This paper provides a comparative analysis of the rules of conduct governing legal representatives in Australia, the United States of America and the United Kingdom as they apply to a range of ethical issues in mediation. The analysis has four main aims. First, it clarifies the position in Australia and the USA - the Australian and American mediation communities have not introduced separate codes for ?mediation advocates? as Mason recently suggested. But some provisions have been made for mediation practice. (...) The second aim is to tease out from these provisions learning points for policy makers and rule drafters. Amongst the points to consider is whether or not, and under what circumstances, mediators should be regarded as courts, or as third parties for the purpose of the rules. Third, the analysis provides some grounds for arguing that the current rules of conduct are appropriate for legal representatives in mediation. Fourth, it identifies challenges associated with proposals to introduce rules which require legal representatives to participate in mediation in good faith in a non-adversarial manner according to higher standards of honesty and candour. The article concludes by identifying a number of assumptions which permeate the literature on this topic. (shrink)

This paper explores the role of corpus linguistics in legal research, emphasizing the necessity of a representative and balanced corpus of legal language. While existing corpora provide valuable insights, they often focus on limited genres, risking an incomplete understanding of the complexity of legal discourse. The paper advocates for an empirical and comprehensive study of legal language and introduces KoPr, a pioneering representative corpus of Czech legal language, as an illustrative example. This corpus (...) encompasses diverse legal texts, including legislation, case law, academic literature, and communication by legal practitioners. The methodology for constructing KoPr is detailed, from defining legal genres to adapting corpus design principles specifically for legal discourse. Furthermore, the paper addresses practical and methodological limitations encountered during corpus development and proposes solutions for mitigating them. By systematically organizing legal texts within the corpus, the paper ensures representativeness and usability. Presenting KoPr’s parameters and applications, the study highlights the transformative potential of corpus-based research in legal linguistics, offering new insights into the linguistic foundations of the law. (shrink)

This paper presents a formalism for representing temporal knowledge in legal discourse that allows an explicit expression of time and event occurrences. The fundamental time structure is characterized as a well‐ordered discrete set of primitive times, i.e. non‐decomposable intervals with positive duration or points with zero duration), from which decomposable intervals can be constructed. The formalism supports a full representation of both absolute and relative temporal knowledge, and a formal mechanism for checking the temporal consistency of a given set (...) of legal statements is provided. The general consistency checking algorithm which addresses both absolute and relative temporal knowledge turns out to be a linear programming problem, while in the special case where only relative temporal relations are involved, it becomes a simple question of searching for cycles in the graphical representation of the corresponding legal text. (shrink)

1. Understanding.--2. Purpose.--3. Conciliation.--4. Justice.--5. Justice, science and religion as contributions to civilization.--6. Uniformitarian process under supreme law.

There is currently unprecedented attention in Australia on the misidentification of women victim-survivors as family violence ‘predominant aggressors’—this focus has largely been oriented towards the role of the police. Less research has considered court responses to misidentification and specifically, the role that legal practitioners play in recognising and responding to clients who have been misidentified. This article addresses this key gap in the literature through an exploration of 18 legal practitioners’ experiences of representing misidentified clients in the civil (...) protection order system in the Australian state of Victoria. The findings suggest that legal practitioners face a number of challenges when representing clients who have been misidentified and that the magistrates’ courts are ill-equipped to respond to misidentification. As a consequence, a culture of respondents consenting to orders that should never have been made against them is maintained. This article calls for a greater focus on the role that the courts can play in providing a ‘safety net’ for victim-survivors who have been misidentified. (shrink)

There is more to legal knowledge representation than knowledge-bases. It is valuable to look at legal knowledge representation and its implementation across the entire domain of computerisation of law, rather than focussing on sub-domains such as legal expert systems. The DataLex WorkStation software and applications developed using it are used to provide examples. Effective integration of inferencing, hypertext and text retrieval can overcome some of the limitations of these current paradigms of legal computerisation which are apparent (...) when they are used on a stand-alone basis. Effective integration of inferencing systems is facilitated by use of a (quasi) natural language knowledge representation, and the benefits of isomorphism are enhanced. These advantages of integration apply to all forms of inferencing, including document generation and casebased inferencing. Some principles for development of integrated legal decision support systems are proposed. (shrink)

In environmental ethics, the legal and political representation of non-humans is a widespread aspiration. Its supporters see representative institutions that give voice to non-humans’ interests as a promising strategy for responding to the illegitimate worldwide exploitation of non-human beings. In this article I engage critically with those who support this form of representation, and address two issues central to any account concerned with the legal and political representation of non-human living beings: what should be represented? And what (...) are the conditions of such a representation? The answers I provide to these queries count as a first step towards a comprehensive account of the institutional representation of non-human nature. (shrink)

Modelling reasoning with legal cases has been a central concern of AI and Law since the 1980s. The approach which represents cases as factors and dimensions has been a central part of that work. In this paper I consider how several varieties of the approach can be applied to the interesting case of Popov v Hayashi. After briefly reviewing some of the key landmarks of the approach, the case is represented in terms of factors and dimensions, and further explored (...) using theory construction and argumentation schemes approaches. (shrink)

Despite the public availability of legal documents, there is a need for finding specific information contained in them, such as paragraphs, clauses, items and so on. With such support, users could find more specific information than only finding whole legal documents. Some research efforts have been made in this area, but there is still a lot to be done to have legal information available more easily to be found. Thus, due to the large number of published (...) class='Hi'>legal documents and the high degree of connectivity, simple access to the document is not enough. It is necessary to recover the related legal framework for a specific need. In other words, the retrieval of the set of legal documents and their parts related to a specific subject is necessary. Therefore, in this work, we present a proposal of a RDF-based graph to represent and search parts of legal documents, as the output of a set of terms that represents the pursued legal information. Such a proposal is well-grounded on an ontological view, which makes possible to describe the general structure of a legal system and the structure of legal documents, providing this way the grounds for the implementation of the proposed RDF graph in terms of the meaning of their parts and relationships. We posed several queries to retrieve parts of legal documents related to sets of words and the results were significant. (shrink)

