Phenomenological sociology and ethnomethodology have many adherents and practitioners throughout the world. The international character of interest in these two areas is exemplified by the scholars from Canada, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Switzerland, and the United States who contributed to this collection. Together they exemplify the kinds of theoretical and research issues that arise in seeking to explore the social world in ways that respect what Edmund Husserl referred to as ...

The studies in this volume use ethnographic, ethnomethodological, and sociolinguistic research to demonstrate how legal agents conduct their practices and exercise their authority in relation to non-expert participants and broader publics. Instead of treating law as a body of doctrines, or law and society as a relationship between legal institutions and an external society, the studies in this volume closely examine law at work: specific legal practices and social interactions produced in ...

What if anything justifies us in believing the testimony of others? How should we react to disagreement between ourselves and our peers, and to disagreement among the experts when we ourselves are novices? Can beliefs be held by groups of people in addition to the people composing those groups? And if so, how should groups go about forming their beliefs? How should we design social systems, such as legal juries and scientific research-sharing schemes, to promote knowledge among the people ...

Second edition of the introductory guidebook to the basic principles of constructing sound arguments and criticising bad ones. Non-technical in approach, it is based on 186 examples, which Douglas Walton, a leading authority in the field of informal logic, discusses and evaluates in clear, illustrative detail. Walton explains how errors, fallacies, and other key failures of argument occur. He shows how correct uses of argument are based on sound strategies for reasoned persuasion and criti...

Prolonged solitary confinement has become a widespread and standard practice in U.S. prisons—even though it consistently drives healthy prisoners insane, makes the mentally ill sicker, and, according to the testimony of prisoners, threatens to reduce life to a living death. In this profoundly important and original book, Lisa Guenther examines the death-in-life experience of solitary confinement in America from the early nineteenth century to today’s supermax prisons. Documenting how solit...

This book analyzes the uses of emotive language and redefinitions from pragmatic, dialectical, epistemic and rhetorical perspectives, investigating the relationship between emotions, persuasion and meaning, and focusing on the implicit dimension of the use of a word and its dialectical effects. It offers a method for evaluating the persuasive and manipulative uses of emotive language in ordinary and political discourse. Through the analysis of political speeches (including President Obama'...

This short book starts from first principles of moral nihilism and determinism and arrives at a shared system of morality and justice. It suggests a moral or ethical system that abandons the assumptions of objectivity, moral agency, and free will, and goes on to explore the implications of such a theory in the areas of criminal justice and government.

Biometric technologies, such as finger- or facial-scan, are being deployed across a variety of social contexts in order to facilitate and guarantee identity verification and authentication. In the post-9/11 world, biometric technologies have experienced an extraordinary period of growth as concerns about security and screening have increased. This book analyses biometric systems in terms of the application of biopolitical power – corporate, military and governmental – on the human body. It...

A provocative philosophical investigation into the ethics of torture, The War on Terror, and making tough choices in exceptional circumstances.The general consensus among philosophers is that the use of torture is never justified. In Terrorism, Ticking Time-Bombs, and Torture, Fritz Allhoff demonstrates the weakness of the case against torture; while allowing that torture constitutes a moral wrong, he nevertheless argues that, in exceptional cases, it repr...

Coauthored by W. Lance Bennett and Martha S. Feldman, 'Reconstructing Reality in the Courtroom' explains what makes stories believable and how ordinary people connect complex legal arguments and evidence presented in trials to assess guilt and innocence. The explanation takes the core elements of narrative—the who, what, where, when, how, why—and shows how average people who hear hundreds of stories every day use the connections between these elements to assess credibility.A series...

Adjudication in Action describes the moral dimension of judicial activities and the judicial approach to questions of morality, observing the contextualized deployment of various practices and the activities of diverse people who, in different capacities, find themselves involved with institutional judicial space. Exploring the manner in which the enactment of the law is morally accomplished, and how practical, legal cognition mediates and modulates the treatment of cases dealing with sexu...

This book develops a psychoanalytic theory of political correctness and the pristine self, which is defined as a self touched by nothing but love. It explores the damage that political correctness can do to social order. Applications include the breakdown of social capital, the financial crisis, and Occupy Wall Street. Long an issue for conservatives, alarm over political correctness has now spread to the liberal side of the political spectrum. As Schwartz argues, all have reason to be con...