With the New Deal came a dramatic expansion of the American regulatory state. Threatening to undermine many of the traditional roles of the legal system and its actors by establishing a system of administrative law, the new emphasis on federal legislation as a form of social and economic planning ushered in an era of "legal uncertainty." In this study Ronen Shamir explores how elite corporate lawyers and the American Bar Association clashed with academic legal realists over the constitutionality of the New Deal's legislative program. Applying the insights of Weber and Bourdieu to the sociology of the legal profession, Shamir shows that elite members of the bar had a keen self-interest in blocking the expansion of administrative law. He dismisses as oversimplified the view that elite lawyers were "hired guns" who argued that New Deal legislation was unconstitutional solely because of their duty to represent their capitalist clients. Instead, Shamir suggests, their alignment with the capitalist class was an incidental result of their attempt to articulate their vision of the law as scientific, apolitical, and judicially oriented--and thereby to defend their own position within the law profession. The academic legal realists on the other side of the constitutional debates criticized the rigidity of the traditional judicial process and insisted that flexibility of interpretation and the uncertainty of legal outcomes was at the heart of the legal system. The author argues that many legal realists, encouraged by the experimental nature of the New Deal, seized an opportunity to improve on their marginal status within the legal profession by moving their discussions from academic circles to the national policy agenda.

An exploration into how uncertainty and political and ethical biases affect international law governing the use of force.

In this book, Adrian Vermeule shows that any approach to legal interpretation rests on institutional and empirical premises about the capacities of judges and the systemic effects of their rulings. He argues that legal interpretation is above all an exercise in decisionmaking under severe empirical uncertainty.

Should laws be made in courts or in parliaments? Orlin Yalnazov proposes a new approach to the problem. He conceptualizes law as an information product, and law-making as an exercise in production. Law-making has inputs and outputs, and technology is used to transform one into the other. Law may, depending on input and technology, take on different forms: it can be vague or it can be certain. The ‘technologies’ between which we may choose are precedent and statute. Differences between the two being sizeable, our choice has significant repercussions for the cost of the input and the form of the output. The author applies this framework to several problems, including the comparison between the common and the civil law, comparative civil procedure, and EU law. Perhaps most critically, he offers a critique of the ‘efficiency of the common law’ hypothesis.

Re-engaging with the Pure Theory of Law developed by Hans Kelsen and the other members of the Viennese School of Jurisprudence, this book looks at the causes and manifestations of uncertainty in international law. It considers both epistemological uncertainty as to whether we can accurately perceive norms in international law, and ontological problems which occur inter alia where two or more norms conflict. The book looks at these issues of uncertainty in relation to the foundational doctrines of public international law, including the law of self-defence under the United Nations Charter, customary international law, and the interpretation of treaties. In viewing international law through the lens of Kelsen’s theory Jörg Kammerhofer demonstrates the importance of the theoretical dimension for the study of international law and offers a critique of the recent trend towards pragmatism and eclecticism in international legal scholarship. The unique aspect of the monograph is that it is the only book to apply the Pure Theory of Law as theoretical approach to international law, rather than simply being a piece of intellectual history describing it. This book will of great interest to students and scholars of public international law, legal theory and jurisprudence.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the world's largest regional security organisation, possesses most of the attributes traditionally ascribed to an international organisation, but lacks a constitutive treaty and an established international legal personality. Moreover, OSCE decisions are considered mere political commitments and thus not legally binding. As such, it seems to correspond to the general zeitgeist, in which new, less formal actors and forms of international cooperation gain prominence, while traditional actors and instruments of international law are in stagnation. However, an increasing number of voices - including the OSCE participating states - have been advocating for more formal and autonomous OSCE institutional structures, for international legal personality, or even for the adoption of a constitutive treaty. The book analyses why and how these demands have emerged, critically analyses the reform proposals and provides new arguments for revisiting the OSCE legal framework.

This book argues that lawyers must often rely on contestable ethical and strategic intuitions when dealing with legal and factual uncertainties in 'hard cases' of resort to force. This area of international law relies on multiple tests which can be interpreted in different ways, do not yield binary 'yes/no' answers, and together define 'paradigms' of lawful and unlawful force. Controversial cases of force differ from these paradigms, requiring lawyers to assess complex, incomplete factual evidence, and to forecast the immediate and long-term consequences of using and not using force. Legal rules cannot resolve such uncertainties; instead, techniques from legal risk management, strategic intelligence assessment and political forecasting may help. This study develops these arguments using the philosophy of knowledge, socio-legal, politico-strategic and ethical theory, structured interviews and a survey with 31 UK-based international lawyers, and systematic analysis of key International Court of Justice cases and scholarly assessments of US-led interventions.