Scholars of culture, humanities and social sciences have increasingly come to an appreciation of the importance of the legal domain in social life, while critically engaged socio-legal scholars around the world have taken up the task of understanding "Law's Empire" in all of its cultural, political, and economic dimensions. The questions arising from these intersections, and addressing imperialisms past and present forms the subject matter of a special symposium issue of Social Identities under the editorship of Griffith University's Rob McQueen, and UBC's Wes Pue and with contributions from McQueen, Ian Duncanson, Renisa Mawani, David Williams, Emma Cunliffe, Chidi Oguamanam, W. Wesley Pue, Fatou Camara, and Dianne Kirkby. This paper introduces the volume, forthcoming in late 2007. The central problematique of this issue has previously been explored through the 2005 Law's Empire conference, an informal but vibrant postcolonial legal studies network.

Law's Empire

In many cases of disagreement, particularly in situations involving practical reasoning, it is impossible to demonstrate conclusively that either party is wrong. The role of argument in such cases is to persuade rather than to prove, demonstrate or refute. Following Perelman, we argue that persuasion in such cases relies on a recognition that the strength of an argument depends on the social values that it advances, and that whether the attack of one argument on another succeeds depends on the comparative strength of the values advanced by the arguments concerned. To model this we extend the standard notion of Argumentation Frameworks (AFs) to Value-based Argumentation Frameworks (VAFs). After defining VAFs we explore their properties, and show how they can provide a rational basis for the acceptance or rejection of arguments, even where this would appear to be a matter of choice in a standard AF .I n particular we show that in a VAF certain arguments can be shown to be acceptable however the relative strengths of the values involved are assessed. This means that disputants can concur on the acceptance of arguments, even when they differ as to which values are more important, and hence that we can identify points for which persuasion should be possible. We illustrate the above using an example moral debate. We then show how factual considerations can be admitted to our framework and discuss the possibility of persuasion in the face of uncertainty and disagreement as to values.

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Persuasion in Practical Argument Using Value-based Argumentation Frameworks

Brian Skyrms, author of the successful Evolution of the Social Contract (which won the prestigious Lakatos Award) has written a sequel The book is a study of ideas of cooperation and collective action The point of departure is a prototypical story found in Rousseau's A Discourse on Inequality Rousseau contrasts the pay-off of hunting hare where the risk of non-cooperation is small but the reward is equally small, against the pay-off of hunting the stag where maximum cooperation is required but where the reward is so much greater Thus, rational agents are pulled in one direction by considerations of risk and in another by considerations of mutual benefit Written with Skyrms's characteristic clarity and verve, this intriguing book will be eagerly sought out by students and professionals in philosophy, political science, economics, sociology and evolutionary biology

The Stag Hunt and the Evolution of Social Structure

Autonomous vehicles may change the transportation landscape and policymakers must find the best course to maximize social benefits while minimizing drawbacks. This report weighs the potential advantages, including safety, mobility and fuel consumption, and disadvantages, including travel demand. Current legislation in Nevada, Florida, California, and Washington, DC, and in other states, and the standards and regulations that apply to such vehicles, are outlined. The report provides a brief history of autonomous vehicles and a summary of the role of telematics and communications, and discusses liability for drivers, insurers and manufacturers. It contains guidance for policymakers and risks to be considered as policies are formulated.

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Autonomous Vehicle Technology: A Guide for Policymakers

Background In the current debate over tort reform, critics of the medical malpractice system charge that frivolous litigation — claims that lack evidence of injury, substandard care, or both — is common and costly. Methods Trained physicians reviewed a random sample of 1452 closed malpractice claims from five liability insurers to determine whether a medical injury had occurred and, if so, whether it was due to medical error. We analyzed the prevalence, characteristics, litigation outcomes, and costs of claims that lacked evidence of error. Results For 3 percent of the claims, there were no verifiable medical injuries, and 37 percent did not involve errors. Most of the claims that were not associated with errors (370 of 515 [72 percent]) or injuries (31 of 37 [84 percent]) did not result in compensation; most that involved injuries due to error did (653 of 889 [73 percent]). Payment of claims not involving errors occurred less frequently than did the converse form of inaccuracy — nonpayment of claims asso...