[English version below] Diese Stellungnahme zielt darauf ab, Empfehlungen für akzeptable Rahmenbedingungen eines Genomischen-Neugeborenen-Screening (gNBS)-Programms in Deutschland zu formulieren, darunter Empfehlungen zu Auswahlkriterien für Zielkrankheiten und zum Management eines gNBS-Programms sowie zur gesetzlichen Neuregulierung. Sie ist Ergebnis eines dreijährigen Forschungsprojektes, das an den Universitäten Heidelberg und Mannheim durchgeführt wurde. An dem interdisziplinären Projekt beteiligt waren Forscher:innen aus den Bereichen Kinder- und Jugendmedizin, Humangenetik, Rechtswissenschaft, Medizinische Psychologie und Medizinethik sowie Vertreter:innen von Patient:innen-Organisationen (Kindernetzwerk e.V. und Deutsche Interessengemeinschaft Phenylketonurie und verwandte angeborene (...) Stoffwechselstörungen e.V.). Das Projekt wurde vom Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF; seit 2025 Bundesministerium für Forschung, Technologie und Raumfahrt: BMFTR) gefördert und trägt den Titel NEW_LIVES („Genomic NEWborn screening programs – Legal Implications, Value, Ethics and Society” – „Genomische Neugeborenen-Screening-Programme – Rechtliche Implikationen, Werte, Ethik und Gesellschaft“). Die Stellungnahme beginnt mit einführenden Kapiteln zum Hintergrund des gNBS aus Sicht der verschiedenen Fachbereiche und aus Sicht der Gesellschaft, gefolgt von konkreten Empfehlungen für ein zukünftig mögliches gNBS-Pro- gramm in Deutschland. In der Einleitung (1.) werden erste Ergebnisse bisheriger Forschungsprojekte zum gNBS zusammengefasst und die Zielsetzung und Methode, einschließlich der Rolle von Patient:innen-Vertreter:innen bei der Erarbeitung der Stellungnahme werden beschrieben. In Abschnitt 2 („Medizinischer Hintergrund“) werden Entwicklung, Umfang und Ablauf des derzeitigen Neugeborenen-Screening (NBS)-Programms in Deutschland beschrieben und die Besonderheiten eines gNBS-Programms erläutert. Abschnitt 3 („Perspektive von Patient:innen, Eltern und medizinischem Personal“) fasst die Ergebnisse der sozialempirischen Studien zusammen, die im Rahmen des Projektes NEW_LIVES durchgeführt wurden (Fokusgruppen, bevölkerungs-repräsentative Befragung, querschnittliche Online-Befragung) und vergleicht die Ergebnisse mit anderen, internationalen Studien. Abschnitt 3 enthält außerdem eine gemeinsame Stellungnahme der beiden Patient:innen-Organisationen, die am Projekt NEW_LIVES mitgewirkt haben, zum gNBS. Abschnitt 4 („Genomisches Neugeborenen-Screening aus rechtlicher Sicht“) skizziert den rechtlichen Regulierungsrahmen zum gNBS in Deutschland. Abschnitt 5 („Genomisches Neugeborenen-Screening aus ethischer Sicht“) benennt zentrale ethische Herausforderungen des gNBS und formuliert ethische Orientierungsmaßstäbe für ein zukünftiges gNBS-Programm in Deutschland. Da die Neugeborenen diejenigen sind, die an einem gNBS teilnehmen würden und davon profitieren könnten, stellt deren Kindeswohl den zentralen ethischen Orientierungsmaßstab für die Bewertung dar. Die sich in Abschnitt 6 anschließenden Empfehlungen sind aus Sicht aller an der Erarbeitung dieser Stellungnahme beteiligten Fachdisziplinen und der Patient:innen-Organisationen verfasst Darunter sind einerseits transparente Auswahlkriterien für Zielkrankheiten eines gNBS-Programms (Kriterien 1–11). Andererseits werden Empfehlungen für die Einführung, Qualitätssicherung und Nutzenbewertung eines gNBS-Programms formuliert (Kriterien 12–18). Zudem enthält diese Stellungnahme Empfehlungen zur gesetzlichen Neuregulierung. Eine Publikation der Empfehlungen auf Englisch findet sich in Schnabel-Besson et al.: “A multi-dimensional fra- mework for establishing and managing a genomic newborn screening program” (Arbeitstitel; zum Zeitpunkt des Verfassens dieser Stellungnahme in Vorbereitung; DOI der Preprint-Version: 10.1101/2025.06.17.25329 471). - This position paper has the aim of formulating recommendations for what would be an acceptable framework for a genomic newborn screening (gNBS) programme in Germany, including recommendations for selection criteria for target diseases, and for the management of a gNBS programme, as well as for revision of legislation. It is the result of a research project conducted at the Universities of Heidelberg and Mannheim over the course of three years. This interdisciplinary project brought together researchers from the fields of paediatrics and adolescent medicine, human genetics, law, medical psychology, and medical ethics, as well as representatives of patient organisations (Kindernetzwerk e.V., and Deutsche Interessenge- meinschaft Phenylketonurie und verwandte angeborene Stoffwechselstörungen e.V.). The project was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF; since 2025 Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space: BMFTR) and is called NEW_LIVES (“Genomic NEWborn screening programs – Legal Implications, Value, Ethics and Society”). The position paper begins with introductory chapters on gNBS from the perspective of the different disciplines, and from a societal viewpoint, followed by concrete recommendations for a possible future gNBS programme in Germany. The Introduction (1.) summarises the initial results of previous research projects on gNBS, and describes the objectives, and methodology, including the role of patient representatives, in the development of the position paper. Section 2 (“Medical Background”) describes the development, scope, and process of the current NBS programme in Germany, and explains the specific features of a gNBS programme. Section 3 (“Perspectives of Patients, Parents, and Medical Staff”) summarizes the results of the social-empirical studies conducted as part of the NEW_LIVES project (focus groups, population-representative survey, cross-sectional online survey), and compares the results with other, international studies. Section 3 also contains a joint statement on gNBS by the two patient organisations that participated in the NEW_LIVES project. Section 4 (“Genomic Newborn Screening from a Legal Perspective”) outlines the legal regulatory framework for gNBS in Germany. Section 5 (“Genomic Newborn Screening from an Ethical Perspective”) identifies key ethical challenges of gNBS, and formulates ethical guidelines for a future gNBS programme in Germany. Since newborns are the ones who would participate in, and benefit from gNBS, their welfare represents the central ethical guideline for the evaluation. The recommendations in Section 6 are written from the perspective of all disciplines, and patient organisations involved in the development of this position paper. These recommendations reflect the consensus of the inter-, and transdisciplinary group of authors, and form the core of the position paper. They comprise 18 criteria for a possible future gNBS programme in Germany. These include, on the one hand, transparent selection criteria for target diseases of a gNBS programme (criteria 1–11). On the other