Okinawan life, at the crossroads of American militarism and Japanese capitalism, embodies a fundamental contradiction to the myth of the monoethnic state. Suspended in a state of exception, Okinawans have never been officially classified as colonial subjects of the Japanese empire or the United States, nor have they ever been treated as equal citizens of Japan. As a result, they live amid one of the densest concentrations of U.S. military bases in the world. By bringing Foucauldian biopolitics into conversation with Japanese Marxian theorizations of capitalism, Alegal uncovers Japan’s determination to protect its middle class from the racialized sexual contact around its mainland bases by displacing them onto Okinawa, while simultaneously upholding Okinawa as a symbol of the infringement of Japanese sovereignty figured in terms of a patriarchal monoethnic state. This symbolism, however, has provoked ambivalence within Okinawa. In base towns that facilitated encounters between G.I.s and Okinawan women, the racial politics of the United States collided with the postcolonial politics of the Asia Pacific. Through close readings of poetry, reportage, film, and memoir on base-town life since 1945, Shimabuku traces a continuing failure to “become Japanese.” What she discerns instead is a complex politics surrounding sex work, tipping with volatility along the razor’s edge between insurgency and collaboration. At stake in sovereign power’s attempt to secure Okinawa as a military fortress was the need to contain alegality itself—that is, a life force irreducible to the legal order. If biopolitics is the state’s attempt to monopolize life, then Alegal is a story about how borderland actors reclaimed the power of life for themselves. In addition to scholars of Japan and Okinawa, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in postcolonialism, militarism, mixed-race studies, gender and sexuality, or the production of sovereignty in the modern world.

“An extraordinarily good synthesis from an amazing range of philosophical, legal, and technological sources . . . the book will appeal to legal academics and students, lawyers involved in e-commerce and cyberspace legal issues, technologists, moral philosophers, and intelligent lay readers interested in high tech issues, privacy, [and] robotics.” —Kevin Ashley, University of Pittsburgh School of Law As corporations and government agencies replace human employees with online customer service and automated phone systems, we become accustomed to doing business with nonhuman agents. If artificial intelligence (AI) technology advances as today’s leading researchers predict, these agents may soon function with such limited human input that they appear to act independently. When they achieve that level of autonomy, what legal status should they have? Samir Chopra and Laurence F. White present a carefully reasoned discussion of how existing philosophy and legal theory can accommodate increasingly sophisticated AI technology. Arguing for the legal personhood of an artificial agent, the authors discuss what it means to say it has “knowledge” and the ability to make a decision. They consider key questions such as who must take responsibility for an agent’s actions, whom the agent serves, and whether it could face a conflict of interest.

A freewheeling, small-town attorney takes on a national murder trial when an out-of-town client is accused of killing a federal judge in Texas. “A spectacular courtroom thriller that kept me turning pages like the best of Grisham or Turow." —Michelle King, co-creator of The Good Wife, The Good Fight, and Evil The town of Marshall, Texas, is the epicenter of intellectual property law in the US—renowned for its speedy trials and massive payouts. One of its best lawyers is James Euchre. His newest client, Amir Zawar, is a CEO forced to defend his life’s work against a patent infringement claim. But when a beloved hometown hero is murdered, all signs point to Zawar, an outsider with no alibi. With the help of a former federal prosecutor and a local PI, Euchre hopes to uncover the truth. In his first criminal case, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Euchre fears either an innocent man will be sent to death row, or he’ll help set a murderer free. The Local is a small-town thriller crackling with courtroom tension right up to the final verdict.

What legal status should be granted to artificial agents?

English as a Legal Language is a lawyer's plain language guide to English legal terminology. Anyone who finds it difficult to express legal terms in English simply looks under the general heading to find the relevant terms and their usage. This book can also be used to find explanations of words from a translating dictionary. Further, it is structured as a thesaurus, organized according to topic with an alphabetical index. More and more, lawyers need the English language. But attempts to convert the language to meet one's own purpose often result in misconceptions. English legal language has its roots in the Anglo-American legal tradition and the non-native speaking lawyer may have difficulty understanding a word choice in English without also seeing how it fits into legal thinking and relates to other words in the subject area as a whole. English as a Legal Language offers a comparative lexicon of US and UK legal systems, with references to European legal systems. Special features of this work include: - The vocabulary of an entire area of law in each section; - A verb section which provides guidance on substantives, adjectives, adverbs, phrases, usage, as well as sample sentences and clues about typical mistakes; and - An index which gives an alphabetical rendition of the topically ordered definitions - essential for words that have multiple definitions. All lawyers working in English, and especially continental European lawyers, will find this book indispensable in their practices. The book is also of prime interest to business people, accountants, translators, legal secretaries and students. It will enable all practitioners and academics to express complex ideas in English, to understand the intricacies of English as a legal language, and to avoid the potential mishaps, when language barriers prevent a true meeting of minds.

In the wake of the recognition of the Whanganui River in New Zealand, the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers in India, the Yarra River in Australia and the Atrato River in Colombia as «subjects of rights», the International Observatory on Nature’s Rights has initiated a reflection on the possibility of recognizing the St. Lawrence River, the «path that walks» as it is called by the First Nations, as a «legal person». The texts in this collective work deal with the implications of attributing a legal personhood and rights to the St. Lawrence River, delve into the epistemological foundations of the paradigm of the recognition of the rights of Nature and present concrete cases of recognition of rivers as subjects of law. Written by experts from several countries where the recognition of the legal personhood of rivers has occurred to date, they take an in-depth look at the challenges and contributions of this paradigm shift in river protection. This book answers questions about the implications of such recognition and contributes to the process of building a new law that has just begun in Quebec and Canada with the adoption in February 2021 of resolutions conferring the status of «legal person» on the MagPie/ Muteshekau Shipu River located on the North Shore of Quebec and on the Nitassinan (ancestral territory) of two Innu communities, Ekuanitshit and Uashat mak Mani-utemam. Contributions : Inès Bennada, David Cordero Heredia, Teresa Vicente Giménez, Stratégies Saint-Laurent, Isabelle Delainey, Uapukun Mestokosho, Sylvain Gaudreault, Andrew Galliano, Nathalia Parra, Bianca De Marchi Moyano, Hugo Muñoz, Danaé Espinoza, Erin O’Donnell, Brettel Dawson, Shrishtee Bajpai, Rébecca Pétrin, Sokhna Sene, Victor David, Daniel Turp and Yenny Vega Cárdenas.

This book addresses three major questions about law and legal systems: (1) What are the defining and organising forms of legal institutions, legal rules, interpretative methodologies, and other legal phenomena? (2) How does frontal and systematic focus on these forms advance understanding of such phenomena? (3) What credit should the functions of forms have when such phenomena serve policy and related purposes, rule of law values, and fundamental political values such as democracy, liberty, and justice? This book seeks to offer general answers to these questions and thus gives form in the law its due. The answers not only provide articulate conversancy with the subject but also reveal insights into the nature of law itself, the oldest and foremost problem in legal theory and allied subjects.