penal state to interrogation law and practice in common law jurisdictions, empirical and comparative approaches to criminal procedure, prosecution-led investigations and measures of procedural coercion in the field of corruption, international corporate prosecutions, special procedures for white-collar and corporate wrongdoing in Europe, and trial procedure in response to terrorism. Also discussed are the roles of the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights as guardians of fair criminal proceedings in Europe, double jeopardy or ne bis in idem in common law and civil law jurisdictions, plea bargaining vs. abbreviated trial procedures, restorative justice as an alternative to penal sanctions, and the pluralistic nature of international criminal procedure.

The early years of the first decade of the twenty-first century saw the emergence and rapid development of a movement that labeled itself “Empirical Legal Studies” (ELS). This book acknowledges the diversity of empirical investigation of law, legal systems, and other legal phenomena. In particular, there are at least three approaches and research groupings that predate the contemporary ELS movement, which may be respectively identified as socio-legal/law and society (an interdisciplinary movement with strong roots in sociology but including scholars from a wide range of traditional disciplines including law), empirically oriented law-and-economics, and judicial behavior/politics. This book also explores three key dimensions of policing: order management, crime management, and security management. Finally, it concludes by identifying some emerging trends in the organization and conduct of police work as policing organizations seek to reconfigure their capacities and capabilities to meet new challenges. The phrase “empirical legal research” in the title, The Oxford Handbook of Empirical Legal Research, is designed both to reflect and to celebrate the healthy pluralism of empirical approaches to the study of law and legal phenomena.

This book explores the intertwining domains of artificial intelligence (AI) and ethics—two highly divergent fields which at first seem to have nothing to do with one another. AI is a collection of computational methods for studying human knowledge, learning, and behavior, including by building agents able to know, learn, and behave. Ethics is a body of human knowledge—far from completely understood—that helps agents (humans today, but perhaps eventually robots and other AIs) decide how they and others should behave. Despite these differences, however, the rapid development in AI technology today has led to a growing number of ethical issues in a multitude of fields, ranging from disciplines as far-reaching as international human rights law to issues as intimate as personal identity and sexuality. In fact, the number and variety of topics in this volume illustrate the width, diversity of content, and at times exasperating vagueness of the boundaries of “AI Ethics” as a domain of inquiry. Within this discourse, the book points to the capacity of sociotechnical systems that utilize data-driven algorithms to classify, to make decisions, and to control complex systems. Given the wide-reaching and often intimate impact these AI systems have on daily human lives, this volume attempts to address the increasingly complicated relations between humanity and artificial intelligence. It considers not only how humanity must conduct themselves toward AI but also how AI must behave toward humanity.

The Oxford Handbook of European Legal History charts the landscape of contemporary research and the shift from national legal histories to comparative methods, which have profoundly affected the way we understand legal transformation at the local, national, regional, European, and global level. The Handbook shows legal change in terms of continuous flow and exchange of influences, which take place within complicated combinations of cultural, political, and social networks. The present Handbook captures this revised conception of European legal history; it not only merely reflects the state of the discipline, but also aims to shape it. As the chapters of this Handbook show, ancient Roman law owed much to the Near Eastern legal orders. Later on, from the fifteenth century onwards, the major European legal orders gradually spread to all continents. Indeed, most of the globalization of law has taken place by way of European legal systems turning global.

Since its formation the European Union has expanded beyond all expectations, an expansion that seems set to continue. The EU has never been stronger and yet it now appears to be reaching a crisis point, beset by conflict and challenges to its legitimacy. EU law, always controversial, continues to perplex. What is the EU? An international organization, or a federation? Should its legal concepts be measured against national standards, or another yardstick? The Oxford Handbook of EU Law illuminates the richness and complexity of the law and policies of the EU. Each chapter summarizes, analyses, and reflects on the state of play in a given area, and suggests how it is likely to develop. Written by an international team of leading commentators, this Oxford Handbook creates a vivid and provocative tapestry of the key issues shaping the law of the European Union.