hand, recommendations are formulated for the introduction, quality assurance, and benefit assessment of a gNBS programme (criteria 12–18). This position paper also contains recommendations for new legal regulations. An English version of the recommendations, including the 11 criteria for selecting target diseases and the 7 criteria for programme management can be found in Schnabel-Besson E, Dikow N, Alex K et al.: “A multidimensional framework for establishing and managing a genomic newborn screening program” (working title; in preparation at the time of writing this position paper; doi of preprint version: 10.1101/2025.06.17.25329471). (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to explore the contours of the right to vote in a properly functioning representative democracy. I begin by noting that in all the roles voting can play—whether in non-democratic societies or, in democratic societies, in the service of a variety of democracy-independent goals—the right to vote is both an individual and a collective right. I then argue that its primary function in a representative democracy is to facilitate the participation of its members, (...) through the election of their representatives in the society’s legislature(s), in the making of the major political decisions that help to shape the framework in which they all have to live their lives.The right to vote in a properly functioning representative democracy is a complex right, a right that comprises three distinguishable rights.The first of these is the right of all the (adult) members of a society to cast ballots in the regularly recurring elections that determine the composition of a society’s legislature(s). This is the right to a universal franchise.The second is the right to have all the votes that have been cast in legally permissible ways counted and certified accurately.The third is the right to have all accurately tabulated and confirmed votes count towards the election of legislatures that are reasonably representative of all who have voted.Breaches of all three rights can occur in societies that are widely regarded as representative democracies. Thus. breaches of the first right can occur if, for example, ex-felons are excluded from voting lists, or if the right to vote is denied to certain permanent residents in disregard of the fact that they are full participants in the economic and social life of a country. The second right can be breached if, whether because of inefficiency in the structuring of vote tabulation arrangements or—a more sinister possibility—because of politically-motivated attempts to interfere with these arrangements, not all legally cast votes form part of final election tallies. The third right can be breached if not all the votes that have been correctly tallied are allowed to contribute to the election of a legislature that fairly represents the most important of the political preferences and priorities of all voting members of the electorate.While examples can easily be provided of breaches of the first two kinds that continue to occur, I focus in the paper on a sometimes-overlooked breach of the third sort that is generated by a familiar and widely endorsed electoral system. I argue that the first-past-the-post (or “single-member-constituency”) system—henceforth FPTP for short—has structural features that make it inevitable that many members of FPTP electorates don’t have a democratically defensible version of the right to vote.For one thing, the representation in a legislature that voters hope to secure by the votes they cast as members of an electorate can be obtained, under FPTP rules, only by those voters who vote for the winning candidate in the only electoral contest—viz. the contest at local constituency level—in which the system permits them to cast ballots. The many voters in all such contests who vote for any of the losing candidates are consequently deprived of representation in the legislature. Since the right of members of the electorate to participate indirectly in the making of political decisions is facilitated in a properly functioning representative democracy by the election of members of a legislature who reflect to some reasonable degree their major political preferences and priorities, the fact that the FPTP system permits the election to a legislature of only those candidates who win constituency-level electoral contests means that the many voters in all such contests who vote for any of the losing candidates are deprived of representation in the legislature.Moreover, the fact that all the votes cast in these local elections—including the votes cast for losing candidates—contribute to the jurisdiction-wide popular vote does nothing to alter the seat distribution in a legislature, simply because under FPTP the popular vote is allowed to play absolutely no role in determining election outcomes. Voters who support losing candidates in constituency-level electoral contests and who are consequently deprived of representation in the legislature cannot take comfort in the thought that at least their losing votes add to the jurisdiction-wide popular vote for the political parties they favor in the popular vote. Yes; their losing votes in constituency-level electoral contests help to boost the jurisdiction-wide popular vote secured by the political party that sponsored the local candidate they supported. But No; contributing to the jurisdiction-wide popular vote of the political party they favor makes absolutely no difference to the party’s seat-count in the legislature. The jurisdiction-wide popular vote is permitted by FPTP to play no constitutionally recognized role in determining this seat-count.The conclusion to be drawn is that the version of the right to vote that is conferred on the members of a society by the first-past-the-post electoral system is deficient in a way that threatens the democratic credentials of the representative democracies (like Canada, the UK, and the USA) in which this system is established and maintained. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Luís Roberto Barroso, a Brazilian Supreme Court Justice, sustained the exercise of a representative role by the judicial branch (precisely by constitutional courts), as a way to give voice to a majority will not captured by positive legal rules due to the distortions of the institutional mechanisms based on voting (elections and legislative process). This paper aims to investigate whether this claim is compatible with the notion of a constitutional democracy, taking into consideration both (...) the possibility of gauging the empirical will of the majority apart from the institutional mechanisms based on voting and the role of the judicial branch in this kind of society. Finally, it suggests the possibility of acknowledging a representative role to the judiciary based on whatcan be argued to be the interest of the citizens of a constitutional democracy as such. (shrink)

