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The application of ethical assessment is related to applications of law and principles of human rights. This chapter provides a foundation for legal analysis and perception that can be applied to legal systems to establish comparisons and contrasts. Topics discussed include the role of law and lawyers, legal reform for reproductive health, the evolution of reproductive health law, legal principles governing reproductive health care, the regulation of information, competent delivery of services and the law of negligence, conscientious objection, the safety and efficacy of products, and criminal law.

This chapter illustrates how ethical analysis can be a helpful tool, along with legal analysis, to support and enrich public health decision making. It provides n overview of the complementary roles of public health ethics and law; an approach to public health ethics, including a framework to guide ethical reflection, deliberation, and justification in practice; examples of common ethical themes and tensions between individual and collective interests; an understanding of the role of professional ethics, as expressed in the new public health code of ethics; and an outline of ways to integrate ethics into practice within public health organizations.

This chapter examines prevailing ethical theory, including: (1) ethical formalism and deontological prima facie duties; (2) consequentialism (consisting of ethical egoism, contractualism, and utilitarianism); and (3) Aristotelian virtue philosophy (featuring feminist care ethics). The limits of each ethical school of thought and its variants are presented. The relevance of turning to moral philosophy for the purpose of psychological jurisprudential theorizing and law-psychology-crime research is described. This includes commentary on how existing strategies (restorative justice, therapeutic jurisprudence, and commonsense justice) collectively represent an integrative type of ethic that is consistent with the humanizing intentions of psychological jurisprudence. Several important observations on methodological details (i.e., textual legal analysis) conclude the chapter.

Hindu law has defied many predictions of its demise, despite being an ancient legal system. It must be seen as a postmodern phenomenon that displays its internal dynamism and perennial capacity for flexibility and realignment, in combination with the societies to and in which it applies. This chapter discusses mostly a postmodern legal analysis of Hindu law, which has been neglected because of a combination of declining knowledge of its classical foundations. The chapter discusses Hindu law beyond modernity and tradition, and provides a brief outline of the proceeding chapters.

Creating equality of opportunity seems to be a viable strategy for resolving the conflict between the contending principles of competitiveness and solidarity. Both principles lie at the core of the European Union’s agenda. Anti-discrimination law appears to be a way of mediating between them. The relevant legislation protects people who happen to bear certain characteristics—most of which are socially salient, for example, sex, race, religion, ethnicity—from disadvantage that arises from actions by private persons or the state in the context of the provision of goods and opportunities. Characteristically, the protection is limited to certain critical goods, such as jobs, salaries, housing or access to education. The European Union has been the driving force in the development of anti-discrimination legislation in the legal systems of its Member States.

Weighing Thucydides' implicit (therefore, at best, only alleged) criticisms of — and homage to — his predecessor Herodotus demands comparison and examination of ‘normal’ institutions. Included oaths, for example, deserve examination as well as accounts of speeches, battle-challenges, and diplomatic threats. Oath furnishes one noteworthy index of sophisticated social and legal analysis embedded in ancient historical narrations. The historians' use of this specific index shows that they treat oaths in some significantly different ways. While Herodotus mentions only the gist of an earlier generation's inter-state oaths, Thucydides can transcribe every clause of certain contemporaneous treaties. This chapter examines when, where, and how Herodotus and Thucydides include oaths. After situating oath in Hellenic thought, it maps fifth-century test cases onto that pattern.

Legal cultural analysis can be a very useful methodology for considering legal systems and traditions. This chapter applies that methodological approach to international investment law. It first explains the methodology and then discusses the unique obstacles international economic law presents for an application of the methodology. Next, it examines the field with those difficulties in mind, and identifies systemic or macro-legal cultural issues within the field of international investment law that are presently or will in the future be significant influences on the development of international investment law.

This chapter addresses the normative and spatial dimensions of sovereignty in a society characterized by cultural diversity, social fragmentation, and ideological conflict. The thesis of this chapter is that in mediating these tensions, decision makers and the courts often use the ‘ethics of provincialism’, a vision of ethnic, cultural, and religious pluralism managed by geographic autonomy and isolation, using geography as a proxy for subgroup affiliation. For the sake of clarity, the discussion is focused on a recent decision delivered by the Israeli Supreme Court — Solodkin v. City of Beit Shemesh — that raises significant questions regarding the (appropriate) place of space in legal analysis, permitting the analysis of severe social effects of the ethics of provincialism. After exploring the facts of the case, it then considers how various political theories — liberalism, multiculturalism, and civic republicanism — would address the dilemma presented in it. This discussion, in turn, serves as a springboard for exploring pervasive questions regarding the association between social groups and the urban spaces they inhabit in multicultural societies.

This chapter examines decision-making and the use of discretion within the Criminal Cases Review Commission using socio-legal analysis, with particular emphasis on the application of the real possibility test at screening, investigation, and referral back to the Court of Appeal. It also describes the theoretical framework used in the review of the Commission's discretion and decision-making. The chapter begins with a discussion of how the Commission decides whether there is new evidence and whether that evidence gives rise to a real possibility that the Court of Appeal will find the conviction to be unsafe. It then considers the legal and socio-legal literature on discretion, highlighting the key features of discretionary behaviour and how it is facilitated and constrained in practice. Finally, it explores three concepts proposed by Keith Hawkins in the context of legal decision-making: ‘surround’, ‘field’, and ‘frame’.

This introductory chapter begins by considering the rhetoric of European Union (EU) institutions on the security role of the Union. It then sets out the book's purpose, which is to provide a legal analysis of the EU' Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP). An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter provides a sociologically informed historical analysis of applications made under the European Convention on Human Rights against the UK concerning discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. It focuses on sixty-three cases against the UK that originated in individual applications submitted to the Strasbourg organs between 1972 and 2010. The key aim of this chapter is to elucidate the socio-legal context of applications against the UK about sexual orientation discrimination, the jurisprudence that the Strasbourg organs have developed as a result of these applications, and the effect of this jurisprudence on the legal landscape of the UK.

In the tradition of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and Judge Learned Hand, Justice Antonin Scalia committed himself to developing and promoting an objective approach to legal analysis. Scalia focused on the interpretation of statutes and the Constitution, whereas Hand is best known for his contributions to common law subjects, even though, like Scalia, Hand was a federal judge. Holmes did both. The chapter shows that Scalia was not of a single mind when it came to the interpretation of statutes. A purely formalist thread and an evidence-restricted intentionalist thread both run through his body of work. The author is personally more comfortable with the latter. Whatever one’s personal philosophy, the chapter’s goal is to show that Justice Scalia wrote with a somewhat more complex set of legal values and linguistic presumptions than is often recognized.

This chapter examines three assumptions that underpin much of the discussion on health. These are, firstly, that it makes sense to see ourselves as atomistic, static entities; secondly, that health is an entirely personal, subjective quality; and, thirdly, that the desirable norm is a capacitous, invulnerable human, and accordingly that incapacity and vulnerability are pathological. It then considers, in relation to three areas of healthcare law (resource allocation, confidentiality, and organ donation/use of body parts and materials) how the authors’ account of health should change legal analysis.