Oxford Journal of Legal Studies最新文献

In Legal Directives and Practical Reasons, Noam Gur has presented a novel account, called the dispositional model, to explain how law bears on our normative practical reasons. Gur holds that his model is superior to the current models, namely the standard weighing model and Joseph Raz's exclusionary model. Although his work provides useful insights into the practical impact of law, I argue that: (i) his challenge against the exclusionary model is valid only insofar as one accepts Raz's normal justification thesis and dependence thesis; (ii) his argument against the weighing model misses its target, because it attacks the model as a decision-making method, not as an account of practical reason; and (iii) his dispositional model solely constitutes a decision-making strategy and does not offer a third alternative answer to the question of how law affects our normative practical reasons. Hence, the dispositional model is not a competitor to the weighing and the exclusionary model, and the problem of accounting for the normativity of law remains.

For centuries, parliamentary privilege has stood as a bar against judicial review over the internal affairs of Parliament. The literature surrounding parliamentary privilege has mostly been about the scope of the privilege; few have discussed if the existence of the privilege itself is justified. This article undertakes that task, by examining parliamentary privilege as a defence against judicial review. Three propositions will be made. First, in the context of judicial review, parliamentary privilege is defined by the outer limits of the principle of exclusive cognisance. Article 9 of the Bill of Rights 1689 adds nothing. Second, parliamentary privilege as it relates to judicial review is incompatible with the two prevailing models of the separation of powers. Third, six arguments that may be made in favour of parliamentary privilege will be refuted. Accordingly, parliamentary privilege should no longer provide a defence towards judicial review.

Sceptics of judicial review-from Jeremy Waldron to those in the Judicial Power Project-have tended to attribute to their opponents an erroneous prioritisation of 'justice' over 'legitimacy'. They claim that those who make the case for judicial review do so on the grounds that 'judges know best', and that judicial review therefore helps promote the overall justness of a state's social order-rather than on the grounds that it helps enhance the overall legitimacy of a state's authority. This article interrogates that line of attack. It explores its roots in political theory, particularly the idea that those guilty of it (such as Aileen Kavanagh) follow in John Rawls's supposed prioritisation of justice over legitimacy. And it turns to republican and later-Rawlsian thinking on these two concepts to see whether it may offer a sound basis upon which the case for judicial review can be made … legitimately.

The new law of contractual discretion is developing apace. This article addresses three major issues in this dynamic field. First, the article propounds an analytical framework for understanding the nature and practice of reasonableness review in the contractual setting, based on doctrinal exegesis of the full run of cases on contractual discretion. Significantly, the analysis demonstrates that review of contractual discretion is characterised by a 'variable intensity' approach: the intensity with which courts scrutinise exercises of discretion is dependent on a series of contextual factors. Second, the article analyses the genus of the implied term, which imposes legal constraints on contractual decision-makers, arguing that the term is properly conceptualised as a term implied in law. Third, the article addresses the remedial consequences of non-compliance with implied fetters, identifying three different remedial models in the case law. The article challenges the common assertion that damages are the invariable remedy, arguing that an impugned exercise of discretion may be void or voidable.

There have been several important formal changes to the United Kingdom's constitution over the past few decades, including devolution to Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales; the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights in domestic law; and the creation of a new Supreme Court. This article is about the informal semantic changes that may have accompanied these formal changes. It focuses on several central concepts: parliamentary sovereignty, the rule of law, the separation of powers, devolution, and human rights. Using a recently developed machine learning method to analyse a massive corpus of parliamentary debate, the article gauges the extent to which these concepts have become more (or less) related to the meaning of the UK's constitution in parliamentary discourse. Ultimately, the analysis supports some important theoretical expectations about the changing nature of the constitution, including the claim that parliamentary sovereignty is now a less significant concept for the meaning of the constitution than it once was.

This article sketches out two distinct attitudes towards textuality in international law, namely international hermeneutics and international poetics. It argues that these two attitudes towards textuality espouse very different types of dualism of thought. This difference bears major implications on how the international lawyer approaches international legal texts. In exposing these two attitudes towards textuality and the distinct types of dualism they reveal, this article makes a plea for a greater embrace of international poetics by international lawyers, and thus for a complete remoulding of international lawyers' dualist patterns of thought.

How should criminal conduct be divided among different offences? To date, this question has received only one serious answer: the fair labelling principle, which states that distinctions among offences should reflect distinctions in the nature and seriousness of the wrongdoing that they criminalise. This article argues that the fair labelling principle should not be the sole or main principle governing offence differentiation decisions. Its argument consists in three main claims. First, the only plausible foundation for the principle is a duty to ensure that the blame expressed through criminal conviction is allocated justly. Second, this duty cannot be absolute: if it were, the result would be an absurdly highly differentiated criminal law. Third, several other factors are relevant to how we should differentiate offences, and these will often count against the demands of just blaming. A complete normative account of offence differentiation must thus extend beyond fair labelling-or indeed, any single principle.