Giovanni Boccaccio's lawyerly adultress Madonna Filippa (Decameron 6.7) invites reflection on his attitudes toward women's bodily autonomy and participation in matters of law. Her character has generally been read as an impossible fiction, representing either a protofeminist fantasy or an ironic embodiment of misogyny. This article reconsiders her in the historical context of a handful of fourteenth- to fifteenth-century women jurists (Bettisia Gozzadini, Pola dei Mansi, Novella and Bettina d'Andrea, Miriam Spira-Luria, et al.) active in legal studia and yeshivas (...) in Bologna, Padova, and Verona. Their historical tradition and iconography join literary representations of women at law (by Valerius Maximus, Boccaccio, and Christine de Pizan) to establish the female jurist as a cultural type. Madonna Filippa thus represents one possible response to a real cultural phenomenon. Whether we agree with the narrator Filostrato's catastrophizing outlook on women's participation in law is another story. (shrink)

Each developed economic system is based on the principle of division of labor and can’t be imagined without the delegation of certain powers to agents. Any economic activity, particularly carried out through legal entity, is not able to function without the party’s right to authorize other persons to negotiate and make contracts on behalf of the principal. Due to the complexity of the economic order it is sometimes difficult to a third party to ascertain whether the agent acts with (...) authority. Therefore legal regulation expands the scope of authority of the representatives beyond the actually granted powers—often the need to check the credentials of the representatives is rejected, when it is obvious from the facts that they have been granted necessary powers. (shrink)

This article explores the claim that representative legislatures should create general legal norms. After distinguishing the requirement that statutes be general from the broader rule‐of‐law idea that law be general, I concentrate on the French constitutional tradition to argue that the plausibility of the claim turns on the elucidation of a set of social norms and understandings about the proper role of representative legislatures mediating between abstract ideals of the common good and local practices. I call these (...) norms grammars. The article then briefly compares the French “Sieyèsian” with the US “Madisonian” grammar of political representation regarding the issue of the generality of statutes and concludes with a plea for an in‐depth comparative investigation into different such grammars. (shrink)

In this article I aim to use the 1948 Russell-Copleston debate to highlight some recent problems I have experienced teaching argument analysis in my philosophy courses. First, I will use argument diagramming to represent the arguments in the debate while reflecting on the use of this approach use to teach argument analysis skills. Then, I will discuss the tools and methods scholars have proposed to represent debates, rather than just individual arguments. Finally, I will argue that there is not, but (...) needs to be, a good way to represent argumentative debates in a way that neither obscures the essential details of the exchange nor becomes too unwieldy to extract a sense of the overall debate. (shrink)

This article discusses the desirability and feasibility of modeling precedents with multiple interpretations within factor-based models of precedential constraint. The main idea is that allowing multiple reasonable interpretations of cases and modeling precedential constraint as a function of what all reasonable interpretations compel may be advantageous. The article explains the potential benefits of extending the models in this way with a focus on incorporating a theory of vertical precedent in U.S. federal appellate courts. It also considers the costs of extending (...) the models in this way, such as the significant increase in the functional size of the case base and the need to provide some kind of ordering on interpretations to select a “best” interpretation. Finally, the article suggests partially incorporating multiple interpretations of dimensions as a realistic starting point for incorporating interpretations generally, and shows how doing so can help address difficulties with dimensions. The conclusion remarks on the use of interpretations to deal with inconsistent precedents. (shrink)

We show that the fundamental legal structure of a well-written financial contract follows a state-transition logic that can be formalized mathematically as a finite-state machine (specifically, a deterministic finite automaton or DFA). The automaton defines the states that a financial relationship can be in, such as “default,” “delinquency,” “performing,” etc., and it defines an “alphabet” of events that can trigger state transitions, such as “payment arrives,” “due date passes,” etc. The core of a contract describes the rules by which (...) different sequences of events trigger particular sequences of state transitions in the relationship between the counterparties. By conceptualizing and representing the legal structure of a contract in this way, we expose it to a range of powerful tools and results from the theory of computation. These allow, for example, automated reasoning to determine whether a contract is internally coherent and whether it is complete relative to a particular event alphabet. We illustrate the process by representing a simple loan agreement as an automaton. (shrink)

Previous research in argumentation has closely examined distortions of the opposition—particularly the straw man—and has recently provided some experimental evidence on their effects on persuasive outcomes. However, comparatively little empirical attention has been given to the inverse practice of faithfully reformulating an opponent’s contribution. The effects of accurate and inaccurate representations on speaker ethos and perceived reasonableness also remain underexplored. This paper addresses these gaps through three pre-registered experimental studies comparing accurate reformulation, misrepresentation, and no reformulation of the opposition. Experiment (...) 1 assesses the impact of these practices on perceived trustworthiness using a six-item, 7-point semantic differential scale. Experiment 2 examines judgments of reasonableness using a scale repeatedly employed in pragma-dialectical effectiveness research. Experiment 3 measures persuasiveness at both the attitudinal and behavioral intention levels. Participants read a series of pre-tested argumentative exchanges between two speakers in a charitable-giving context. Results show that, in the cases examined, misrepresenting the opposition negatively impacted both trustworthiness and reasonableness judgments, addressing concerns that adhering to dialectical standards may diminish rhetorical success. (shrink)

This paper presents a new language for isomorphic representations of legalknowledge in feature structures. The language includes predefinedstructures based on situation theory for common-sense categories, andpredefined structures based on Van Kralingens frame-based conceptualmodelling language for legal rules. It is shown that the flexibility of thefeature-structure formalism can exploited to allow for structure-preservingrepresentations of non-primitive concepts, and to enable various types ofinteraction and cross- reference between language elements. A fragment of theDutch Opium Act is used to illustrate how modelling and (...) reasoning proceed in practice. (shrink)

This chapter and Chapter 11 descend to more institutional issues on how to express the democratic demand for secession. Ideally, a secession claim should be clearly expressed both via representatives and via referendum. In liberal-democratic contexts, a majority of the representatives of the seceding territory ought to push forward and endorse the secessionist political project. Without this boost and endorsement from their representatives, a simple majority of citizens answering in favour of secession in a referendum would be either insufficient or (...) deficient, as this chapter contends. (shrink)

