Textual canons of legal rules interpretation in the American law

Author(s):  
Eleonora Viktorova
Keyword(s):  
2020 ◽  
pp. 527-550
Author(s):  
Kristina Daugirdas

This chapter explores the promotion of the rule of law. In drafting and publishing Restatements of Foreign Relations Law, both the American Law Institute and the reporters have understood the projects as contributing to the rule of law at the international level, at the domestic level, or both. There are at least three distinct ways that these Restatements might promote the rule of law. First, they might do so by clarifying the content of the law. Second, the Restatements might contribute to the development of new legal rules, specifically to the evolution and consolidation of customary international law. Finally, the Restatements might promote the rule of law by promoting compliance with the law. Ultimately, the Third and Fourth Restatements have taken quite different approaches to promoting the rule of law. To some extent these different approaches are a consequence of changes in the legal landscape over the past three decades. They also reflect different choices that the reporters and the American Law Institute have made about how to carry out the project of restating foreign relations law.


2007 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
David A. Skeel

Jesus' Legal Theory—A Rabbinic Reading opens with a startling claim. The increasing number of legal scholars who have begun exploring the relationship between Christianity and American law in the past several years have neglected to consider the insights of Jesus himself. “[N]otably absent from this literature,” Professor Saiman writes, “is any extensive examination of Jesus, and his views about jurisprudence and legal theory. Despite the overall diversity of his writings, there is little discussion about what Jesus thought about law, lawyers, legal rules and the legal order.” What, the article asks, does Jesus' own legal theory look like?


1997 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Edward White

In most studies of the early twentieth-century emergence of a modern conception of law in America, the formation of the American Law Institute in 1923 is not highlighted. One might point to academic literature advocating a “sociological” approach to judicial decision making, or a behavioralist approach to the work of judges, or the reorganization of law school casebooks to include “functional” legal categories or social science materials. One might unpack the work of an early twentieth-century lawyer, or even a judge, and find a jurisprudential perspective that could be labeled modernist. Finally, one might note the appearance of litigation strategies—encapsulated in the term “Brandeis brief”—designed to incorporate into case decisions arguments that legal rules should reflect their social context. But one would not associate the arrival of modernist jurisprudence in America with the early history of an organization of elite lawyers and judges whose stated purpose was to commission “restatements” of black-letter common law rules.


Author(s):  
Martin Weiser

The position of law in North Korean politics and society has been a long concern of scholars as well as politicians and activists. Some argue it would be more important to understand the extra-legal rules that run North Korea like the Ten Principles on the leadership cult as they supersede any formal laws or the constitution.1 But the actual legal developments in North Korea, which eventually also mediate those leading principles and might even limit their reach, has so far been insufficiently explored. It is easy to point to North Korean secrecy as a main reason for this lacuna. But the numerous available materials and references on North Korean legislation available today have, however, not been fully explored yet, which has severely impeded progress in the field. Even publications officially released by North Korea to foreigners offer surprisingly detailed information on legal changes and the evolution of the law-making institutions. This larger picture of legal developments already draws a more detailed picture of the institutional developments in North Korean law and the broad policy fields that had been regulated from early on in contrast to the often-assumed absence of legislation in important fields like copyright, civil law or investment. It also shows that different to a monolithic system, various law-making institutions exist and fulfil discernably different legal responsibilities. Next to this limitation in content, scholars in the field currently also have not used all approaches legal developments in the North Korea could be analysed and interpreted with. Going beyond the reading of legal texts or speculating about known titles of still unavailable legislation, quantitative approaches can be applied ranging from the simple counting of laws to more sophisticated analysis of legislative numbering often provided with legislation. Understanding the various institutions as flexible in their roles and hence adoptable to shifts in leadership and policy agendas can also provide a more realistic picture of legal practices in North Korea.


2006 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 172-174
Author(s):  
George L Gretton
Keyword(s):  

2005 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-197
Author(s):  
Catherine Wessinger

This article provides an initial report on oral histories being collected from three surviving Branch Davidians: Bonnie Haldeman, the mother of David Koresh, Clive Doyle, and Sheila Martin. Their accounts are being made into autobiographies. Interviews with a fourth survivor, Catherine Matteson, are being prepared for deposit in an archive and inform the material gathered from Bonnie Haldeman, Clive Doyle, and Sheila Martin. Oral histories provided by these survivors humanize the Branch Davidians, who were dehumanized and erased in 1993 by the application of the pejorative ‘cult’ stereotype by the media and American law enforcement agents. These Branch Davidian accounts provide alternate narratives of what happened in 1993 at Mount Carmel Center outside Waco, Texas, to those provided by American federal agents, and flesh out the human dimensions of the community and the tragedy. Branch Davidians are differentiated from many other people primarily by their strong commitment to doing God's will as they understand it from the Bible. Otherwise they are ordinary, intelligent people with the same emotions, loves, and foibles as others.


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