What makes something a human right? What is the relationship between the moral foundations of human rights and human rights law? What are the difficulties of appealing to human rights? This book offers the first comprehensive survey of current thinking on the philosophical foundations of human rights. Divided into four parts, this book focuses firstly on the moral grounds of human rights, for example in our dignity, agency, interests or needs. Secondly, it looks at the implications that di...

Criminalization is a new series arising from an interdisciplinary investigation into the issue of criminalization, focussing on the principles and goals that should guide decisions about what kinds of conduct are to be criminalized, and the forms that criminalization should take. Developing a normative theory of criminalization, the six volumes will tackle the key questions at the heart of issue: By reference to what principles and goals should legislations decide what to criminal...

The third book in the Criminalization series examines the constitutionalization of criminal law. It considers how the criminal law is constituted through the political processes of the state; how the agents of the criminal law can be answerable to it themselves; and finally, how the criminal law can be constituted as part of the international order. Addressing the ways in which and the grounds on which types of conduct can be justifiably criminalized, the first four chapters of this volume...

The Criminalization series arose from an interdisciplinary investigation into criminalization, focussing on the principles that might guide decisions about what kinds of conduct should be criminalized, and the forms that criminalization should take. Developing a normative theory of criminalization, the series tackles the key questions at the heart of the issue: what principles and goals should guide legislators in deciding what to criminalize? How should criminal wrongs be classif...

Ronald Dworkin is widely accepted as the most important and most controversial Anglo-American jurist of the past forty years. And this same-named volume on his work has become a minor classic in the field, offering the most complete analysis and integration of Dworkin's work to date. This third edition offers a substantial revision of earlier texts and, most importantly, incorporates discussion of Dworkin's recent masterwork Justice for Hedgehogs.Accessibly written for a w...

According to republican theory, we are free persons to the extent that we are protected and secured in the same fundamental choices, on the same public basis, as one another. But there is no public protection or security without a coercive state. Does this mean that any freedom we enjoy is a superficial good that presupposes a deeper, political form of subjection? Philip Pettit addresses this crucial question in On the People's Terms. He argues that state coercion will not involve individu...

What is the role and value of criminology in a democratic society? How do, and how should, its practitioners engage with politics and public policy? How can criminology find a voice in an agitated, insecure and intensely mediated world in which crime and punishment loom large in government agendas and public discourse? What collective good do we want criminological enquiry to promote?In addressing these questions, Ian Loader and Richard Sparks offer a sociological account of how cr...

International law is playing an increasingly important role in international politics. However, international relations theorists have thus far failed to conceptualise adequately the role that law plays in politics. Instead, IR theorists have tended to operate with a limited conception of law. An understanding of jurisprudence and legal methodology is a crucial step towards achieving a better account of international law in IR theory. But many of the flaws in IR's idea of law stem also fro...

How do laws resemble rules of games, moral rules, personal rules, rules found in religious teachings, school rules, and so on? Are laws rules at all? Are they all made by human beings? And if so how should we go about interpreting them? How are they organized into systems, and what does it mean for these systems to have 'constitutions'? Should everyone want to live under a system of law? Is there a special kind of 'legal justice'? Does it consist simply in applying the law of the system? A...

The Constitutional State provides an original analytical account of the state and its associated constitutional phenomena. It presents the state as a form of social group, consisting of people, territory and institutions bound together by rules. The institutions of the state make a distinctive and characteristic claim over the people of the state, who, in turn, have a distinctive and characteristic relationship with these institutions. This account reveals the importance of at lea...

The series, St Andrews Studies in Philosophy and Public Life originates in the Centre for Ethics, Philosophy and Public Affairs, University of St Andrews and is under the general editorship of John Haldane. The series includes monographs, collections of essays and occasional anthologies of source material representing study in those areas of philosophy most relevant to topics of public importance, with the aim of advancing the contribution of philosophy in the discussion of these topics. I...

The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Law provides a comprehensive, non-technical philosophical treatment of the fundamental questions about the nature of law. Its coverage includes law’s relation to morality and the moral obligations to obey the law, the main philosophical debates about particular legal areas such as criminal responsibility, property, contracts, family law, law and justice in the international domain, legal paternalism and the rule of law.The entir...