Expert witnesses in the U.S. have begun using AI-generated outputs in their analyses. This paper critically examines such uses in “linguistic” analyses and expert reports submitted to court. We discuss how such practices raise significant ethical, constitutional, and evidentiary concerns and are largely inconsistent with U.S. legal requirements governing expert testimony including admissibility doctrines (e.g., _Daubert_, _Frye_) and statutory frameworks. Using a case study example of a “ChatGPT analysis” in an opposing expert linguist’s report, we identify tensions between judicial (...) expectations of methodological transparency, reliability, and replicability, and the nature and function of many current AI models. Moreover, we discuss how the use of AI often fails to assist triers-of-fact in the context of specific statutory frameworks, such as the Lanham Act. We further highlight a growing tendency for courts and practitioners to conflate AI-generated output with, e.g., corpus linguistics, which risks mischaracterizing AI output as methodologically equivalent and, in doing so, undermines both established linguistic methods and uses of AI in other judicial discursive practices (e.g., legal interpretation, drafting support). As courts increasingly confront AI use, this paper aims to support judicial gatekeeping by offering a linguistically-grounded critique of AI’s role in forensic evidence and expert reasoning, and also examine how AI use in expert evidence reconfigures the semiotics of expertise itself. Specifically, we argue that these practices shift epistemic authority from human experts to AI, reshaping processes of evidentiary meaning-making and altering how expertise is performed, evaluated, and legitimated in the courtroom. (shrink)

In this paper I recapitulate the ideas of Berman and Hafner (1993) regarding the role of teleology in legal argument. I show how these ideas can be used to address some issues arising from more recent work on legal argument, and how this relates to ideas associated with the New Rhetoric of Perelman. I illustrate the points with a discussion of the classic problem of which vehicles should be allowed in parks.

In 1935, when the U.S. Supreme Court’s new building opened and displayed the phrase “Equal Justice Under Law,” racial segregation was commonplace, as were barriers limiting opportunities for men and women of all colors to participate in economic and political life. The justices on the Court and the lawyers appearing before them reflected those facts; almost all were white men. Today, the Supreme Court’s inscription has become its motto, read as if it always referenced an understanding of equality that has (...) become central to the identity and the legitimacy of courts. The judiciary “looks” somewhat different than it did and, in a sense, has become more “representative” of the range of people appearing in courts. Given the role that courts had played in sustaining discrimination, the impression that courts ought to welcome everyone is a major achievement. Yet, to assess the impact of new judicial demographics requires analysis of other major alterations in U.S. courts—the influx of diverse litigants newly entitled to pursue legal claims; the economic barriers facing many claimants; the emergence of judiciaries as agency-like promoters of agendas; and the displacement of public adjudication through the privatization of dispute resolution. Studies of women as judges focus mostly on their rulings, but probing the “difference that difference makes” requires looking beyond judicial opinions. Courts in the United States have developed structural capacities to propose rules and legislation, create education programs, commission research and task forces, and lobby for resources. When women of all colors and men of color became lawyers and judges, they created affinity organizations and pressed courts to research court-based bias and to revise rules of ethics, doctrine, and practice. Those changes are part of the impact of diversification within the legal profession, as is the backlash against affirmative efforts to reform practices. Another difference of the last decades is that new rights have brought into court many claimants with limited means. Participatory participation (“equal justice under law”) remains elusive, while the “justice gap” (shorthand for the lack of sufficient governmental help for under-resourced litigants) is pervasive. Worse yet, in some jurisdictions, courts have served as “revenue centers,” using court-imposed assessments as income. Failure to pay “legal financial obligations” can result in suspension of driver’s licenses, the loss of voting rights, and other sanctions levied disproportionately on people who are poor and of color. Instead of being seen as fonts of fairness, courts are coming to be identified as sites of inequality. In addition, many courts have embraced alternative forms of dispute resolution that make both processes and outcomes less visible to the public. Through doctrine and rules, U.S. courts have shifted their own practices as well as enforced mandates imposed on consumers and employers that push them out of court and out of class or joint actions. In sum, the new faces on the bench ought not to obscure that the project of representation, inclusion, and equality is far from complete. The vivid inequalities in courts are problems for courts because such disparities undermine their ability to be places of justice. (shrink)

The purpose of this abstract is focused on the character of the Count of Almaviva as representative of the transition from the Ancien Régime to the Nouveau Régime. Despite the fact that the opera plot is focused on the adventures of Susanna and Figaro in order to get married, its legal pivot is on the feudal lord who seeks to enforce his status and his rights, first of all his “ius primae noctis” on Susanna, his wife’s lady-in-waiting. He (...) tried to seduce her for all the opera but he fails, proving himself ridiculous and surpassed.From the private law perspective, the Count exploits Figaro’s promise of marriage to Marcellina in the event of the breach of a debt incurred some time before. Despite his conflict of interest because he is the master, the Count tries to mislead the judgement of his subordinate, unsuccessfully, due to the parent–child relationship between Marcellina and Figaro themselves. However, he does not give up and the final double exchange of role keeps him in a ridiculous situation to obtain forgiveness from his wife, the Countess, quite a proto-feminist in this opera.From the public law perspective, the crisis of the figure of the Count of Almaviva clearly represents the decline of aristocracy itself. None of his subjects are afraid of him. For instance, Cherubino escapes the mandatory enrollment in the Count’s regiment by dressing up as a girl. This is not only of scenic value, but it could also represent a crisis of social roles on the eve of the French Revolution.The Marriage of Figaro represents an indispensable inspiration for historical and multidisciplinary reflections to analyze the paradigm shifts which occurred in the late seventeenth century and the legacy they have left on today’s legal culture. (shrink)

