The Rule of Law and the Rule of Empire: A.V. Dicey in Imperial Context

The idea of the rule of law, more ubiquitous globally today than ever before, owes a lasting debt to the work of Victorian legal theorist A. V. Dicey. But for all of Dicey's influence, little attention has been paid to the imperial entanglements of his thought, including on the rule of law. This article seeks to bring the imperial dimensions of Dicey's thinking about the rule of law into view. On Dicey's account, the rule of law represented a distinctive English civilisational achievement, one that furnished a liberal justification for British imperialism. And yet Dicey was forced to acknowledge that imperial rule at times required arbitrariness and formal inequality at odds with the rule of law. At a moment when the rule of law has once more come to license all sorts of transnational interventions by globally powerful political actors, Dicey's preoccupations and ambivalences are in many ways our own.     

历史精神与宪法:严复《政治讲义》论析

在严复的著译作品中,1906年出版的《政治讲义》是惟一一部专门阐述"政治科学"的著作,这使该文本在思想史上具有独特的意义。严复用历史的、比较的方法阐释政治学说,同时,也清楚地表明了自己坚持君主立宪的主张。本文尝试从宪政史的角度对严复君主立宪思想的背景与特质进行分析,重点考察严复那一代知识人思考政治法律问题的方法。同时,对严复在《政治讲义》中提出的量化的自由观、有责任的政府观、地方自治论等进行阐释。     

From Empire to Law: Customs Collection in the American Founding

This essay investigates the eighteenth‐century origins of the federal administrative state through the prism of customs collection. Until recently, historians and legal scholars have not closely studied collection operations in the early federal custom houses. Gautham Rao's National Duties: Custom Houses and the Making of the American State (2016) offers the most important and thoroughly documented historical analysis to date. Joining a growing historical literature that explains the early development of the US federal political system with reference to imperial models and precedents, Rao shows that the seductive power of commerce over the state within eighteenth‐century imperial praxis required the early federal customs officials to “negotiate” their authority with the mercantile community. A paradigm of accommodation dominated American customs collection well into the nineteenth century until Jacksonian centralizers finally began to dismantle it in the 1830s. The book brings welcome light to a long‐neglected topic in American history. It offers a nuanced, historiographically attentive interpretation that rests on a broad archival source base. It should command the sustained attention of legal, social, economic, and constitutional historians for it holds the potential to change the way historians think about early federal administration. This essay investigates one of the central questions raised in National Duties : How were the early American custom houses able to successfully administer a comprehensive program of customs duties when their imperial predecessors had proved unable to collect even narrowly tailored ones? Focusing on the Federalist period (1789–1800), I develop an answer that complements Rao's, highlighting administrative change over continuity and finding special significance in the establishment of the first federal judicial system.     

What is Left of the Law and Society Paradigm after Critique? Revisiting Gordon's “Critical Legal Histories”

For more than twenty‐five years, Robert Gordon's “Critical Legal Histories” has been savored by legal historians as one of the most incisive explanations available of what legal history can and should be. Gordon's essay, however, is of significance to the course of sociolegal studies in general. This commentary offers an appreciation, and a critique, of “Critical Legal Histories.” It explores Gordon's articulation of the central themes of critical legal studies, in particular his corrosion of functionalism and embrace of the indeterminacy thesis, and assesses the consequences for sociolegal and legal‐historical analysis of the resultant stress on the contingency and complexity of social life.     

