Download or read book Legal History and the Rule of Law in Timor Leste written by and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Timor Leste written by William Binchy and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Timor-Leste has had a troubled history and faces an uncertain future. Having experienced colonization for centuries followed by the Indonesian occupation, with all its abuses of human rights, Timor-Leste emerged as an independent state, based on the rule of law and on respect for human rights. The last few years have shown that no society is simple and that the complex influences of the past continue to shape political, social, and cultural realities. This book examines the contemporary challenges for justice and human rights in the shadow of the past. It approaches the task from a broad interdisciplinary perspective, conscious of the need to integrate insights not only of scholars immersed in human rights, international criminal justice, and customary law, but of others whose backgrounds are in international relations, history, anthropology, demography, sociology, geography, and ecology.
Download or read book Customary Justice and the Rule of Law in War torn Societies written by Deborah Isser and published by US Institute of Peace Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The major peacekeeping and stability operations of the last ten years have mostly taken place in countries that have pervasive customary justice systems, which pose significant challenges and opportunities for efforts to reestablish the rule of law. These systems are the primary, if not sole, means of dispute resolution for the majority of the population, but post-conflict practitioners and policymakers often focus primarily on constructing formal justice institutions in the Western image, as opposed to engaging existing traditional mechanisms. This book offers insight into how the rule of law community might make the leap beyond rhetorical recognition of customary justice toward a practical approach that incorporates the realities of its role in justice strategies."Customary Justice and the Rule of Law in War-Torn Societies" presents seven in-depth case studies that take a broad interdisciplinary approach to the study of the justice system. Moving beyond the narrow lens of legal analysis, the cases Mozambique, Guatemala, East Timor, Afghanistan, Liberia, Iraq, Sudan examine the larger historical, political, and social factors that shape the character and role of customary justice systems and their place in the overall justice sector. Written by resident experts, the case studies provide advice to rule of law practitioners on how to engage with customary law and suggest concrete ways policymakers can bridge the divide between formal and customary systems in both the short and long terms. Instead of focusing exclusively on ideal legal forms of regulation and integration, this study suggests a holistic and flexible palette of reform options that offers realistic improvements in light of social realities and capacity limitations. The volume highlights how customary justice systems contribute to, or detract from, stability in the immediate post-conflict period and offers an analytical framework for assessing customary justice systems that can be applied in any country. "
Download or read book Handbook on the Rule of Law written by Christopher May and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2018-08-31 with total page 553 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The discussion of the norm of the rule of law has broken out of the confines of jurisprudence and is of growing interest to many non-legal researchers. A range of issues are explored in this volume that will help non-specialists with an interest in the rule of law develop a nuanced understanding of its character and political implications. It is explicitly aimed at those who know the rule of law is important and while having little legal background, would like to know more about the norm.
Download or read book Laying Down the Law written by R. W. Kostal and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the John Phillip Reed Book Award, American Society for Legal History A legal historian opens a window on the monumental postwar effort to remake fascist Germany and Japan into liberal rule-of-law nations, shedding new light on the limits of America’s ability to impose democracy on defeated countries. Following victory in WWII, American leaders devised an extraordinarily bold policy for the occupations of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan: to achieve their permanent demilitarization by compelled democratization. A quintessentially American feature of this policy was the replacement of fascist legal orders with liberal rule-of-law regimes. In his comparative investigation of these epic reform projects, noted legal historian R. W. Kostal shows that Americans found it easier to initiate the reconstruction of foreign legal orders than to complete the process. While American agencies made significant inroads in the elimination of fascist public law in Germany and Japan, they were markedly less successful in generating allegiance to liberal legal ideas and institutions. Drawing on rich archival sources, Kostal probes how legal-reconstructive successes were impeded by German and Japanese resistance on one side, and by the glaring deficiencies of American theory, planning, and administration on the other. Kostal argues that the manifest failings of America’s own rule-of-law democracy weakened US credibility and resolve in bringing liberal democracy to occupied Germany and Japan. In Laying Down the Law, Kostal tells a dramatic story of the United States as an ambiguous force for moral authority in the Cold War international system, making a major contribution to American and global history of the rule of law.
