Journal of Law and Society 

About: Journal of Law and Society is an academic journal published by Wiley. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Politics & Human rights. It has an ISSN identifier of 0263-323X. Over the lifetime, 1212 publications have been published receiving 23972 citations.

Law: A Map of Misreading. Toward a Postmodern Conception of Law

Abstract: In Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche announced that the spirit has undergone three metamorphoses.' In the first one the spirit becomes a camel; then the camel becomes a lion; and finally the lion becomes a child. While a camel, the spirit allows itself to be loaded with any values or beliefs humanity wants to load it with. But while speeding into the desert the spirit undergoes a second metamorphosis and the camel becomes a lion. The lion is the animal in revolt against the values and beliefs it was loaded with before. The lion is the spirit of negativity that substitutes 'I will' for 'thou shalt'. But because it merely acts against, the lion is a purely negative being, incapable of creating new values to replace the old ones. In order to take this further step the spirit must undergo a third metamorphosis through which the lion becomes a child. As a child the spirit is innocent and forgetting, it is a new beginning, the creation of new values. Only then will the spirit will its own will and conquer its own world. I would like to suggest that law has also undergone three metamorphoses in the modern era. However, the sequence of the steps has been reversed. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries law started out as a child. The new theories of natural law and the liberal political philosophy were a magnificent new creation of values and beliefs that testified to the emergence and consolidation of bourgeois society. But as the nineteenth century wore on, the law became the lion of negativity. It was the time when law was resisting against the demands which the social question had given rise to and which were being pressed into the political agenda by emergent social and political forces. In the twentieth century, and particularly after the Second World War, the law underwent a third metamorphosis. It gave up resistance in docile submission to the whole range of values and beliefs sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory that the different social and political

Accountability in the Regulatory State

Abstract: Accountability has long been both a key theme and a key problem in constitutional scholarship. The centrality of the accountability debates in contemporary political and legal discourse is a product of the difficulty of balancing the autonomy given to those exercising public power with appropriate control. The traditional mechanisms of accountability to Parliament and to the courts are problematic because in a complex administrative state, characterized by widespread delegation of discretion to actors located far from the centre of government, the conception of centralized responsibility upon which traditional accountability mechanisms are based is often fictional. The problems of accountability have been made manifest by the transformations wrought on public administration by the new public management (NPM) revolution which have further fragmented the public sector. In this article it is argued that if public lawyers are to be reconciled to these changes then it will be through recognizing the potential for additional or extended mechanisms of accountability in supplementing or displacing traditional accountability functions. The article identifies and develops two such extended accountability models: interdependence and redundancy

Regulating More Effectively: The Relationship between Procedural Justice, Legitimacy, and Tax Non-compliance

Abstract: In recent years, a significant number of middle-income taxpayers have been making use of aggressive tax planning strategies to reduce tax. In many cases, it is unclear whether these are designed and used by tax- payers to minimize tax legally or to avoid tax illegally. Those that are designed to exploit loopholes in tax law need to be dealt with in a way that restores faith and equity to the system. But how can tax authorities best manage taxpayers who may have inadvertently become involved in such illegal tax planning practices? Using longitudinal survey data, it will be shown that attempts to coerce and threaten taxpayers into compliance can undermine the legitimacy of the Tax Office's authority, which in turn can affect taxpayers' subsequent compliance behaviour. Responsive regulation, which is based on principles of procedural justice, will be discussed as an alternative enforcement strategy