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Claims, Errors, and Compensation Payments in Medical Malpractice Litigation

Notes on the Contributors 1. Natural Law: The Classical Tradition 2. Natural Law: The Modern Tradition 3. Exclusive Legal Positivism 4. Inclusive Legal Positivism 5. Formalism 6. Adjudication 7. Constitutional and Statutory Interpretation 8. Methodology 9. Legal and Political Philosophy 10. Authority 11. Reasons 12. Rights 13. Law and Obligations 14. Responsibility 15. Philosophy of the Common Law 16. Philosophy of Private Law 17. Philosophy of Tort Law 18. Philosophy of Contract Law 19. Philosophy of Property Law 20. The Philosophy of Criminal Law 21. Philosophy of International Law 22. Law and Language 23. Law and Objectivity 24. Law, Sexual Orientation, and Gender Index

The Oxford handbook of jurisprudence and philosophy of law

This book develops and expands the arguments of Coleman's Clarendon Lectures, presented at Oxford in the Fall of 1998. The book runs two distinct kinds of arguments simultaneously: one bearing on substantive issues in legal theory and jurisprudence; the other defending a particular version of philosophical pragmatism as an approach to legal theory. In the first part of the book, Coleman defends the view that tort law is best understood as articulating the principle of corrective justice. In defending this substantive view, Coleman presents his basic methodological commitments. First, a philosophical explanation of a social, political or legal practice can take the form of showing how a certain set of principles or concepts are embedded in it. The obvious contrast is with certain forms of functional explanations in which the existence and shape of a practice is understood in the light of some claimed function it serves. In the view defended in part one, Coleman claims that corrective justice stands (metaphorically) between our practices of tort law and abstract principles of fairness governing the allocation of life's misfortunes, themselves aspects of the fair terms of interaction among free and equal persons. There is a distinction between those misfortunes that result from human agency and those which are no one's doing. The principle of corrective justice helps articulate the requirements of fairness with respect to those of life's misfortunes owing to human agency. It does so by telling us that the requirements of fairness are to be understood in terms of other concepts: wrongful loss, responsibility and repair, among others perhaps. Fairness in the allocation of the costs of life's misfortunes requires imposing a duty of repair on those responsible for the wrongful losses others have absorbed through their agency. The content of these concepts is in turn rendered more concrete by the practices in which they figure, in particular tort law. At the same time that the practice of tort law makes the principle of corrective justice more concrete, and in doing so more fully articulates the requirements of fairness as regards the costs of life's misfortunes, corrective justice explains tort law. It does this in the following way. Tort law is itself understood as a scheme of practical reasoning. Evidence is introduced in support of various propositions. These propositions are thought to warrant other propositions. The scheme of reasoning--its structure and content--is made transparent by the principle of corrective justice. Thus, a typical plaintiff brings evidence that he was injured by the defendant wrongfully, that the harm of which he complains is protected, that the defendant acted unjustifiably in injuring him, and so on. If he can establish all this, the judgment that he is entitled to repair from the defendant is thought to be warranted. The principle of corrective justice--that each of us has a duty to repair the wrongful losses for which we are responsible--renders the content of each proposition and the relationship of each to the other coherent, mutually supporting and transparent. Thus at the same time that tort law more fully specifies the content of corrective justice, corrective justice explains tort law. Thus, the practice of principle. In part two, Coleman articulates fully, and for the first time, the elements of the jurisprudential view that is most closely associated with him: Inclusive Legal Positivism--the position Hart came to acknowledge in the Postscript as the version of Positivism to which he himself was committed. In fully articulating his version of Inclusive Legal Positivism, Coleman takes pains to distinguish his view from other facially similar views, espoused most recently by the likes of Wilfrid Waluchow and Matthew Kramer. Both, according to Coleman, misunderstand the motivations that underlie legal positivism and the criticisms leveled against it. The most well known criticisms are Ronald Dworkin's and Joseph Raz's. Raz is himself a positivist, but defends what is widely referred to as Exclusive Legal Positivism. Coleman claims that what distinguishes legal positivists from the Dworkinians and natural lawyers is the claim that all criteria of legality are conventional. Inclusive Legal Positivists all allow that sometimes morality can be a condition of legality, and this is what divides them from exclusive legal positivists. The latter claim that law's claim to authority is incompatible with morality serving as a condition of legality. Coleman takes on the two strongest versions of this argument: one owing to Joseph Raz, the other to Scott Shapiro, and finds both wanting in related ways. The section concludes with a sketch of Coleman's account of legal authority in its relation to our concept of law. In the third part of the book, Coleman returns to a variety of methodological issues in jurisprudence. According to Coleman, the distinctive philosophical method is conceptual analysis. Philosophers illuminate our practices by analyzing the concepts that figure in them. What sort of activity is conceptual analysis? Briefly, Coleman defends a form of apriori conceptual analysis in jurisprudence against the view taken by Brian Leiter that apriori conceptual analysis of adjudicatory practice is fruitless. Leiter defends a naturalistic approach to conceptual analysis that Coleman finds inadequately motivated, and, in any event, not a threat to traditional analytic jurisprudence. At the same time, Stephen Perry, following Ronald Dworkin, has advanced the view that conceptual analysis--at least of jurisprudential concepts--is a normative activity. This is meant to be an objection to a view they both attribute to legal positivists that denies that conceptual analysis is a normative activity. Coleman argues that the claim that conceptual analysis is a normative activity is ambiguous between the claim that our concepts must be responsive to theoretical norms and the very different claim that our concepts are answerable to the norms of political morality. No legal positivist-- including Hart--has ever denied the former, and no one could plausibly defend the latter, which would, in effect, turn conceptual analysis into a form of first-order moral philosophy. So in defending conceptual analysis, Coleman is committed to the project of identifying apriori the "thinnest" conceptions of our concepts that answer to the range of theoretical norms and intellectual interests that motivates philosophic inquiry in the first place. This activity is clearly normative, but not in a troubling way. The book concludes with a long look at what really is behind Dworkin's continued objections to the legal positivist project. Coleman argues that when reading Dworkin right from Model of Rules I through Law's Empire and beyond, one theme emerges--always slightly hidden from view. This is the thought that whether in identifying criteria of legality or criteria for the application of concepts, whether articulating a theory of legal authority or a theory of language, legal positivists are committed to the importance of conventions and to a difference between acceptance and validity, between the conditions for accepting conventions and for determining the validity of rules, and between, in effect, the conditions of revisibility for both. At the heart of Dworkin's argument is the thought that conventions are unnecessary to understand the practices we are interested in as legal philosophers--especially the practice of justification in legal argument; worse, invoking conventions adds confusion rather than illumination since it makes it impossible for us fully to understand important concepts within our legal practice, notably theoretical disagreement, and within our semantic practices, notably the existence of pivotal cases. Coleman develops this argument in full detail on behalf of Dworkin, but defends the centrality of the conventionality of the rule of recognition as part of the answer to the fundamental question of jurisprudence: what makes legal authority possible? A question, he argues, that Dworkin offers no plausible answer to.

