This book presents the current state of the art regarding the application of logical tools to the problems of theory and practice of lawmaking. It shows how contemporary logic may be useful in the analysis of legislation, legislative drafting and legal reasoning concerning different contexts of law making. Elaborations of the process of law making have variously emphasised its political, social or economic aspects. Yet despite strong interest in logical analyses of law, questions remains about the role of logical tools in law making. This volume attempts to bridge that gap, or at least to narrow it, drawing together some important research problems—and some possible solutions—as seen through the work of leading contemporary academics. The volume encompasses 20 chapters written by authors from 16 countries and it presents diversified views on the understanding of logic (from strict mathematical approaches to the informal, argumentative ones) and differentiated choices concerning the aspects of law making taken into account. The book presents a broad set of perspectives, insights and results into the emerging field of research devoted to the logical analysis of the area of creation of law. How does logic inform lawmaking? Are legal systems consistent and complete? How can legal rules be represented by means of formal calculi and visualization techniques? Does the structure of statutes or of legal systems resemble the structure of deductive systems? What are the logical relations between the basic concepts of jurisprudence that constitute the system of law? How are theories of legal interpretation relevant to the process of legislation? How might the statutory text be analysed by means of contemporary computer programs? These and other questions, ranging from the theoretical to the immediately practical, are addressed in this definitive collection.

"Logic and law have a long history in common, but the influence has been mostly one-sided, except perhaps in the 5th and 6th centuries B.C., where disputes at the market place or in tribunals in Greece seem to have stimulated a lot of reflection among sophistic philosophers on such topics as language and truth. Most of the time it was logic that influenced legal thinking, but in the last 50 years logicians began to be interested in normative concepts and hence in law"--

The global landscape has changed profoundly over the past decades. As a result, the making of international law and the way we think about it has become more and more diversified. This Research Handbook offers a comprehensive guide to the theory and practice of international lawmaking today. It takes stock at both the conceptual and the empirical levels of the instruments, processes, and actors involved in the making of international law. The editors have taken an approach which carefully combines theory and practice in order to provide both an overview and a critical reflection of international lawmaking. Comprehensive and well-structured, the book contains essays by leading scholars on key aspects of international lawmaking and on lawmaking in the main issue areas. Attention is paid to classic processes as well as new developments and shades of normativity. This timely and authoritative Handbook will be a valuable resource for academics, students, legal practitioners, diplomats, government and international organization officials as well as civil society representatives.

Provides an in-depth study of the theory, history, practice, and interpretation of customary international law.

The human rights of communities in many resource-rich, weak governance States are adversely affected, not only by the acts of States and their agents, but also by powerful non-State actors. Contemporary phenomena such as globalisation, privatisation and the proliferation of internal armed conflict have all contributed to the increasing public influence of these entities and the correlative decline in State power. This book responds to the persistent challenges stemming from non-State actors linked to extractive industries. In light of the intersecting roles of multinational enterprises and non-State armed groups in this context, these actors are adopted as the primary analytical vehicles. The operations of these entities highlight the practical flaws of existing accountability regimes and permit an exploration of the theoretical challenges that preclude their direct legal regulation at the international level. Drawing insights from discursive democracy, compliance theories and the Pure Theory of Law, the book establishes a conceptual foundation for the creation of binding international obligations addressing non-State actors. Responding to the recent calls for a binding business and human rights treaty at the UN Human Rights Council, and the growing influence of armed non-State actors, the book makes a timely contribution to debates surrounding the direction of future developments in the field of international human rights law.

This book develops a sociological understanding of law making in the European Union. In particular, the book focuses on the social function of law in new governance structures promoting decentralized and flexible procedures that encourage deliberation, participation of stakeholders, and public dialogue. It pays attention to both the practical knowledge and the power relations underpinning law making, while seeking to bring to the foreground the importance of compromise in the process. The empirical substantiation of the argument discusses the regulation of technology in the European Union and is premised on case studies of governance of the Internet, patents of high technology, filters used on the Internet to block harmful material, trademark law and domain name dispute resolution by ICANN. To this effect, the book studies the dynamics of constructing a legal argument inside the European Commission, and its role in the process of coordinating the creation of networks, securing enforcement in self regulatory regimes, and steering activity on the part of autonomous groups of actors.

When a legal rule requires us to drive on the right, notarize our wills, or refrain from selling bootleg liquor, how are we to describe and understand that requirement? In particular, how does the logical form of such a requirement relate to the logical form of other requirements, such as moral requirements, or the requirements of logic itself? When a general legal rule is applied or distinguished in a particular case, how can we describe that process in logical form? Such questions have come to preoccupy modern legal philosophy as its methodology, drawing on the philosophy of logic, becomes ever more sophisticated. This collection gathers together some of the most prominent legal philosophers in the Anglo-American and civil law traditions to analyse the logical structure of legal norms. They focus on the issue of defeasibility, which has become a central concern for both logicians and legal philosophers in recent years. The book is divided into four parts. The first section is devoted to unravelling the basic concepts related to legal defeasibility and the logical structure of legal norms, focusing on the idea that law, or its components, are liable to implicit exceptions, which cannot be specified before the law's application to particular cases. Part two aims to disentangle the main relations between the issue of legal defeasibility and the issue of legal interpretation, exploring the topic of defeasibility as a product of certain argumentative techniques in the law. Section 3 of the volume is dedicated to one of the most problematic issues in the history of jurisprudence: the connections between law and morality. Finally, section 4 of the volume is devoted to analysing the relationships between defeasibility and legal adjudication.