It gives me great pleasure to offer this foreword to the present work of my admired friend and respected colleague Ota Weinberger. Apart from the essays of his which were published in our joint work An Institutional Theory of Law: New Approaches to Legal Positivism in 1986, relatively little of Wein berger's work is available in English. This is the more to be regretted, since his is work of particular interest to jurists of the English-speaking world both in view of its origins and in respect of its content As to its origins, Weinberger war reared as a student of the Pure Theory of Law, a theory which in its Kelsenian form has aroused very great interest and has had considerable influence among anglophoone scholars -perhaps even more than in the Germanic countries. Less well known is the fact that the Pure Theory itself divided into two schools, that of Vienna and that of Brno. It was in the Brno school of Frantisek Weyr that Weinberger's legal theory found its early formation, and perhaps from that early influence one can trace his continuing insistence on the dual character of legal norms -both as genuinely normative and yet at the same time having real social existence.

The study of law and politics is one of the foundation stones of the discipline of political science, and it has been one of the most productive areas of cross-fertilization between the various subfields of political science and between political science and other cognate disciplines. This Handbook provides a comprehensive survey of the field of law and politics in all its diversity, ranging from such traditional subjects as theories of jurisprudence, constitutionalism, judicial politics and law-and-society to such re-emerging subjects as comparative judicial politics, international law, and democratization. The Oxford Handbook of Law and Politics gathers together leading scholars in the field to assess key literatures shaping the discipline today and to help set the direction of research in the decade ahead.

A new title in the Routledge Major Works series, Critical Concepts in Political Science, this is a four-volume collection of cutting-edge and canonical research on law and politics.

The provision of legal technical assistance has in recent years become a major concern for international financial institutions, such as the World Bank, and for Western-based bilateral donor agencies. This book offers critical perspectives for the evaluation of legal technical assistance projects and contains proposals for action and research. Five chapters offer general perspectives on law, state and civil society and the remaining six case studies on themes such as economic regulation, agrarian reform, representation of women and access to justice.

Teaches how and why states make, break, and uphold international law using accessible explanations and contemporary international issues.

This book – which is the result of several years of research, discussion, writing and re-writing – consists of three parts and eight chapters. The rst part is given by the two rst chapters introducing the issue of validity and facticity in law. The second part (Chapters 3, 4 and 5) is the core of this study and tries to present a theory based on a speci c view about language and social practice. The third part deal with the issue of value judgments and views about morality and consists of Chapters 6 and 7. Chapter 8 should nally serve as epilogue. In the rst chapter a discussion is started about the relationship between law and power, seen as a presupposition for an assessment of the nature of law. As a matter of fact, as has been remarked, “general theories of law struggle to do justice to the 1 multiple dualities of the law”. Indeed, law has a “dual nature”: it is a fact, but it also a norm, a sort of ideal entity. Law is sanction, but it is also discourse. It is effectivity, or facticity, but it is also a vehicle of principles among which the central one is justice. But this duality is not only a phenomenological, or a matter of justi cation and implementation as two separate moments.

In The Politics of Islamic Law, Iza Hussin compares India, Malaya, and Egypt during the British colonial period in order to trace the making and transformation of the contemporary category of ‘Islamic law.’ She demonstrates that not only is Islamic law not the shari’ah, its present institutional forms, substantive content, symbolic vocabulary, and relationship to state and society—in short, its politics—are built upon foundations laid during the colonial encounter. Drawing on extensive archival work in English, Arabic, and Malay—from court records to colonial and local papers to private letters and visual material—Hussin offers a view of politics in the colonial period as an iterative series of negotiations between local and colonial powers in multiple locations. She shows how this resulted in a paradox, centralizing Islamic law at the same time that it limited its reach to family and ritual matters, and produced a transformation in the Muslim state, providing the frame within which Islam is articulated today, setting the agenda for ongoing legislation and policy, and defining the limits of change. Combining a genealogy of law with a political analysis of its institutional dynamics, this book offers an up-close look at the ways in which global transformations are realized at the local level.