Download or read book Beyond Common Knowledge written by Erik Gilbert Jensen and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An intensive global search is on for the "rule of law," the holy grail of good governance, which has led to a dramatic increase in judicial reform activities in developing countries. Very little attention, however, has been paid to the widening gap between theory and practice, or to the ongoing disconnect between stated project goals and actual funded activities. Beyond Common Knowledge examines the standard methods of legal and judicial reform. Taking stock of international experience in legal and judicial reform in Latin America, Europe, India, and China, this volume answers key questions in the judicial reform debate: What are the common assumptions about the role of the courts in improving economic growth and democratic politics? Do we expect too much from the formal legal system? Is investing in judicial reform projects a good strategy for getting at the problems of governance that beset many developing countries? If not, what are we missing?
Download or read book The Authority of the Court and the Peril of Politics written by Stephen Breyer and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sitting justice reflects upon the authority of the Supreme CourtÑhow that authority was gained and how measures to restructure the Court could undermine both the Court and the constitutional system of checks and balances that depends on it. A growing chorus of officials and commentators argues that the Supreme Court has become too political. On this view the confirmation process is just an exercise in partisan agenda-setting, and the jurists are no more than Òpoliticians in robesÓÑtheir ostensibly neutral judicial philosophies mere camouflage for conservative or liberal convictions. Stephen Breyer, drawing upon his experience as a Supreme Court justice, sounds a cautionary note. Mindful of the CourtÕs history, he suggests that the judiciaryÕs hard-won authority could be marred by reforms premised on the assumption of ideological bias. Having, as Hamilton observed, Òno influence over either the sword or the purse,Ó the Court earned its authority by making decisions that have, over time, increased the publicÕs trust. If public trust is now in decline, one part of the solution is to promote better understandings of how the judiciary actually works: how judges adhere to their oaths and how they try to avoid considerations of politics and popularity. Breyer warns that political intervention could itself further erode public trust. Without the publicÕs trust, the Court would no longer be able to act as a check on the other branches of government or as a guarantor of the rule of law, risking serious harm to our constitutional system.
Download or read book A Short History of European Law written by Tamar Herzog and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-08 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tamar Herzog offers a road map to European law across 2,500 years that reveals underlying patterns and unexpected connections. By showing what European law was, where its iterations were found, who made and implemented it, and what the results were, she ties legal norms to their historical circumstances and reveals the law’s fragile malleability.
Download or read book A Citizen s Guide to the Rule of Law written by Adis Nicolaidis, Kalypso Merdzanovic and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In our daily lives, the rule of law matters more than anything and yet remains an invisible presence. We trust in the rule of law to protect us from governmental overreach, mafia godfathers, or the will of the majority. We take the rule of law for granted, often failing to recognize its demise—until it is too late. For under attack it is, not only in the growing number of authoritarian countries around the world but in Europe, too. As a citizen’s guide, this book explains in plain language what the rule of law is, why it matters, and why we have to defend it. The starting point is to ask why EU efforts to promote the rule of law in candidate countries have succeeded or failed, and what this tells us about what is happening inside the EU. The authors move on to suggest ways of strengthening the rule of law in Europe and beyond. This book is a call to action in defense of the most precious human invention of all time.
Download or read book Natural Law in Court written by R. H. Helmholz and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-08 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The theory of natural law grounds human laws in the universal truths of God’s creation. Until very recently, lawyers in the Western tradition studied natural law as part of their training, and the task of the judicial system was to put its tenets into concrete form, building an edifice of positive law on natural law’s foundations. Although much has been written about natural law in theory, surprisingly little has been said about how it has shaped legal practice. Natural Law in Court asks how lawyers and judges made and interpreted natural law arguments in England, Europe, and the United States, from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the American Civil War. R. H. Helmholz sees a remarkable consistency in how English, Continental, and early American jurisprudence understood and applied natural law in cases ranging from family law and inheritance to criminal and commercial law. Despite differences in their judicial systems, natural law was treated across the board as the source of positive law, not its rival. The idea that no person should be condemned without a day in court, or that penalties should be proportional to the crime committed, or that self-preservation confers the right to protect oneself against attacks are valuable legal rules that originate in natural law. From a historical perspective, Helmholz concludes, natural law has advanced the cause of justice.