This book chapter examines the impact of legal regulations on sustainability as perceived by SME leaders. The impact of laws and regulations is explored within the framework of the entrepreneurial ecosystem at three levels: emotional or affective; cognitive motivational; and conative or behavioural. Through the inclusion of this practical small business perspective, we aim to enrich the discourse on the importance and challenges of regulation in the context of sustainability. This study is part of a larger research on the (...) role of Hungarian SMEs in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. In our mixed-method research we first used focus group interviews to identify the terms and phrases used by SMEs in relation to sustainability. Based on the qualitative results, a questionnaire was designed and administered to a representative sample of Hungarian SMEs. The results show that the legal system, i.e., policy, has a major—and at times controversial—impact on the sustainability of entrepreneurial activity. The policy implication is that sustainability issues should be addressed more comprehensively and in a more holistic, integral way across all domains of the entrepreneurial ecosystem. At the same time, individual characteristics of the entrepreneur, such as gender, position, and decision-making power, as well as characteristics of the enterprise, such as size or ownership structure, influence the assessment of the legislation and the perception and resolution of related challenges which should be taken into consideration. (shrink)

In _De Wilde v. the Netherlands_ (2021), the European Court of Human Rights accepted the Dutch court’s interpretation of the terms _seriousness_ and _cohesion_, representing two of the four criteria that must be satisfied for views to qualify for protection as a religion or belief under Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights. This paper aims to assess the judicial interpretations from two perspectives: linguistic and jurisprudential. First, we determine the meanings of both words by analysing their entries (...) in five representative English dictionaries. Second, the courts’ interpretative approach is evaluated with reference to the existing Strasbourg case law. The analyses show that while the criterion of seriousness was interpreted correctly, the argumentation regarding the second requirement may be disputed from both perspectives considered. On the one hand, the courts’ understanding of _cohesion_ extends beyond the conventional scope of this noun and aligns more closely with the definitions of its near-synonym, and on the other, it remains incompatible with the duty of public authorities to maintain neutrality and impartiality. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 2, February 2020, Page 49-50.

Relationships between physicians and pharmaceutical sales representatives (PSRs) often create conflicts of interest, not least because of the various benefits received by physicians. Many countries attempt to control pharmaceutical industry marketing strategies through legal regulation, and this is true in Poland where efforts are underway to eliminate any practices that might be considered corrupt in medicine. The present research considered Polish medical students’ opinions about domestic laws restricting doctors’ acceptance of expensive gifts from the industry, the idea of compulsory (...) transparency, and the possibility of introducing a Polish Sunshine Law. A qualitative, focus group-based, interview method was used. Data were gathered from nine focus groups involving 92 medical students from three universities located in major Polish cities. The article presents a classification of opposing student views with regard to the consequences of introducing different legal solutions; this should be useful for policy makers deliberating on how to optimally regulate pharmaceutical marketing. The study’s results are discussed in the context of the public bioethical debate in Poland. (shrink)

Introduction New, highly portable MRI (pMRI) technology promises to revolutionize brain research by facilitating field-based studies that can expand research to new settings beyond the traditional MRI suite in a medical center. At this early stage of development, understanding public knowledge and attitudes about pMRI research is crucial. Objective In this article we present the first empirical study of the general public’s willingness to participate in pMRI research, and their perceptions of expected benefits and concerns. Methods & Results We conducted (...) a nationally representative online survey (N = 2,001) administered Aug. 15-31, 2022. We found that respondents were overwhelmingly willing to participate in pMRI research, with no significant differences between five key demographic sub-groups: rural residents, older adults (65+), Hispanics, non-Hispanic Blacks, and those economically disadvantaged. Respondents saw many potential benefits (e.g., follow-up information about the study’s results) and few concerns (e.g., insufficient payment) associated with participating. Conclusion Such high public interest in participating confirms the importance of developing ethical guidance for pMRI research now, before that research rapidly expands. The results speak to the importance of minimizing the therapeutic misconception in pMRI research, as the survey reveals gaps in participant knowledge about the capabilities and limitations of pMRI devices to provide clinically informative scans. Our data showed that a lack of trust in scientists can reduce likelihood of participation, and thus researchers will need to engage participant communities to fully realize the potential of pMRI research to reach remote and historically underrepresented populations. (shrink)

This book develops a general theory of law, inclusive legal positivism, which seeks to remain within the tradition represented by authors such as Austin, Hart, MacCormick, and Raz, while sharing some of the virtues of both classical and modern theories of natural law, as represented by authors such as Aquinas, Fuller, Finnis, and Dworkin. Its central theoretical questions are: Does the existence or content of positive law ever depend on moral considerations? If so, is this fact consistent with (...) class='Hi'>legal positivism? The author shows how inclusive positivism allows one to answer yes to both of these questions. In addition to articulating and defending his own version of legal positivism, which is a refinement and development of the views of H.L.A. Hart as expressed in his classic book The Concept of Law, the author clarifies the terms of current jurisprudential debates about the nature of law. These debates are often clouded by failures to appreciate that different theorists are offering differing kinds of theories and attempting to answer different questions. There is also a failure, principally on the part of Ronald Dworkin, to characterize opposing theories correctly. The clarity of Waluchow's work will help to remove the confusion which has hitherto marred some jurisprudential debate, particularly about Dworkin's work. (shrink)

This paper analyses the logical structure of the balancing of conflicting normative arguments, and asks whether non-monotonic logic is adequate to represent this type of legal or practical reasoning. Norm conflicts are often regarded as a field of application for non-monotonic logics. This paper argues, however, that the balancing of normative arguments consists of an act of judgement, not a logical inference, and that models of deductive as well as of defeasible reasoning do not give an adequate account of (...) its structure. Moreover, it argues that as far as the argumentation consists in logical inferences, deductive logic suffices for reconstructing the argumentation from the internal point of view of someone making normative judgements. (shrink)

