Written by a former dean, this book offers a unique understanding of challenges facing legal education, research, publishing and governance.

Scientific and technological innovations are forcing the inadequacies of patent law into the spotlight. Robin Feldman explains why patents are causing so much trouble. She urges lawmakers to focus on crafting rules that anticipate future bargaining, not on the impossible task of assigning precise boundaries to rights when an invention is new.

Rethinking Law as Process draws on insights from 'process philosophy' in order to rethink the nature of legal decision-making. While there have been significant developments in the application of âe~processâe(tm) thought across a number of disciplines, little notice has been taken of Whiteheadian metaphysics in law. Nevertheless, process thought offers significant opportunities for serious inquiry into the nature of legal reasoning and the practical application of law. Focusing on the practices of organising, rather than their effects, an increased processual awareness re-orients understanding away from the mechanistic and rationalist assumptions of Newtonian thought, and towards the interminable ontological quest to arrest or to classify the essentially undivided flow of human experience. Drawing together insights from a number of different fields, James Maclean argues that it is because our inherited conceptual framework is tied to a âe~staticâe(tm) way of thinking that every attempt to offer justifying reasons for legal decisions appears at best to register only at the level of explanation. Rethinking Law as Process resolves this problem, and so provides a more adequate description of the nature of law and legal decision-making, by repositioning law within a thoroughly processual world-view, in which there is only the continuous effort to refine and to redefine the continuous flux of legal understanding.

"This book focuses on a very timely and important subject that merit s comprehensive analysis: "rethinking" the securities laws, with particular emphasis on the Securities Act and Securities Exchange Act. The system of securities regulation that prevails today in the United States is one that has been formed through piecemeal federal legislation, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in vocation of its administrative authority, and self-regulatory episodic action. As a consequence, the presence of consistent and logical regulation all too often is lacking. In both transactional and litigation settings, with frequency, mandates apply that are erratic and antithetical to sound public policy. Over four decades ago, the American Law Institute (ALI) adopted the ALI Federal Securities Code. The Code has not been enacted by Congress and its prospects are dim. Since that time, no treatise, monograph, or other source comprehensively has focused on this meritorious subject. The objective of this book is to identify the deficiencies that exist under the current regimen, address their failings, provide recommendations for rectifying these deficiencies, and set forth a thorough analysis for remediation in order to prescribe a consistent and sound securities law framework. By undertaking this challenge, the book provides an original and valuable resource for effectuating necessary law reform that should prove beneficial to the integrity of the U.S. capital markets, effective and fair government and private enforcement, and the enhancement of investor protection"--

Why do killers deserve punishment? How should the law decide? These are the questions Samuel H. Pillsbury seeks to answer in this important new book on the theory and practice of criminal responsibility. In an argument both traditional and fresh, Pillsbury holds that persons deserve punishment according to the evil they choose to do, regardless of their psychological capacities. After considering potential objections to this approach, including those based on determinism, unjust social conditions, and the alleged cruelty of retribution, he presents an extended critique of American homicide law. Using real case examples, Pillsbury offers concrete proposals for legal reform, urging that modern preoccupations with subjective aspects of wrongdoing be replaced with rules that focus more on the individual's motives.

This insightful book presents a radical rethinking of the relationship between law, regulation, and technology. While in traditional legal thinking technology is neither of particular interest nor concern, this book treats modern technologies as doubly significant, both as major targets for regulation and as potential tools to be used for legal and regulatory purposes. It explores whether our institutions for engaging with new technologies are fit for purpose.

This book is about the competing images of man offered us by the disciplines of law and psychiatry. Michael Moore describes the legal view of persons as rational and autonomous and defends it from the challenges presented by three psychiatric ideas: that badness is illness, that the unconscious rules our mental life, and that a person is a community of selves more than a unified single self. Using the tools of modern philosophy, he attempts to show that the moral metaphysical foundations of our law are not eroded by these challenges of psychiatry. The book thus seeks, through philosophy, to go beneath the centuries-old debates between lawyers and psychiatrists, and to reveal their hidden agreement about the nature of man. Some attention is paid to practical legal and psychiatric issues of contemporary concern, such as the proper definition of mental illness for psychiatric purposes, and the proper definition of legal insanity for legal purposes. This book was first announced, for publication in hard covers, in the Press's January to July seasonal list.