Providing a comprehensive account of the often-misunderstood area of legal doctrinal scholarship, this incisive book offers a novel framing for conceptual legal theory and the functions of conceptual theorising in legal studies. It explores the ways in which a doctrinally oriented legal theory may provide methodological support to legal scholars, arguing that making adequate sense of the rational reconstruction of law is pivotal in delivering such active support.

This unique book examines the role non-doctrinal research methods play in international legal research: what do they add to the traditional doctrinal analysis of law and what do they neglect? Focusing on empirical and socio-legal methods, it provides a critical evaluation of the breadth, scope and limits of the representation of international law created by these often-neglected methodologies.

Rethinking Legal Scholarship bridges the gap between American and European legal scholarship by looking at underlying methodological challenges.

This text promotes a more global sociolegal perspective that engages with multiple laws and societies and diverse sociolegal systems based on very different historical and cultural traditions, interacting on multiple local, national, and global levels. The approach to global legal pluralism seeks to provide a framework for envisioning new global governance regimes that move beyond state-based solutions to deal with trenchant transnational challenges.

The legal information environment is deep, wide, and dynamic with many participants, including courts, parliaments, legislatures, and administrative bodies. None exemplifies the agile, knowledge-engaging legal player better than the law firm. Current, authoritative information is essential for the successful representation of clients. The firm's most dependable resource for retrieving information is its library staff. Law Firm Librarianship introduces the reader to the challenges, qualifications, and work conditions of this distinct type of research librarian. The book begins by asking what law firm librarianship is, whilst the second chapter focuses on the law firm and its culture. The third chapter covers the law firm library itself, including the practical aspects of the firm librarian's interaction with his or her professional environments. The next chapter considers the effects of legal publishing practices, and the penultimate section surveys the various research tools the firm librarian relies on for sound knowledge. The book concludes by looking at the dynamic qualities of law firm librarianship. - Offers an up-to-date overview from an experienced practitioner - Adds to the library literature by addressing a type of librarianship that usually receives little attention - Applies field knowledge about legal information trends that will inform related areas of inquiry

First published in 1997, this volume examines questions of legal doctrine which have never been far from the study of crime. It has not always been able to keep the doctrinal aspects of law clearly in sight. There is always the pressure to turn to philosophy for the consideration of questions of moral and legal responsibility and to criminology and psychology for the analysis of action. The essays collected in this book turn again to questions of doctrine and consider the dogmatic order of law as the basis of the understanding of crime. It is the general argument of this book that without an understanding of the dogmatic order of the legal subject of crime, there will only ever be answers to questions that have never been appropriately asked. Loosely collected around questions of institution, judgement and address, these essays bring modern historical, doctrinal and cultural scholarship to bear on the practices of legal doctrine. Their aim is to offer an account of criminal law as a practice that institutes, judges and addresses the legal subject through a range of practices and knowledges. These range from the disciplinary knowledges of mental health to the cultural knowledges of femininity and female desire. They include the technical demands of law writing and court room procedure as well as symbolic powers of imagining corporate crime. These all are returned to the practical question of the production of knowledge through legal doctrine. These essays address a set of questions that have lain dormant in legal scholarship for much of the post-1945 era. In a time when the authority of law is being reconsidered at its foundations, it is appropriate too to reconsider the means and manner of the transmission of criminal law. Without an understanding of the formation of criminal law it is hardly surprising that questions of law reform raise such confusion.