Oxford Journal of Legal Studies最新文献

Philosophical accounts of status understand it either pejoratively, as social rank, or laudatorily, as the dignity possessed by all in virtue of our shared humanity. Status is considered to be something either we all have or no one should have. This article aims to show that there is a third, neglected, sense of status. It refers to the moral rights and duties one holds in virtue of one's social position or role. Employees, refugees, doctors, teachers and judges all hold social roles in virtue of which they have distinctive obligations, rights, privileges, powers and the like. This article aims to do two things: first, to distinguish the role-based notion of status from ideas of social rank, and to identify the various ways in which it constitutes a distinct category of moral wrongdoing; and second, to show that status, thus understood, is justified on egalitarian grounds even though, unlike dignity, not everyone has it. The moral point of status, I argue, is to regulate asymmetrical relations in which one of the parties suffers from background vulnerabilities and dependencies. Status as a moral idea vests both parties with a complex set of rights and duties, whose aim is to restore moral equality between the parties.

This article examines the jurisprudential arguments elaborated in David Dyzenhaus's The Long Arc of Legality. In particular, it looks into the main claim of the book: that the fact of 'very unjust laws' is central to illuminating the idea of law's authority, the elaboration of which Dyzenhaus takes to be the purpose of legal theory. The article analyses Dyzenhaus's own normative proposal in this matter, which consists of a version of legal positivism committed to Lon Fuller's principles of the internal morality of law, with the corollary of a conception of the judicial role as bound to a duty to apply these internal principles of legality when exercising their main function. While I cast some doubts on the feasibility of constructing the judge's function that way, in the end I celebrate Dyzenhaus's attempt at refining legal positivism's identity, especially in light of the ongoing debate with contemporary anti-positivism.

Countries all over the world document their statutory law in official legal databases (OLD), but the extent to which these provide effective access to (statutory) law remains unexamined. Ideally, an OLD should be (i) provided online and free for all without requiring registration or payment, (ii) searchable with regard to statutes' titles, (iii) searchable with regard to the full texts of statutes, (iv) provided in a reusable text-based format and (v) comprehensive in its coverage of at least the laws currently in force. To highlight the nature of OLDs as consumer products, we borrow a term from business operations research and refer to a database fulfilling these basic criteria as a 'minimum viable' OLD. We survey 204 states and jurisdictions to assess how far their country-level OLDs adhere to the minimum viability standard. We find that only 48% of them do; 12% of states do not seem to offer any online OLD at all; and a further 40% of countries offer legal databases that lack at least one of the criteria listed above. The quality of legal access is associated with geographical distribution (with Europe faring the best), economic development and a population's overall Internet usage. The results suggest that comparative legal research faces considerable hurdles when dealing with the Global South; that metadata-enriched digitalisation of legal corpora still remains a desideratum for at least half the world; and that the inaccessibility of law may carry high costs for legal practitioners and the wider public.

This article explains and critiques the protection of love within judgments concerning relationships under the Human Rights Act 1998. Using theory of emotion to conduct doctrinal analysis of the protection of love within international human rights laws and under the Human Rights Act 1998, it reveals a shift in the conception of love underlying the domestic judicial application of huamn rights. Whereas previously the law was underpinned by values of duty and property, judgments concerning relationships now protect the capacity of individuals to choose how to live. However, the protection of this modern conception of love is limited by judicial deference, allowing the values underpinning the historical conception of love to continue to influence the law.

To date, welfare protections have failed animals. In this context, many animal advocates and scholars have supported recognition of animal rights. Animal rights theory, however, remains underdeveloped. This article contributes to the development of animal rights theory and, in this respect, proposes the utilisation of sentience and intrinsic worth concepts as a pluralist foundation for prospective animal rights. Sentience and intrinsic worth as a conceptual underpinning for animal rights hold clear benefits in that (i) the concepts are already embedded in many legal systems, (ii) sentience would enable the development of animal rights to be built on the established interest theory of rights, and (iii) sentience directly links to the justification of rights as being primarily concerned with the prevention of pain and suffering.

Criminal trials and proportional prison sentences are generally seen as the most suitable way to deal with perpetrators of atrocity crimes. Notwithstanding, traditionally conceived criminal penalties, such as imprisonment, may discourage active responsibility-taking by offenders, disaffect victims by not meeting their needs and impede meaningful engagement between perpetrators and survivors. Arguably, alternative criminal sanctions may be appropriate punishment even for atrocity crimes when tried in transitional societies. Using the case of Colombia, this article analyses the justifications of punishment for atrocities in transitional contexts and discusses the adequacy of alternative criminal sanctions as penalties for atrocity crimes. It concludes that under certain conditions, alternative sanctions can be a viable punishment option that may promote active responsibility-taking and contribute to repairing harm, reintegrating offenders into the community and (re)constructing relationships while serving expressive rationales.

The article systematically assesses the extent to which the Administration (Restrictions on Disposal etc. to Connected Persons) Regulations 2021 achieve the goal of the government to quell the negative perceptions of pre-pack administration. The pre-pack has generated much criticism from disenfranchised groups who regard the practice with much suspicion. These criticisms have triggered questions as to whether and how to structure the regulation of pre-packs. The article introduces original frames through which to distinguish the competing regulatory visions of the pre-pack, as well as to systematically evaluate the regulatory frameworks that have been introduced. The evaluation reveals a gap between the regulatory visions of the critics and the regulator. This gap has impacted the reception and effectiveness of successive regulatory frameworks. Combining its frames with the expectation gap theory, the article offers a critical assessment of the 2021 reforms, which address most but not all the criticisms of the pre-pack.