关于西方宪法史研究的几点思考

关于西方宪法史的研究,很大程度上就是对于西方宪法历史的阐释。它涉及如何理解宪法的涵义,如何理解历史上宪法事件或者具有宪法意义的事件,如何理解宪法性事件之间的因果关系等等。这些先决性命题,决定了西方宪法的历史图景及其线索。古代希腊以降的早期宪法思想与宪制实践,为西方宪法的成熟奠定了良好的基础。近东一带的政治法制实践,对于西方宪法思想的形成和发展产生过重要的影响,这些早期的宪政因子对于西方宪法制度和宪法思想提供了重要的知识渊源。     

Religion and the Practices of Popular Constitutionalism: Sarah Gordon's The Spirit of the Law

Sarah Gordon's The Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America (2010) details the advent, beginning in the 1940s, of a “new constitutional world” pertaining to the religion clauses. By focusing on case studies, Gordon's narrative history shows the emergence, maturation, and waning of a rich historical moment in which religiously motivated popular constitutionalists had a profound impact on how the Constitution was technically interpreted by the courts. Shifting perspectives from history to ethnography, the essay synthesizes Gordon's stories to yield an anatomy of “religious” popular constitutionalism as it appears in Gordon's book and conjectures at what it might look like if we left court records behind.     

Reforming the United Kingdom Constitution: Law,Convention, Soft Law

The Governance of Britain Green Paper continues the programme of constitutional reform begun in 1997, and appears to reinforce the juridification of the UK's constitution. Nevertheless, several key reforms will be implemented not by legislation, but by creating new conventions. This article argues that such ‘declared’ conventions are best understood as a form of constitutional ‘soft law’, which attempt to influence constitutional behaviour rather than generating binding norms. Applying a regulatory analysis, it then argues that the case for a soft, rather than hard law approach to constitutional reform is weaker than its widespread use in the UK suggests. Finally, the article challenges the thesis that the political constitution is being replaced by a legal constitution, arguing that the government's attitude to constitutional reform still exhibits basic characteristics of political constitutionalism. Moreover, there is more to contemporary constitutional developments than a bipolar contest between political and legal constitutionalism.     

The Perils of ‘As If’ European Constitutionalism

This review article offers thoughts on Kaarlo Tuori's recent book, European Constitutionalism, and more particularly on what he calls the ‘disciplinary contest over the legal characterisation of the EU and its law’. As the book's title suggests, Tuori privileges the constitutional perspective in that contest, so much so—he freely admits—that his analysis ‘predetermine[s] how the EU and its law will be portrayed’. And therein also lies the book's main weakness. Tuori's predetermined ‘constitutional’ interpretation, like so much of the dominant legal discourse in the EU today, ultimately obscures the core contradiction in EU public law. National institutions are increasingly constrained in the exercise of their own constitutional authority but supranational institutions are unable to fill the void because Europeans refuse to endow them with the sine qua non of genuine constitutionalism: the autonomous capacity to mobilise fiscal and human resources in a compulsory fashion. The EU's lack of constitutional power in this robust sense derives from the absence of the necessary socio‐political underpinnings for genuine constitutional legitimacy—what we can call the power‐legitimacy nexus in EU public law. To borrow Tuori's own evocative phrase, the EU possesses at best a ‘parasitic legitimacy’ derived from the more robust constitutionalism of the Member States as well as from the positive connotations that using ‘constitutional’ terminology evokes regardless of its ultimate aptness. The result is an ‘as if’ constitutionalism, the core feature of which is an increasingly untenable principal‐agent inversion between the EU and the Member States, one with profound consequences for the democratic life of Europeans. The sustainability of integration over the long term depends on confronting these adverse features of ‘European constitutionalism’ directly, something that legal elites—whether EU judges, lawyers, or legal scholars—ignore at their peril.     

The Political Origins of English Private Law

The article seeks to explain the emergence of the view that English law contains a fundamental divide between public and private law. I propose to explain the divide, not as a conceptual distinction, grounded in the internal rationality of law, but as a response to the potential problem of political legitimacy arising from the fact that in the domain of private law courts are constantly engaged in making substantive law. That by itself shows that the divide between public and private law is politically motivated, but I further argue that the prevailing view of law among proponents of the divide revives Dicey's conception of the common law within the narrower domain of private law. Since Dicey's views are widely believed to be motivated by his political views, if I am right, this lends support to the conclusion that the views of defenders of the divide are grounded in similar political positions.     

