Law

This book examines the relatively recent and under-explored phenomenon of outward foreign direct investment (FDI) from the large emerging market countries, focusing on the four BRIC states (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) and on the services sector meaning primarily telecommunications, finance, and transport. It considers the international legal framework governing FDI, discussing the nature and extent of the bilateral and regional investment treaty commitments undertaken by each of the BRIC states, including their commitments under the WTO General Agreement on Trade in Services, as well as their obligations as members of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Drawing on trends observed in the regulatory approach of these countries to FDI in services, including the observed flow of FDI both to and now from the developing world, the book proposes a multilateral investment treaty aimed at the liberalisation and protection of FDI in services. The treaty will capture the emerging equilibrium in global FDI patterns signifying a unified approach to the regulation of foreign investment in the growing services economy by developing and developed economies alike. The treaty will strengthen the legitimacy of investor-state dispute settlement and recognise public interest norms such as environmental protection and human rights as well as allow signatories to retain sovereignty over matters relating to national security and economic stability.

Islam's tense relationship with modernity is one of the most crucial issues of our time. Within Islamic legal systems, with their traditional preference for eyewitness testimony, this struggle has played a significant role in attitudes toward expert witnesses. Utilizing a uniquely comparative approach, this book examines the evolution of the role of such witnesses in a number of Arab countries from the premodern period to the present. It begins with a history of expert testimony in medieval Islamic culture, analyzing the different roles played by male experts, especially physicians and architects, and females, particularly midwives. From there, it focuses on the case of Egypt, tracing the country's reform of its traditional legal system along European lines beginning in the late nineteenth century. Returning to a broader perspective, the book draws on a variety of legal and historical sources to place the phenomenon of expert testimony in cultural context. A truly comprehensive resource, this book will be sought out by a broad spectrum of scholars working in history, religion, gender studies, and law.

The relationship between Islamic law and international human rights law has been the subject of considerable, and heated, debate in recent years. The usual starting point has been to test one system by the standards of the other, asking is Islamic law ‘compatible’ with international human rights standards, or vice versa. This approach quickly ends in acrimony and accusations of misunderstanding. By overlaying one set of norms on another we overlook the deeply contextual nature of how legal rules operate in a society, and meaningful comparison and discussion is impossible. Chapters in this book attempt to deepen the understanding of human rights and Islam, paving the way for a more meaningful debate. Focusing on central areas of controversy, such as freedom of speech and religion, gender equality, and minority rights, the chapters examine the contextual nature of how Islamic law and international human rights law are legitimately formed, interpreted, and applied within a community. They examine how these fundamental interests are recognized and protected within the law, and what restrictions are placed on the freedoms associated with them.

Current Legal Issues, like its sister volume Current Legal Problems, is based upon an annual colloquium held at University College London. Each year leading scholars from around the world gather to discuss the relationship between law and another discipline of thought. Each colloquium examines how the external discipline is conceived in legal thought and argument, how the law is pictured in that discipline, and analyses points of controversy in the use, and abuse, of extra-legal arguments within legal theory and practice. This book, the fifteenth volume in the Current Legal Issues series, offers an insight into the scholarship examining the relationship between language and the law. The issues examined in this book range from problems of interpretation and beyond this to the difficulties of legal translation, and further to non-verbal expression in a chapter tracing the use of sign language at the Old Bailey; it examines the role of language and the law in a variety of literary works, including Hamlet; and considers the interrelation between language and the law in a variety of contexts, including criminal law, contract law, family law, human rights law, and EU law.

Lawsuits are rare events in most people's lives. High-stakes cases are even less commonplace. Why is it, then, that scholarship about the Japanese legal system has focused almost exclusively on epic court battles, large-scale social issues, and corporate governance? This book fills a void in our understanding of the relationship between law and social life in Japan by shifting the focus to cases more representative of everyday Japanese life. Compiling case studies based on seven fascinating themes—karaoke-based noise complaints, sumo wrestling, love hotels, post-Kobe earthquake condominium reconstruction, lost-and-found outcomes, working hours, and debt-induced suicide—it offers a portrait of the way law intermingles with social norms, historically ingrained ideas, and cultural mores in Japan. Each example is informed by extensive fieldwork. The author interviews all of the participants—from judges and lawyers to defendants, plaintiffs, and their families—to uncover an everyday Japan where law matters, albeit in very surprising ways.