While some descriptive and normative theories of legislation account for an extensive role of legal interpretation in legislation, others see its legislative role as marginal. Yet in contemporary constitutional democracies, where legislation is limited and guided by constitutional norms, as well as international and supranational law, legal interpretation must play some role in legislation—even if all or most of legislative activity may not be adequately described and evaluated as legal interpretation. In this chapter, I aim to explore (...) some implications of recognizing the role of legal interpretation in legislation—notably, for the conceptualization and significance of legal expertise in the legislative process, as well as for determining the moral duties of legislative representatives. First, I argue that the role of legal interpretation in legislation calls for institutional reforms in legislatures in order to ensure that legal expertise is adequately channeled into the legislative process, including agenda-setting. Second, I argue that interpreting legal norms through legislation implies specific moral duties for legislative representatives, both in their relations to one another and in their relations vis-à-vis their constituents. I show that giving legal interpretation its due in a descriptive and normative account of legislative activity does not imply an elitist understanding of legislation, and it does not compromise our conception of legislatures as loci of political and moral disagreement and democratic representation. (shrink)

The essay traces the legal, representative, and societal status of migrant Others in the “closed society” of the GDR (German Democratic Republic or East Germany) as an example of how Germany has been profiting from labor migration on both sides of the Wall. It outlines how, from German reunification to the present day, migration has been presented as a sudden and temporary problem that obscures a colonial and racist past and necropolitical present. The essay examines the process of (...) social de-differentiation in the “state-domineered society” of the GDR and how social techniques of othering and ethnicization in the form of laws for foreigners fostered discrimination and racism against the “stranger” (Georg Simmel), especially the guest worker. Looking at the process of a “double transformation” in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent reunification, the essay examines how overlapping processes of othering as the modern equivalent of the term “Orientalism” (Edward Said) have shaped and continue to shape reunified Germany. The process of “catching up with modernization” affects not only former migrants, second-generation descendants, refugees, and racialized citizens, but also the social group of East Germans who stood outside a Western-coded paradigm of normalcy. It asks to what extent the Federal Republic of Germany aimed at the integration of majority white East Germans during the reunification process to the detriment of migrant Others and how reunified Germany still fosters integration for the benefit of national economic interests and at the cost of migrant Others in Germany today. The essay reflects on the complicated transition from the notion of an ethnically homogeneous German nation, postulated since 1871 and long prevalent in terms of the principle of descent, to the contested self-image of reunified Germany as a country of immigration and its transformation into a post-migration society. (shrink)

This short piece discusses Hélène Landemore’s proposal of an ‘open democracy’, as outlined in her recent book _Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century_. Acknowledging the value of Landemore’s radical and ambitious proposals, I draw attention to a number of shortcomings and blind spots that have to do with how the case for an ‘open democracy’ is made: through an unduly brief and dismissive treatment of political parties; a methodological insensitivity to empirical variations of democratic performance and citizens’ (...) evaluations of the latter; a failure to distinguish between higher and ordinary law-making in the discussion of the central Icelandic case; and, finally, a surprising concession that realising an open democracy is all but infeasible in established constitutional democracies. If open democracy is to be an attractive ideal, these issues must arguably be addressed. (shrink)

Automated legal reasoning and its application in smart contracts and automated decisions are increasingly attracting interest. In this context, ethical and legal concerns make it necessary for automated reasoners to justify in human-understandable terms the advice given. Logic Programming, specially Answer Set Programming, has a rich semantics and has been used to very concisely express complex knowledge. However, modelling discretionality to act and other vague concepts such as ambiguity cannot be expressed in top-down execution models based on Prolog, (...) and in bottom-up execution models based on ASP the justifications are incomplete and/or not scalable. We propose to use s(CASP), a top-down execution model for predicate ASP, to model vague concepts following a set of patterns. We have implemented a framework, called s(LAW), to model, reason, and justify the applicable legislation and validate it by translating (and benchmarking) a representative use case, the criteria for the admission of students in the “Comunidad de Madrid”. (shrink)

Ontologies represent the standard way to model the knowledge about specific domains. This holds also for the legal domain where several ontologies have been put forward to model specific kinds of legal knowledge. Both for standard users and for law scholars, it is often difficult to have an overall view on the existing alternatives, their main features and their interlinking with the other ontologies. To answer this need, in this paper, we address an analysis of the state-of-the-art in (...) legal ontologies and we characterise them along with some distinctive features. This paper aims to guide generic users and law experts in selecting the legal ontology that better fits their needs and in understanding its specificity so that proper extensions to the selected model could be investigated. (shrink)

Legal tech is growing, and its growth provokes anxieties about the future of the legal profession as such. In this article, we examine the impact of legal tech on the central role of lawyers at law firms in crafting an imagined ‘right legal answer’ by drawing on Duncan Kennedy’s suggestion that a claim to the rightness of one’s legal propositions is a central characteristic of the legal profession. We first ask how changes in the (...) organisation of legal services affect the ability of lawyers at law firms to produce that ‘right legal answer’. While legal tech only exacerbates already ongoing processes of eradication of routine tasks, we find that it continues to mask the role of ideology in arriving at a right legal answer under a new layer of technological projection. Second, we ask how lawyers’ ability to produce ‘the right legal answer’ is affected by, first, expert systems and, second, a legal tech application named Bryter, representing a no-code system. We find that expert systems do not permit to uphold the unity of the lawyer required for Kennedy’s model of the right legal answer, but that no-code systems as Bryter do so. No-code systems can be reduced to a slogan: Have the lawyer, but evict her ideological temptations more efficiently than before! (shrink)

Lawyers have long asserted that they are not morally responsible for the clients and causes they represent. Such irresponsibility is predicated on a political philosophy of liberal pluralism, which maintains that because all human preferences are legitimate, the only way to resolve differences is through agreed processes – of which the legal system is preeminent. We have reached a conjuncture, however, where this posture is no longer acceptable. Climate change, caused by human agency, threatens all life on earth. Autocrats (...) in many countries seek to destroy democracy. And growing inequalities of wealth and income render representative democracy an empty charade. Because lawyers are centrally implicated in each of these existential threats, they must confront their own moral responsibility. (shrink)

In the article the tribute is paid to historical experience of formation of the institutes of representative democracy in Ukraine, the utmost meaning of which for current state-building process, is also elucidated. There is a profound analysis of the Constitution of the Ukrainian Democratic Republic (1918) and other normative-legal acts (1917-1920), that constitutes a status and peculiarities of the activity of representative institutes. Keywords: democracy, Constitution of the UNR, state-building process, political institutions.