我国网络舆论监督的法律文化分析

互联网自20世纪90年代中期开始在我国推广,经过20年左右的发展,已经成为社会生活中的新兴信息传播媒体,和传统媒体一样,互联网对以政府为主导的社会公共事务的正常运转,起到重要的监督作用.通过法律文化视角对这种网络舆论监督机制进行审视,并对目前网络舆论监督中存在的一些问题进行分析,有助于加快社会主义法治建设的历史进程.     

An Analysis of Policy‐Based Congressional Responses to the U.S. Supreme Court's Constitutional Decisions

While Congress can attempt to overrule constitutional decisions of the Supreme Court by initiating the constitutional amendment process, an amendment is rarely a practicable option. Instead, Congress regularly tries to modify the impact of constitutional decisions with ordinary legislation. I analyze policy‐based responses to the Supreme Court's constitutional decisions that were initiated in Congress between 1995 and 2010. For each responsive proposal, I consider the relationship between the proposed legislation and the Court's legal holding and the relationship between the proposal and the public policy associated with the Court's decision. I find that Congress enjoys considerable success in reversing the policy impacts of the Court's decisions but is limited in its ability to overcome the Court's legal rules.     

The Legacy of the Maastricht-Urteil and the Pluralist Movement

Abstract:  The Maastricht-Urteil of the German Constitutional Court of October 1993 has left a deep mark on EU law. Although some may consider it as part of legal history, the decision has never been overruled, and the ideas behind it are very much alive. This article tries to examine the legacy of that decision. From a practical point of view, the article focuses on the following issues: the current situation in Germany; the influence on other constitutional or supreme courts and on constitutional reforms in some Member States; the influence on the European Court of Justice and on the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe. Regarding theory, three sections of the article discuss a number of widespread ' idées reçues ' contained in the Maastricht-Urteil on notions such as the state, constituent power ( pouvoir constituant ), and democracy. The next section presents the movement of legal pluralism as an attempt to come to terms with the Maastricht-Urteil and its legacy. It criticises the radical versions of legal pluralism in view of the damage they may cause to essential dimensions of the rule of law. The final section reflects on the real motives behind the Maastricht-Urteil and its legacy, and on possible future developments.     

The Emergence of Penal Extremism in California: A Dynamic View of Institutional Structures and Political Processes

This article examines legal and political developments in California in the 1970s and early 1980s that led to extreme changes in the state's use of imprisonment. It uses historical research methods to illustrate how institutional and political processes interacted in dynamic ways that continuously unsettled and reshaped the crime policy field. It examines crime policy developments before and after the passage of the state's determinate sentencing law to highlight the law's long‐term political implications and to illustrate how it benefited interest groups pushing for harsher punishment. It emphasizes the role executives played in shaping these changes, and how the law's significance was as much political as legal because it transformed the institutional logics that structured criminal lawmaking. These changes, long sought by the law enforcement lobby, facilitated crime's politicization and ushered in a new era of frenetic and punitive changes in criminal law and punishment. This new context benefited politicians who supported extreme responses to crime and exposed the crime policy process to heightened degrees of popular scrutiny. The result was a political obsession with crime that eschewed moderation and prioritized prison expansion above all else.     

Law and Politics Reconsidered: A New Constitutional History of Dred Scott

This essay synthesizes recent writing on the constitutional history of slavery, featuring Mark Graber's Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil (2006) . It offers a historical and legal analysis of Dred Scott that attempts to clarify the roles of both law and politics in controversial judicial decisions. It joins Graber in rehabilitating Chief Justice Taney's Dred Scott opinion as a plausible implementation of a Constitution that was born in slavery and grew only more suffused with slavery over time. It integrates much recent writing on the social, political, and constitutional history of slavery to develop the context in which the Dred Scott opinions must be read. And it finds that Justice Curtis's celebrated dissent amounted to an unjudicial manipulation of the law, albeit for the higher purpose of striking at the political hegemony of the slaveholding class.
This essay is an abridgement of a longer work ( Leonard 2009 ) that offers, among other things, further analysis of the unjudicial character of Curtis's dissent.     