Law and law-like institutions are visible in human societies very distant from each other in time and space. When it comes to observing and analysing such social constructs historians, anthropologists, and lawyers run into notorious difficulties in how to conceptualize them. Do they conform to a single category of ‘law’? How are divergent understandings of the nature and purpose of law to be described and explained? Such questions reach to the heart of philosophical attempts to understand the nature of law, but arise whenever we are confronted by law-like practices and concepts in societies not our own. This book analyses the nature and meaning of law in diverse societies. The book starts from the concept of legalism, taken from the anthropologist Lloyd Fallers, whose 1960s work on Africa engaged, unusually, with jurisprudence. The concept highlights appeal to categories and rules. The degree to which legalism in this sense informs people's lives varies within and between societies, and over time, but it can colour equally both ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ law. Breaking with recent emphases on ‘practice’, the chapters explore, in a set of cases, the place of legalism in the workings of social life. The chapters make obvious the need to question our parochial common sense where ideals of moral order at other times and places differ from those of modern North Atlantic governance. State-centred law, for instance, is far from a ‘central case’. Legalism may be ‘aspirational’, connecting people to wider visions of morality; duty may be as prominent a theme as rights; and rulers from thirteenth-century England to sixteenth-century Burma appropriate, as much they impose, a vision of justice as consistency. The use of explicit categories and rules does not reduce to simple questions of power.

The role of the U.S. Supreme Court in the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election raised questions in the minds of many Americans about the relationships between judges and political influence; the following years saw equally heated debates over the appropriate role of political ideology in selecting federal judges. Legal scholars have always debated these questions—asking, in effect, how much judicial systems operate on merit and principle and how much they are shaped by politics. The Japanese Constitution, like many others, requires that all judges be “independent in the exercise of their conscience and bound only by this Constitution and its laws.” Consistent with this requirement, Japanese courts have long enjoyed a reputation for vigilant independence—an idea challenged only occasionally, and most often anecdotally. But this book uses the latest statistical techniques to examine whether that reputation always holds up to scrutiny—whether, and to what extent, the careers of lower court judges can be manipulated to political advantage. On the basis of careful econometric analysis of career data for hundreds of judges, the book finds that Japanese politics do influence judicial careers, discreetly and indirectly: judges who decide politically charged cases in ways favored by the ruling party enjoy better careers after their decisions than might otherwise be expected, while dissenting judges are more likely to find their careers hampered by assignments to less desirable positions.

Mediation provides an attractive alternative to resolving disputes through court proceedings. Mediation promises just results in the interest of all parties concerned, a reduction of the court caseload, and cost savings for the parties involved as well as for the treasury. The European Directive on Mediation has given mediation in Europe new momentum by establishing a common framework for cross-border mediation. Beyond Europe, many states have tried in recent years to answer the question whether, and if so, how mediation should be regulated at a national and international level. The aim of this book is to promote the understanding and discussion of regulatory issues by presenting comparative research on mediation. It describes and analyses the law and practice of mediation in twenty-two countries. Europe is represented by chapters on mediation in Austria, Bulgaria, England, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal and Spain. The world beyond Europe is analysed in chapters on mediation in Australia, Canada, China, Japan, New Zealand, Russia, Switzerland and the USA. Against this background, further chapters on fundamental issues identify possible regulatory models and discuss central principles of mediation law and practice. In particular, the work considers harmonisation and diversity in the law of mediation as well as the economic and constitutional problems associated with privatising civil justice. To the extent available, empirical research is used as a point of reference in the critical analysis

Examining the law and public policy relating to religious liberty in Western liberal democracies, this book contains a detailed analysis of the history, rationale, scope, and limits of religious freedom from (but not restricted to) an evangelical Christian perspective. Focussing on the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the European Convention on Human Rights it studies the interaction between law and religion at several different levels, looking at the key debates that have arisen. Divided into three parts, the book begins by contrasting the liberal and Christian rationales for and understandings of religious freedom. It then explores central thematic issues: the types of constitutional frameworks within which any right to religious exercise must operate; the varieties of paradigmatic relationships between organized religion and the state; the meaning of ‘religion’; the limitations upon individual and institutional religious behaviour; and the domestic and international legal mechanisms that have evolved to address religious conduct. The final part explores key subject areas where current religious freedom controversies have arisen: employment, education, parental rights and childrearing, controls on pro-religious and anti-religious expression, medical treatment, and religious group (church) autonomy.

A leader of a global superpower is betrayed by his mistress, who makes public the sordid details of their secret affair. His wife stands by as he denies the charges. Debates over definitions of moral leadership ensue. Sound familiar? If you guessed Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, try again. This incident involved former Japanese prime minister Sōsuke Uno and a geisha. This book organizes the seemingly random worlds of Japanese and American scandal—from corporate fraud to baseball cheaters, political corruption to celebrity sexcapades—to explore well-ingrained similarities and contrasts in law and society. In Japan and the United States, legal and organizational rules tell us what kind of behavior is considered scandalous. When Japanese and American scandal stories differ, those rules—rules that define what is public and what is private, rules that protect injuries to dignity and honor, and rules about sex, to name a few—often help explain the differences. In the cases of Clinton and Uno, the rules help explain why the media did not cover Uno's affair, why Uno's wife apologized on her husband's behalf, and why Uno—but not Clinton—resigned.