Legal measures on vaccination against smallpox in the principality of Serbia in the 1830s–1840s

The paper addresses the legal measures regarding vaccination against smallpox in the Principality of Serbia in the 1830s–1840s. The main focus is on two normative acts – Rules for the inoculation of pox of 1839 and a Supplement to these Rules of 1842. Relying on archive material, the paper strives to show both the normative content of these acts (including a comparison with the Austrian regulations of 1836), as well as the circumstances in which they were passed and their application in practice. Particular attention is paid to the main obstacles to effective vaccination – distrust and fear of the procedure among the general population and insufficient available medical staff – and steps that were taken to overcome these difficulties.

Does Law Matter?

Implicit in almost all of legal philosophy is the belief that law matters. But is that belief sound, and, if it is, then why, when, where, and how does law matter? Thus, exploring the conceptual, normative, and empirical dimensions of the proposition that law matters represents a cluster of questions that, if not the most important questions in legal philosophy, are certainly among the most important.

Legal philosophy and the study of legal reasoning

In this paper, I argue that legal philosophers ought to focus more on problems of legal reasoning. This is a field with many philosophically interesting questions to consider, but also, a field in which legal philosophers can contribute the most to the study and the practice of law. Neither legal practitioners nor legal scholars reason with the same care and precision as philosophers do. Against this background, I suggest that the following three types of questions regarding legal reasoning are especially worthy of serious consideration. The first is that of the relevance of the theory of reasons holism to legal reasoning. The second is the question of how to analyze (first-order) legal statements in a way that does not undermine the rationality of legal reasoning. And the third is the question of whether legal arguments are to be understood as deductive arguments, inductive arguments, or both, and if so how.

Determining the content of corporate reporting on human rights

Business enterprises have to report their activities to stakeholders in order to provide corporate transparency. Non-financial corporate reports provide a comprehensive coverage of environmental, socio-economic, labor, health, and human rights issues. In the paper the author argues that a uniform definition of a sector-specific human rights issue in reporting frameworks, rather than self-identification by enterprises of salient human rights issues, would help to achieve standardization and thus the possibility of sanctions in the event of false or misleading reporting. The author analyzes existing international and regional non-financial reporting instruments regarding the human rights included in it. The main content issues of non-financial reporting are derived and given requirements to improve them. The author further analyzes whether the two main frameworks for human rights reporting (the GRI Standards and the UNGPs Reporting Framework) currently meet the requirements for content defined in the paper and, if not, how they can be changed.

The most important problems of legal philosophy and the nature of law

The purpose of legal philosophy is frequently defined as the discovery or exploration of the nature of law. The nature of law is usually understood as a set of necessary properties of law. Such an identification of the purpose of legal philosophy raises some doubts. Irrespective of those doubts, I claim that that focusing exclusively on the nature of law may be detrimental to legal philosophy as a whole, as it may be an obstacle to the investigation of certain issues that seem important. Or, at least, not all fundamental problems of legal philosophy may be perceived as pertaining to the nature of the law. Two such problems are briefly discussed: (i) legal pluralism and (ii) certain new categories of non-human legal subjects, such as autonomous machines, environmental legal persons and animals. I argue that focusing on the nature of law does not help the exploration of those important topics.

When law enters history: prohibition of crime negationism and its limits in international law

The topic of this article is the interaction between the freedom of expression and the memorial laws concerning historical crimes. The author offers an analysis of the phenomenon of negationism through the prism of international law. The article is based on two interrelated hypotheses. The first is that the prohibition of negationism has a legal foundation in international law only if accompanied by the ability to incite hatred or violence. For this purpose, international and regional European standards on negationism are analyzed. The second hypothesis is that in the practice of implementation of memorial laws, the border between hate speech and legitimate historical denialism becomes blurred. This fact might lead to excessive encroachment upon the freedom of expression. The author offers an analysis of the practice of the European Court of Human Rights as a referential framework for the application of memorial laws in practice aimed at evading these excesses.

Promoting the rule of rationality over positive law and legal thinking

The paper makes the following claims. First, the most important problem for contemporary legal philosophy is contrasting the morally disgusting state of the world. Second, qua jurisprudents, the problem must be dealt with indirectly. Third, the indirect way of dealing with the problem requires pursuing the goal of promoting the rule of reason, the dominance of rationality, over law and legal thinking. Fourth, such an overall goal is to be pursued by breaking it down into five more specific goals: namely, promoting the epistemic, methodological, conceptual, instrumental, and substantive rationality of law and/or legal thinking. Fifth, pretentious and idle ways of doing jurisprudence must be put aside.

Back to Hart

The essay addresses two different senses of important “problems” for contemporary legal philosophy. In the first case, the “problem” is having forgotten things we learned from H.L.A. Hart, and, partly as a result, encouraging pointless metaphysical inquiries in other directions that take us very far from questions about the nature of law and legal reasoning. In the second case, the “problem” is to attend more carefully to Hart’s views and his philosophical context to think about the problem of theoretical disagreement, and to understand the way in which later commentators have misunderstood his behaviorist (Rylean) analysis of “accepting a rule from an internal point of view.”

The Legal Balance Between Liberty and Equality

The paper explores the specific legal balance between liberty and equality, distinguishing it from political theories and constitutional settings, where they are often considered in opposition. In order to find the specific legal balance between liberty and equality, and after identifying some of their relevant meanings for the purpose, it becomes necessary to focus on the rule of law, and to examine the relationship between liberty and equality in its different versions. Once the core meaning of the rule of law in terms of liberty and equality is enucleated, it is possible to consider extending it to the international field.