The distinction of macro- and microfoundations of institutions implies a multilevel conceptualization of institutional processes. We adopt the evaluators' perspective on legitimacy to develop a mul...

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The “Macro” and the “Micro” of Legitimacy: Toward a Multilevel Theory of the Legitimacy Process

The prospect of using tropical forest projects to sequester significant amounts of atmospheric carbon as one mitigation approach to climate change has received considerable attention. In the Kyoto Protocol, the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) aspires to make such projects viable. This article examines the prospect of these projects in Africa, and argues that land tenure is much more than just a set of variables to be changed, and that instead it exists as a prohibitive obstacle to the implementation of afforestation and reforestation sequestration approaches. Five primary tenure problems are examined: (1) the disconnect between customary and statutory land rights, (2) legal pluralism, (3) tree planting as land claim, (4) expansion of treed areas in smallholder land use systems, and (5) the difficulty of using the ‘abandoned land’ category. The pervasiveness of these tenurial issues mean that the prospects for successfully implementing afforestation and reforestation projects in Africa are in reality quite weak. The current project approach to carbon storage in Africa needs to be significantly realigned with African reality in order for sequestration expectations to be practical.

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Carbon sequestration in Africa: The land tenure problem

1. Introduction 2. Athens and its legal system 3. Relevance in the popular courts 4. The homicide courts 5. Legal insecurity in Athens 6. Maritime cases 7. Conclusions.

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Law and justice in the courts of classical Athens

Legal pluralism is a contemporary image of law that has been advanced by sociolegal scholars in response to the dominant monist image of law as derivative of the political state and its progeny. The pluralistic image redirects law and society research toward the myriad normative orders outside the circle of “the Law.” This essay considers the epistemological foundations of both legal pluralism and the legal monist image of law against which its proponents are reacting. It argues that contemporary pluralistic imaginations rest on the same impoverished view of law and its subjects that sustains the traditional claim that law comprises only the processes and institutions emanating from the modern political state. The authors propose an alternative image of law in an effort to redirect the sociolegal studies research agenda.Challenging the traditional social-scientific legal pluralism of reified cultures and communities, the idea of critical legal pluralism presented in this essay rests on the insight that it is knowledge that maintains and creates realities: a critical legal pluralism imagines legal subjects as “law inventing” and not merely “law abiding.” The authors argue that, once the constructive, creative capacities of legal subjects are recognized alongside the plurality of these same subjects, the relationship between laws and selves reveals its complexity. They acknowledge that their approach is only one of many possible critical legal pluralist approaches; but they maintain that any reconception of law within a framework of critical legal pluralism is a form of emancipatory prescription. As definitions of law are revised and rejected, new vistas are opened for sociolegal scholarship.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0829320100005342

What is a Critical Legal Pluralism

The authors examine the social scientific evidence regarding one question increasingly addressed in legal scholarship and in custody cases : are children who live with their same-sex parent in a better situation than their peers who live with an opposite-sex parent ? After evaluating the current research on the same-sex hypothesis, they extend this literature by analyzing three data sets (National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, High School and Beyond, and the General Social Survey). They focus on a broader array of socioemotional, academic and personality variables than those previously studied to explore the implications of same-sex parenting on adolescence and adulthood. They find virtually no evidence of a benefit from living with a same-sex parent. This study represents the most complete test to date of, and rebuttal to, the same-sex argument

Living in single-parent households : An investigation of the same-sex hypothesis

Approximately one thousand years ago Gypsies, or Roma, left their native India. Today Gypsies can be found in countries throughout the world, their distinct culture still intact in spite of the intense persecution they have endured. This authoritative collection brings together leading Gypsy and non-Gypsy scholars to examine the Romani legal system, an autonomous body of law based on an oral tradition and existing alongside dominant national legal networks. For centuries the Roma have survived by using defensive strategies, especially the absolute exclusion of gadje (non-Gypsies) from their private lives, their values, and information about Romani language and social institutions. Sexuality, gender, and the body are fundamental to Gypsy law, with rules that govern being pure (vujo) or impure (marime). Women play an important role in maintaining legal customs, having the power to sanction and to contaminate, but they are not directly involved in legal proceedings. These essays offer a comparative perspective on Romani legal procedures and identity, including topics such as the United States' criminalization of many aspects of Gypsy law, parallels between Jewish and Gypsy law, and legal distinctions between Romani communities. The contributors raise broad theoretical questions that transcend the specific Gypsy context and offer important insights into understanding oral legal traditions. Together they suggest a theoretical framework for explaining the coexistence of formal and informal law within a single legal system. They also highlight the ethical dilemmas encountered in comparative law research and definitions of 'human rights'.

Gypsy Law: Romani Legal Traditions and Culture

Folk Law: Essays in the Theory and Practice of Lex Non Scripta

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Autonomous Lawmaking: The Case of the "Gypsies"

By the conventional view, case outcomes are largely the product of courts' application of law to facts. Even when courts do not generate outcomes in this manner, prevailing legal theory casts them as the arbiters of those outcomes. In a competing strategic view, lawyers and parties construct legal outcomes in what amounts to a contest of skill. Though the latter view better explains the process, no theory has yet been propounded as to how lawyers can replace judges as arbiters. This article propounds such a theory. It classifies legal strategies into three types: those that require willing acceptance by judges, those that constrain the actions of judges, and those that entirely deprive judges of control. Strategies that depend upon the persuasion of judges are explained through a conception of law in which cases and statutes are almost wholly indeterminate and strategists infuse meaning into these empty rules in the process of argumentation. That meaning derives from social norms, patterns of outcomes, local practices and understandings, informal rules of factual inference, systems imperatives, community expectations, and so-called public policies. Constraint strategies operate through case selection, record making, legal planning, or media pressure. Strategists deprive judges of control by forum shopping, by preventing cases from reaching decision, or by causing them to be decided on issues other than the merits. The theory presented explains how superior lawyering can determine outcomes, why local legal cultures exist, how resources confer advantage in litigation, and one of the means by which law evolves.

A Theory of Legal Strategy

By the conventional view, case outcomes are largely the product of courts’ application of law to facts. Even when courts do not generate outcomes in this manner, prevailing legal theory casts them as the arbiters of those outcomes. In a competing strategic view, lawyers and parties construct legal outcomes in what amounts to a contest of skill. Though the latter view better explains the process, no theory has yet been propounded as to how lawyers can replace judges as arbiters. This chapter propounds such a theory. It classifies legal strategies into three types: those that require willing acceptance by judges, those that constrain the actions of judges, and those that entirely deprive judges of control.

https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1079&context=dlj

Walter O. Weyrauch

Papers

Gypsy Law: Romani Legal Traditions and Culture

Folk Law: Essays in the Theory and Practice of Lex Non Scripta

Autonomous Lawmaking: The Case of the "Gypsies"

A Theory of Legal Strategy

A Theory of Legal Strategy