This article claims that legal time has excluded and submerged an important sense of time inside structured time. Structured time has two forms. Each form of structured time identifies a beginning to a legal order (droit, Recht) as a whole. The one form has focussed upon a critical date. The critical date is exemplified by a basic text, such as the Constitution, or the judicially identified date of settlement, sovereignty or territorial control of a territory by the state. (...) The second form of structured time has begun with the judicial recognition of a value such as the rule of law, the protection of minorities, equal treatment, or due process of law. With the two forms of structured time, jurists have proceeded to identify a binding law. Such a law has been considered a rule, principle, doctrine or other intelligible standard. Once structured legal time has thus begun, events of legal relevance have been represented by jurists in a distinct phase or period of time. Each such a distinct period is parsed through reference to its named, or labelled, starting point and the latter, in turn and ultimately, with reference to the beginning of the very constitutional order as a whole. Legal justification and the conceptual structures of justification are presumed to follow suit. The article argues, however, that another sense of time, excluded and submerged inside structured time, is experienced. An experienced event, manifested as a discrete incident in experiential time, opens to a condition of the possibility of the existence of law. (shrink)

ABSTRACTPolitical rule depends upon public discourse as it requires negotiation and compromise of conflicting interests. Public discourse includes activities that can be described as cause lawyering, lobbying, and rule entrepreneurship. The rule of law supports public discourse through, inter alia, the right to petition. The right to petition requires identification of those engaged in public discourse through petition. This requirement reflects a principle of general application. Solicitors owe an ethical duty to support the rule of law, including the right to (...) petition. Lawyers without a specific duty to uphold the rule of law have ethical duties to maintain the reputation of the legal system and their legal profession. Lawyers, including solicitors, are frequent contributors to public discourse. Lawyers sometimes resist identifying the clients or client groups they represent in public discourse on the ground of the need to protect client confidentiality. This resistance is not ethically well reasoned, a... (shrink)

This book represents a serious and philosophically sophisticated guide to modern American legal theory, demonstrating that legal positivism has been a misunderstood and underappreciated perspective through most of twentieth-century American legal thought. Anthony Sebok traces the roots of positivism through the first half of the twentieth century, and rejects the view that one must adopt some version of natural law theory in order to recognize moral principles in the law. On the contrary, once one corrects for the (...) mistakes of formalism and postwar legal process, one is left with a theory of legal positivism that takes moral principles seriously while avoiding the pitfalls of natural law. The broad scope of this book ensures that it will be read by philosophers of law, historians of law, historians of American intellectual life, and those in political science concerned with public law and administration. (shrink)

There is a long-standing debate about whether the costs associated with the potential misuse of securities class action (SCA) litigation outweigh its benefits in strengthening investor protection. We address this debate by examining the market reaction to the ruling in China’s first SCA-style Special Securities Representative Action (SSRA), filed against Kangmei Pharmaceutical. We find that investors react positively to the ruling, suggesting that the adoption of SCA litigation is perceived as value-enhancing. Extending ethical decision-making theory, we show that (...) class='Hi'>legal enforcement increases the perceived seriousness of consequences and thereby reshapes both organizational reporting behavior and individual director responses. Specifically, a difference-in-differences analysis reveals that firms with greater ex ante litigation risk improve their financial reporting quality and reduce the incidence of accounting violations and restatements following the ruling. We further show that independent directors are more likely to depart from firms with higher agency conflicts, indicating that individual responses to enforcement depend on the governance environment in which directors serve. Overall, our evidence highlights the effectiveness and value implications of adopting and enforcing SCA litigation in China and provides important conceptual and policy insights for emerging markets with civil law systems and relatively underdeveloped institutions. (shrink)

Sentence boundary detection (SBD) represents an important first step in natural language processing since accurately identifying sentence boundaries significantly impacts downstream applications. Nevertheless, detecting sentence boundaries within legal texts poses a unique and challenging problem due to their distinct structural and linguistic features. Our approach utilizes deep learning models to leverage delimiter and surrounding context information as input, enabling precise detection of sentence boundaries in English legal texts. We evaluate various deep learning models, including domain-specific transformer models like (...) LegalBERT and CaseLawBERT. To assess the efficacy of our deep learning models, we compare them with a state-of-the-art domain-specific statistical conditional random field (CRF) model. After considering model size, F1-score, and inference time, we identify the Convolutional Neural Network Model (CNN) as the top-performing deep learning model. To further enhance performance, we integrate the features of the CNN model into the subsequent CRF model, creating a hybrid architecture that combines the strengths of both models. Our experiments demonstrate that the hybrid model outperforms the baseline model, achieving a 4% improvement in the F1-score. Additional experiments showcase the superiority of the hybrid model over SBD open-source libraries when confronted with an out-of-domain test set. These findings underscore the importance of efficient SBD in legal texts and emphasize the advantages of employing deep learning models and hybrid architectures to achieve optimal performance. (shrink)

This article builds on the regime type comparison conducted recently by Dimitri Landa and Ryan Pevnick and presents a well-designed semi-parliamentarian democratic meritocracy as a theoretically plausible alterative to representative democracy. It advances two separate but interrelated claims. One is that attractive consequences which Landa and Pevnick have associated with a well-designed representative democracy can be equally matched by a well-designed semi-parliamentarian democratic meritocracy. The other is that their insights about the compatibility between political meritocracy and egalitarian values (...) can be further developed to address existing criticisms of democratic meritocracy in Confucian political theory and strengthen its normative justification. By making those two claims, the article contributes to a convergence of interests between Western democratic theory and Confucian political theory over the reconciliation of democracy with meritorious governance. (shrink)