The Long Arc of Legality

The Long Arc of Legality breaks the current deadlock in philosophy of law between legal positivism and natural law by showing that any understanding of law as a matter of authority must account for the interaction of enacted law with fundamental principles of legality. This interaction conditions law's content so that officials have the moral resources to answer the legal subject's question, 'But, how can that be law for me?' David Dyzenhaus brings Thomas Hobbes and Hans Kelsen into a dialogue with H. L. A. Hart, showing that philosophy of law must work with the idea of legitimate authority and its basis in the social contract. He argues that the legality of international law and constitutional law are integral to the main tasks of philosophy of law, and that legal theory must attend both to the politics of legal space and to the way in which law provides us with a 'public conscience'.

Micronations and the Search for Sovereignty

Political disagreement is a fact of life. Such conflict can prompt people to stand for public office and seek to realise political change. Others take a different route; they start their own country. Micronations and the Search for Sovereignty is the first comprehensive examination of the phenomenon of people purporting to secede and create their own country. It analyses why micronations are not states for the purposes of international law, considers the factors that motivate individuals to separate and found their own nation, examines the legal justifications that they offer and explores the responses of recognised sovereign states. In doing so, this book develops a rich body of material through which to reflect on conventional understandings of statehood, sovereignty and legitimate authority. Authored in a lively and accessible style, Micronations and the Search for Sovereignty will be valuable reading for scholars and general audiences.

Walks of Shame

This chapter examines the cultural trope of the perp walk and the grounded practices involved with their construction. While perp walks are often presented as spontaneous encounters between journalists and a defendant, they are more often produced; the result of interpersonal and institutional negotiations between news organizations and law enforcement. The images from these orchestrations visually frame individuals as guilty, and those who have experienced the ritual report it to be dehumanizing. This research expands on the concept of embodied gatekeeping by detailing the way grounded practice shapes narratives that support and perpetuate faith in the criminal justice system’s legitimate authority. The role of police and prosecutors in orchestrating perp walks is rarely, if ever, acknowledged or covered in journalism. The production of these cultural tropes signifies an important dimension of the way embodied gatekeeping can link the goals of visual journalists and criminal justice officials.

Kant and the Problem of Unequal Enforcement of Law

According to Kant’s assurance argument, I am not bound in the state of nature to restrain myself from violating your rights, for I cannot be confident that you will similarly restrain yourself when it comes to my rights. Our status as equals requires that, if I am to be bound to respect your rights, I must have assurance that you will similarly respect mine, and this assurance is something that can only be provided by some entity whose coercive power over us is not only clearly dominant over us both but also directed at us equally. I argue that Kant’s assurance argument provides the basis for an important challenge to the American legal system’s claim to legitimate authority. This is, in one sense, a surprising result, since Kant is infamous for holding a particularly undemanding conception of legitimacy. I use the example of wage and hour laws: though the law define a worker’s wage rights, the legal system fails to enforce them against employers, thus leaving the worker without the assurance of the security of her rights that, on Kant’s assurance argument, she is entitled as a free and equal citizen.

Regulatory Coherence

Part II comprises two chapters, Chapter Three and Chapter Four. These chapters together investigate the decisions and advisory opinions of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) and United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) Annex VII tribunals, as well as other Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) cases. The courts and tribunals studied in these chapters make use of a broad range of interpretive methodologies in identifying emerging global regulatory standards, including reliance on the inbuilt logic of the regulatory schemes they are applying. The standards articulated make relatively minimal demands on domestic legal systems compared with more demanding standards that could have been developed. In this respect the standards appear to enhance traditional procedural justifications for international law’s claim to legitimate authority. Chapter Three focuses on tests for ‘regulatory coherence’.

Regulatory Standards, Legitimate Authority and the Adjudicatory Role

Part V contains two chapters, Chapter Nine and Chapter Ten. These chapters return to the conceptual questions raised by the emergence of global regulatory standards in international courts and tribunals. Chapter Nine evaluates overall how the standards preserve, enhance or undermine international law’s claim to legitimate authority. Broadly, the standards appear to strengthen traditional procedural justifications of authority. However, substantively they contribute only partially to an ideal balancing of international interests and do not promise the co-ordination between domestic and international legal orders needed for international law better to serve its subjects by better balancing competing global interests. More is not to be expected, though. International courts and tribunals remain formally and socially constrained; inter alia the parties’ pleadings are often influential. Greater international political involvement in the development of global regulatory standards would be appropriate, especially in relation to the possible future adoption of regulatory coherence tests that might require proportionality in regulatory action.

The Right to Wage Private Wars of Subsistence

Some philosophers have recently argued for the revisionist just war doctrine that individuals can have the right to initiate war in defense of their human rights when their government fails in its duty to protect them. It was a central tenet of early modern just war theory, too, that when judicial recourse is not available, individuals are entitled to enforce their basic rights by force of war. How should we conceptualize such remedial rights to secure basic rights by armed force? And where to fit such rights within ethical theories of war? This chapter explores these questions by critically contrasting two ways to ground individual rights to wage so-called “private subsistence wars”: via “modern” duties of global justice and via “old” rights of necessity. I argue that the right-of-necessity model—for better or worse—can sidestep problems of indeterminate and underdetermined moral liability by grounding resistance rights in enforceable rights (of subsistence) rather than in enforceable duties (of global justice). My analysis thus charts normative implications of dispensing with the legitimate authority condition by analyzing what it means for rights and duties to be enforceable.

Due Regard and Due Diligence

Chapter Four examines the practice in the same international courts as Chapter Three, this time focusing on ‘due regard’ and ‘due diligence’. These emerging regulatory standards require that States have due regard for one another’s rights and interests, and that States exercise due diligence in the control of activity that may cause transboundary harm. As in Chapter Three, the standards seen in these cases are often accommodating of domestic authority. Due diligence, particularly, significantly accommodates domestic authority. International legal obligations for States to control private conduct and prevent transboundary harm are understood only as obligations of conduct or limited due diligence obligations. This tends to leave international law less equipped to mandate the action from States that will better fulfil States’ combined substantive needs. The emerging global regulatory standards thus appear to do too little to enhance traditional substantive justifications for international law’s claim to legitimate authority.

Introducing Regulatory Standards

The three global regulatory standards seen in the disputes studied in this book comprise: a regulatory coherence standard calling for certain relationships between regulatory measures and their purposes, a standard requiring that a regulating State has demonstrated due regard for the interests of other States, and a standard requiring the exercise of due diligence in the exercise of States’ obligations to prevent transboundary harm. These three core regulatory standards consistently characterise the environmental and health disputes in this book, and they appear to be gaining status as global regulatory standards for the future. The appearance of regulatory standards is best understood as an aspect of the functioning of the plural world legal order rather than as a constitutionalisation of this order in a stronger sense. Theories of legitimate authority in plural legal orders cast valuable light on the legitimacy of the emerging standards-enriched international law.

Proportionality as procedure: Strengthening the legitimate authority of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) has a new mechanism to receive individual complaints and issue views, which makes the question of how the Committee should interpret the broad articles of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights more pressing than ever. Most commentators on the legitimacy of the CESCR’s interpretation have argued that interpreters should make better use of Articles 31–33 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT) in order to improve the legitimacy of their findings. In this article, we argue conversely that the individual communication mechanism should be evaluated and reformed in terms of legitimate authority. In the context of the Committee’s process of interpretation, we contend that proportionality is better suited than the various interpretive options of the VCLT to offer a consistent procedure that is able to generate legitimacy by attenuating the tension between personal and collective autonomy.