Jeffrey Goldsworthy is a renowned constitutional scholar and legal theorist whose work on the powers of Parliament and the interpretation of constitutional and statute laws has helped shape debates on these topics across the English-speaking world. The importance of democratic constitutionalism is central to Professor Goldsworthy's work: it lies at the heart of his defence of Parliamentary supremacy and shapes his approach to both constitutional and statutory interpretation. In honour of Professor Goldsworthy's retirement, this collection provides new perspectives from a range of leading public law scholars and theorists on the legal and philosophical principles that govern the making and interpretation of laws in a constitutional democracy. It also addresses some of the challenges to democratic constitutionalism that have arisen in light of contemporary developments in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.

This first work in the new Oxford Monographs in International Law Series to be edited by Ian Brownlie, QC, FBA, is a study of juridical bays. In 1958, against a backdrop of increasing international tensions regarding rights to and control of waters enclosed by coastal indentations, the world community, in a historic compromise reached under United Nations auspices, adopted Article 7 of the Geneva Convention "On the Territorial Sea and the Contiguous Zone". Recognizing the need to balance the self-protective interests of coastal states and the international interests of a harmonious world community, the signatories to Article 7 decided, in effect, that once the water enclosed within a coastal indentation met the requirements set out under Article 7, an irrebutable presumption had been raised that the claimant state owned these waters as a matter of right against all other states. Well-drafted and remarkably unambiguous, Article 7 should have resolved the issue of unreasonably expansive bay claims forever, but, in fact, it did not. Disputes continued to arise. In the twenty years since its adoption, despite continuing national and international disputes, Article 7 has not received the analysis necessary to help it become a more reliable basis for conflict resolution in cases involving complex coastal configurations. This study, the first major examination of Article 7, interprets both its text and context and more importantly, offers solutions to some of the problems that continue to make the question of coastal bay-type waters sources of national and international conflict.

The essays in Religion and Public Reasons seek to argue for, and illustrate, a central element of John Finnis's theory of natural law: that the main tenets of personal and political morality, and of a good legal order, are taught both by reason (arguments accessible to everyone) and by authentic divine revelation (teachings accessible to all who have a reasonable faith in its witnesses). The author's main books each include arguments for rejecting atheism and agnosticism; several papers here take up these arguments and indicate ways in which they open onto the reasonable grounds for accepting that more about God's nature, and about the meaning of Creation (including ongoing natural evolution), is disclosed by the revelation carried far forward among the Jewish people, and given definitive form by the Jews and Greeks who assembled in the universal Church, as witnesses of Christ, to carry forward that revelation into our present. Several papers argue that "public reason" properly includes such a religion, and that Humeian, Nietzschean, Deweyian, Rawlsian or other atheistical or deistic understandings of a reasonable secularism are badly mistaken. Many substantial papers record the author's position in controversies within Catholicism since the 1960s: on social justice, contraception and abortion; nuclear deterrence; Newman on conscience before pope; Maritain's hopes for a new Christendom and von Balthasar's for a hell empty of human persons; and on "proportionalism" and Lonerganian "historical consciousness" as moral-theological methods. Previously unpublished papers include several University and college sermons, and a substantial introduction.

Reason in Action collects John Finnis's work on the theory of practical reason and moral philosophy. The essays in the volume range from foundational issues of meta-ethics to the practical application of natural law theory to ethical problems such as nuclear deterrence, obscenity and free speech, and abortion and cloning. Defending the objectivity of some evaluative and moral judgments, the volume's meta-ethical papers debate with figures as diverse as Jurgen Habermas, Bernard Williams, David Hume, Max Weber, and Christine Korsgaard, and offer a new understanding of Wittgenstein's On Certainty. Further papers engage with Philippa Foot, Geoffrey Warnock, Leo Strauss, Terence Irwin, Matthew Kramer, neo-scholastic interpreters of Aquinas, utilitarians, game theorists, and Immanuel Kant on the shape of moral thought. John Rawls's conception of public reason, J.S. Mill's understanding of free speech, and Jacques Maritain's appeal to "connatural" knowledge are critically contested. Foundational questions addressed in the volume include: how legal reasoning differs from general practical reasoning; how aesthetic appreciation differs from erotic attraction; how subrational elements enter into the rational standard of fairness; how virtues depend upon principles and norms; and how incommensurabilities count in moral thought. These essays mark the development of Finnis's new classical theory of natural law, engaged with contemporary thinkers and problems. Several essays, including two previously unpublished, show the theory's emergence before Natural Law and Natural Rights. Other unpublished essays include a discussion of pornography, an analysis of freedom of speech, and a substantive introduction reflecting on the theory, its reception, and the convergence on it of capabilities theorists such as Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum.