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This chapter considers the role of ‘memory politics’ – understood as the combination of official and unofficial attempts to deal with the legacy of past violations – in the struggle for democratization in Central America: official initiatives can include truth commissions, amnesty dispensations, criminal investigations and prosecutions, and a range of institutional reforms aimed at redressing the previous failure of the state to guarantee human rights; unofficial initiatives developed by civil society actors to confront the past can include investigations of violations, legal actions, and different kinds of commemorative acts and exercises in collective memory. Memory politics operates at multiple levels and involves a diversity of agents, including local communities, national and international non-governmental human rights organizations (HROs), governments, the media, and, in the case of Central America, the UN; however, it is suggested here that its long-term effects in any national context depend on the interaction between official and unofficial efforts to address the legacies of the past. The experiences of memory politics analysed in this chapter are those of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, the three Central American countries that during the 1990s undertook official processes of investigating past violations of human rights. The precise nature of memory politics and the impact it has had varied considerably in these three countries, and it is suggested that four interrelated factors are central to explaining differences between the respective national experiences: the first is the specific political and social legacies of human rights abuse in each country; the second concerns the circumstances of the transition from war to peace, specifically the prevailing balance of forces and the trade-off between truth and justice that this engendered in each case; the third is the role of local HROs and civil society in general in the politics of memory; and the fourth is the role of international governmental and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in efforts to uncover the truth about the past and to address the consequences of violations. The first three sections of the chapter compare the legacies of human rights abuses, the transitional trade-offs between truth and justice, and the role of civil society organizations and international actors in the memory politics of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala; the final section considers the impact of memory politics on the prospects for democracy in these countries.

This chapter shows the importance of authorities' claims in shaping and creating the law according to the ‘guise of the good’ model. It also shows that an investigation into the philosophy of language such as speech act theories presents only a partial portrait of the intricate relationship between ‘expressions of intentions’ and ‘intentional actions’. The chapter is organized as follows. Section 2 discusses the thesis on the nature of ‘claims of correctness and legitimate authority’ as discussed in recent literature. Section 3 gives the most plausible reconstruction of these claims in terms of speech acts, and shows the limits of this reconstruction. It demonstrates that the account provided by speech acts is dependent on a ‘unitary account’ of expressions of intention; intentional action; and intention in action. Finally, Sections 4 and 5 argue that the claims of legal authorities should be understood as expressions of intentions that involve practical knowledge.

Toward the end of the 1980s, the English legal profession could congratulate itself on having survived two decades of critical scrutiny virtually unchanged. A few years later, two government reports urged the elimination of some professional monopolies and the radical reform of legal education. Organizations such as Justice, the Haldane Society, the Society of Labour Lawyers, the Consumers' Association, the National Consumer Council, and the Legal Action Group sought to translate criticism into reform. Other government critiques of restrictive practices culminated in Labour's creation of a Royal Commission on Legal Services. In its wake, academics, journalists, and practising lawyers exposed anachronistic traditions and restrictive practices, the customs of barristers' clerks, and solicitor sexism. This chapter gives an account of these unlikely revolutionary changes and proposals in detail.

In the advent of how women cause discomfort to their male coworkers, all professional women are aware of the fact that being female can bring both advantages and disadvantages to the work environment. Although some women express positive feedback regarding how they are being treated in their respective work environments, there are, nonetheless, still some cases wherein professional women may either feel neutral, or experience underutilization. By and large, women who harbor negative feelings towards how they are being treated in their workplaces tend to react in predictable ways: denial, collusion, acceptance, challenge, flight, and resorting to legal action. This chapter asserts that examining these reactions can be very useful to how executives may address the problem of female underutilization.

This chapter deals with the resource Law, which is defined as the competence of public actors to formulate and implement public policies and the right of civil actors to appeal mainly public implementation acts in the courts. Law is considered as an important public action resource, the main service of which that can be mobilized by actors is the “right to impose a behaviour that complies with the objective law”. Examples are provided of cases involving the lack of a legal basis (political-administrative actors). They are drawn from municipal implementation activities, including non-decisions, financial policy, public tendering procedures and public infrastructure policies, and language policies. The chapter highlights the importance of the right to submit an appeal (or not), the threatened or actual submission of an appeal, and the particular cases of renouncement of this right.

In the case of intangible property (things in action), simple physical delivery and a consensual intention to effect a conveyance have never been feasible methods of transfer. This chapter considers priority conflicts between two or more persons claiming an entitlement to a thing. As its alternative name ‘things or choses in action’ indicates, intangible property cannot be physically enjoyed in and of itself. It consists of an entitlement arising from obligations that are enforceable by legal action. As an item of value, intangible property commands a certain price when it is sold to the purchaser.

This book discusses how the Saffron Revolution sustained the hopes and aspirations of the people of modern Myanmar for a free and democratic Burma. However, the majority of Burma experts declared the pro-democracy movement a failure. The domestic pro-democracy movement which first emerged in 1988 in Burma transformed over the decades into a transnational social movement, resulting in a new model. The Burmese pro-democracy movement built on new transnational networks in order to initiate innovative campaigns, using legal mechanisms to expose how democratic states and multinational corporations were supporting the oppressive regime. The movement, through so-called “transnational legal actions,” created transnational legal spaces and attempted to challenge the neoliberal conceptions of justice and democracy.

The book argues that, contrary to the perspective of most scholars, the pre-democracy movement in Burma did not suffer a decline after 1990 and instead reincarnated itself as the Free Burma movement through its transnational legal action. Democracy in Burma will not rely on social movement alone, more powerful international states will certainly play a role in determining Burma’s political course. This concluding chapter presents five important lessons from the transnational legal action of the Free Burma movement: states have the power but not the will to control corporations, transnational discourse provides an alternative to neoliberal globalization, corporations, like governments, may violate human rights, the lack of democracy contributes to authoritarianism, and human rights are part law, part ideology.

This chapter explains that the traditional legal actions for insincere promising differ from most other forms of deceit because the alleged misrepresentation concerns the speaker's own intentions. It argues that the allegation is not that the speaker lied about the world “out there,” but that he misinterpreted something about his own mind “in here.” This gives rise to the illusion that all promissory misinterpretations, since they focus on the aspect of “in here,” are knowing misrepresentations. Anyone who speaks these misrepresentations can be held liable as the speaker already knows that he was saying something false, which allows it to be qualified as something done with malice or deceit.

The well-documented “Road to Rome,” a common reference to the ICC’s founding Rome Statute, was as long as it was serpentine. Well before lawyers and politicians gathered in the 1990s to begin the drafting process, there were those who, grappling with the evidence of man’s capacity for inhumanity, expressed their belief in the need for a transnational tribunal with the capacity to deter atrocities and punish those who engineered and executed them. Stated plainly, although the ICC provides the educational, symbolic, and coercive benefits discussed later, the deterrent effect of the ICC, as it presently operates, is more limited. And this is bad news for victims, their advocates, and others who desperately want to see their former tormentors convicted, and who hope that the tangible threat of international legal action will, in the long term, deter potential perpetrators of atrocity crimes from engaging in their planned abuses.