This book addresses issues concerning the shifting contemporary meaning of legal certainty. The book focuses on exploring the emerging tensions that exist between the demand for legal certainty and the challenges of regulating complex, late modern societies. The book is divided into two parts: the first part focusing on debates around legal certainty at the national level, with a primary emphasis on criminal law; and the second part focusing on debates at the transnational level, with a primary emphasis on the regulation of transnational commercial transactions. In the context of legal modernity, the principle of legal certainty—the idea that the law must be sufficiently clear to provide those subject to legal norms with the means to regulate their own conduct and to protect against the arbitrary use of public power—has operated as a foundational rule of law value. Even though it has not always been fully realized, legal certainty has functioned as a core value and aspiration that has structured normative debates throughout political modernity, both at a national and international level. In recent decades, however, legal certainty has come under increasing pressure from a number of competing demands that are made of contemporary law, in particular the demand that the law be more flexible and responsive to a social environment characterized by rapid social and technological change. The expectation that the law operates in new transnational contexts and regulates every widening sphere of social life has created a new degree of uncertainty, and this change raises difficult questions regarding both the possibility and desirability of legal certainty. This book compiles, in one edited volume, research from a range of substantive areas of civil and criminal law that shares a common interest in understanding the multi-layered challenges of defining legal certainty in a late modern society. The book will be of interest both to lawyers interested in understanding the transformation of core rule of law values in the context of contemporary social change and to political scientists and social theorists.

The principle of legal certainty is of fundamental importance for law and society: it has been vital in stabilising normative expectations and in providing a framework for social interaction, as well as defining the scope of individual freedom and political power. Even though it has not always been fully realised, legal certainty has also functioned as a normative ideal that has structured legal debates, both at the national and transnational level. This book presents research from a range of substantive areas regarding the meaning, possibility and desirability of legal certainty in the context of a rapidly changing global society. It aims to address these issues by bringing together scholars from various jurisdictions in order to examine changes in the shifting meaning of legal certainty in a comparative and transnational context. In particular, the book explores some of the tensions that now exist between the conventional expectation of legal certainty and the various challenges associated with regulating highly complex, late modern economies and societies. The book will be of interest to lawyers concerned with understanding the transformation of core rule of law values in the context of contemporary social change, as well as to political scientists and social theorists.

Is Private International Law (PIL) still fit to serve its function in today’s global environment? In light of some calls for radical changes to its very foundations, this timely book investigates the ability of PIL to handle contemporary and international problems, and inspires genuine debate on the future of the field.

The contemporary US legal culture is marked by ubiquitous battles among various groups attempting to seize control of the law and wield it against others in pursuit of their particular agenda. This battle takes place in administrative, legislative, and judicial arenas at both the state and federal levels. This book identifies the underlying source of these battles in the spread of the instrumental view of law - the idea that law is purely a means to an end - in a context of sharp disagreement over the social good. It traces the rise of the instrumental view of law in the course of the past two centuries, then demonstrates the pervasiveness of this view of law and its implications within the contemporary legal culture, and ends by showing the various ways in which seeing law in purely instrumental terms threatens to corrode the rule of law.

Explores the ideological, political, and economic stakes of struggles over international law's history and its relation to empire and capitalism.

Information Law Series Volume 45 In a copyright system characterised by broad and long-lasting exclusive rights, exceptions provide a vital counterweight, especially in times of rampant technological change. The EU’s controversial InfoSoc Directive – now two decades old – lists exceptions in which an unauthorised user will not have infringed the rightholder’s copyright. To reform or not to reform this legal framework – that is the question considered in great depth in this book, providing detailed theoretical and normative analysis of the Directive, the national and CJEU case law arising from it, and meticulously thought-out proposals for change. By breaking down the concepts of ‘flexibility’ and ‘legal certainty’ into a set of policy objectives and assessment criteria, the author thoroughly examines such core aspects of the framework as the following: the justifications for exceptions, e.g., safeguarding the fundamental rights of users; the regimes established in legislation and case law for key exceptions; the need to promote technological development; the importance of avoiding re-fragmentation caused by uncoordinated national legislative responses to technological changes; the legal status of digital technologies that rely on unauthorised uses of copyright-protected works; and the pros and cons of importing a fair use standard modelled after that of the United States. In an invaluable concluding chapter, the author puts forward a set of reform proposals, articulating their advantages and responding to potential objections. In doing so, the chapter also identifies, synthesises and critically examines the various proposals that have been advanced in the academic literature. In its decisive contribution to the debate around the InfoSoc Directive and the rules that guide its implementation, interpretation, and application, this book isolates the contentious structural features of the framework and examines them in a critical fashion. The author’s systematised review of scholarly and policymaking proposals for increasing flexibility and legal certainty in EU copyright law will be welcomed by practitioners in intellectual property law and other areas of economic law, as well as by interested policymakers and scholars.