Download or read book A New Era written by Sue Ingram and published by ANU Press. This book was released on 2015-09-17 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Timor-Leste has made impressive progress since its historic achievement of independence in 2002. From the instability that blighted its early years, the fledgling democratic country has achieved strong economic growth and a gradual reinstatement of essential social services. A decade on in 2012, Presidential and Parliamentary elections produced smooth political transitions and the extended UN peacekeeping presence in the country came to an end. But significant challenges remain. This book, a product of the inaugural Timor-Leste Update held at The Australian National University in 2013 to mark the end of Timor-Leste’s first decade as a new nation, brings together a vibrant collection of papers from leading and emerging scholars and policy analysts. Collectively, the chapters provide a set of critical reflections on recent political, economic and social developments in Timor-Leste. The volume also looks to the future, highlighting a range of transitions, prospects and undoubted challenges facing the nation over the next 5–10 years. Key themes that inform the collection include nation-building in the shadow of history, trends in economic development, stability and social cohesion, and citizenship, democracy and social inclusion. The book is an indispensable guide to contemporary Timor-Leste.
Download or read book Legal Orientalism written by Teemu Ruskola and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-03 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the Cold War ended, China has become a global symbol of disregard for human rights, while the United States has positioned itself as the world’s chief exporter of the rule of law. How did lawlessness become an axiom about Chineseness rather than a fact needing to be verified empirically, and how did the United States assume the mantle of law’s universal appeal? In a series of wide-ranging inquiries, Teemu Ruskola investigates the history of “legal Orientalism”: a set of globally circulating narratives about what law is and who has it. For example, why is China said not to have a history of corporate law, as a way of explaining its “failure” to develop capitalism on its own? Ruskola shows how a European tradition of philosophical prejudices about Chinese law developed into a distinctively American ideology of empire, influential to this day. The first Sino-U.S. treaty in 1844 authorized the extraterritorial application of American law in a putatively lawless China. A kind of legal imperialism, this practice long predated U.S. territorial colonialism after the Spanish-American War in 1898, and found its fullest expression in an American district court’s jurisdiction over the “District of China.” With urgent contemporary implications, legal Orientalism lives on in the enduring damage wrought on the U.S. Constitution by late nineteenth-century anti-Chinese immigration laws, and in the self-Orientalizing reforms of Chinese law today. In the global politics of trade and human rights, legal Orientalism continues to shape modern subjectivities, institutions, and geopolitics in powerful and unacknowledged ways.
Download or read book A Common Law for the Age of Statutes written by Guido Calabresi and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dominance of legislatures and statutory law has put an impossible burden on the courts. Guido Calabresi thinks it is time for this country seriously to consider returning to a traditional American judicial–legislative balance in which courts would enlarge the common law and would also decide when a rule of law has seen its day and should be revised.
Download or read book Promoting the Rule of Law in Post Conflict States written by Laura Grenfell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-11 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Laura Grenfell critically evaluates how the rule of law is contextualized and promoted in states where customary law is prevalent.
Download or read book Stateness and Democracy in East Asia written by Aurel Croissant and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-21 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comparative analysis of case studies across East Asia provides new insights into the relationship between state building, stateness, and democracy.
Download or read book Judging Under Uncertainty written by Adrian Vermeule and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Adrian Vermeule shows that any approach to legal interpretation rests on institutional and empirical premises about the capacities of judges and the systemic effects of their rulings. He argues that legal interpretation is above all an exercise in decisionmaking under severe empirical uncertainty.
Download or read book United Nations Justice written by Calin Trenkov-Wermuth and published by UN. This book was released on 2010 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "At the end of the 20th century, and at the dawn of the 21st, the United Nations was tasked with the administration of justice in territories placed under its executive authority, an undertaking for which there was no established precedent or doctrine. Examining the UN's legal and judicial reform efforts in Kosovo and East Timor, this volume argues that rather than helping to establish a sustainable legal system, the UN's approach detracted from it, as it confused ends with means."--Publisher's description.