The Practice of Principle

Preface Acknowledgements Introduction Part I. The Market Paradigm: 1. Rationality and cooperation 2. Competition and cooperation 3. Law and markets 4. Efficiency and market failure Part II. Safeguard and Risks: 5. The rational agreement 6. Safeguarding 7. Calculus and contexts 8. Filling in the gaps 9. From contracts to torts Part III. Rectifiable Wrongs: 10. The goals of tort law 11. Fault and strict liability 12. The ecomomic analysis of torts 13. Reciprocity of risk 14. Causation, responsibility, and strict liability 15. Liability and recovery 16. The mixed conception of corrective justice 17. Wrongfulness 18. Corrective justice and tort law 19. Justifiable departures from corrective justice 20. Product liability 21. Liberalism revisited Notes Index.

Risks and Wrongs

Introduction Part One: Corrective Justice: The practice of principle Part Two: Inclusive Legal Positivism Part Three: Conceptual Analysis

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The Practice of Principle: In Defence of a Pragmatist Approach to Legal Theory

The problem ofjustifying democracy arises when a society sees the need for cooperative, collective action. Collective action may be needed to solve coordination problems, public goods problems, Prisoner's Dilemmas, and other structural problems of human interaction or perhaps to realize common ideals of justice in concrete political institutions. Once the need for collective action is established, one must ask how the goals of a cooperative endeavor are to be secured. Cooperation requires that individuals, at least over a specified range of activity, pursue a joint strategy. To assure voluntary compliance in a joint venture, cooperation must be to each person's advantage. However, each person may have an incentive to induce others to cooperate and to defect from the joint strategy in the hope of enjoying the fruits of cooperation without incurring the opportunity costs of compliance. This is the essence of the Prisoner's Dilemma, and considerations of this sort suggest that if collective action is to succeed, policies or strategies formed collectively must be coercively enforceable. Coercion, however, requires justification. Because solving the problem of rational noncompliance requires that collective decisions be coercively enforceable, the rules by which collective decisions are reached require justification. Douglas Rae neatly puts the problem of justification that emerges when political solutions are coercively enforceable as follows: "Once a political community has decided which of its members are to participate directly in the making of collective policy, an important question remains: 'How many of them must agree before a policy is imposed on the community?"" This is essentially the question to which the principle of democratic rule provides an answer: by what process are collective decisions to be made? Answering Rae's question requires a normative framework. We could say that a procedure for making collective decisions is justified if and

Jules L. Coleman

Papers

The Oxford handbook of jurisprudence and philosophy of law

The Practice of Principle

Risks and Wrongs

The Practice of Principle: In Defence of a Pragmatist Approach to Legal Theory

Democracy and social choice