Manx Law: A Contribution from the Isle of Man*

This article provides a rare insight into the legal system and jurisprudence of the Isle of Man by the island's Second Deemster.

The author describes, inter alia, the judicial structure, sentencing and impact of international jurisprudence on the work of the judiciary of the Isle of Man, before outlining the island's constitutional position with the United Kingdom and with England and Wales.

The author argues against intellectual and judicial insularity: ‘Laws should be developed and problems solved by reaching out for knowledge and solutions that may be provided by approaches from jurisdictions beyond our local frontiers’. However, in reaching out to foreign jurisdictions, it is emphasised that account must be taken of local history, traditions, laws and needs.     

Queer Legal History: A Field Grows Up and Comes Out

This essay examines recent scholarship on the legal history of sexuality in the United States. It focuses on Margot Canaday's The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Modern America (2009) and Marc Stein's Sexual Injustice: Supreme Court Decisions from Griswold to Roe (2010). It also reviews recent work on the history of marriage, including Sarah Barringer Gordon's The Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America (2010) and George Chauncey's Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today's Debate Over Gay Equality (2004), and the history of military law Defending America: Military Culture and the Cold‐War Court Martial (2005), by Elizabeth Lutes Hillman. The essay argues that this scholarship is significant because it offers a different view of sex and power than the one derived from the early writing of Michel Foucault. “Queer legal history” treats the liberalism of the 1960s‐1970s as sexually discriminatory as well as liberatory. It underlines the exclusions that were part of public policy under the federal G.I. Bill and the New Deal welfare state.     

Walter Scott and the Reform of the Scottish Judicature 1806–10

The significance of the effort to reform the Court of Session in the early nineteenth century lies in the fact that it represented the first time Westminster had proposed to alter a key Scottish institution protected by the articles of the 1707 Act of Union. Scott as a Clerk of Session played a crucial role in the process, initially resisting reform and then undertaking to shape it. At the same time, his literary patriotism as Britain's best-selling poet was criticized by Britain's most famous cultural critic, Francis Jeffrey, a fellow member of the Faculty of Advocates. Jeffrey as editor of the Edinburgh Review wrote a controversial review of Scott's best-selling poem about the Battle of Flodden, Marmion, which accused Scott of being too ‘English’ in his treatment of this Scottish tragedy. And yet, more than Jeffrey, Scott was opposed to the Whig project of reforming Scottish law to make it more ‘constitutional’ or ‘English’. Using original documents held by the National Archives of Scotland, the Advocates Library, and the National Library of Scotland, this article examines Scott's role in making this controversy a matter of interest for both British literature and legal history.     

论表达自由的界限（下）——从比较法、特别是普通法的视角切入

表达自由是自由社会的人们享有的一项带有普遍性的、根本性的权利,通常表现为宪法或法律规定的权利。鉴于各国政治和法律体制以及文化环境之不同,人们享有该项权利的普遍性和充分性存在很多差别,因此,可从比较法,特别是普通法的角度关注该项根本权利的行使及对其设定的界限和施加的限制,集中展示强加这等界限或限制的法理学说、理据以及方法和途径,并分析提出具有普遍意义的结论。     

论表达自由的界限（上）——从比较法、特别是普通法的视角切入

表达自由是自由社会的人们享有的一项带有普遍性的、根本性的权利,通常表现为宪法或法律规定的权利。鉴于各国政治和法律体制以及文化环境之不同,人们享有该项权利的普遍性和充分性存在很多差别,因此,可从比较法,特别是普通法的角度关注该项根本权利的行使及对其设定的界限和施加的限制,集中展示强加这等界限或限制的法理学说、理据以及方法和途径,并分析提出具有普遍意义的结论。     

The Persistent Significance of Jurisdiction*

According to Joseph Raz's sources thesis, the existence and content of authoritative directives must be identifiable by resort to the social fact of their provenance from a de facto authority, without regard to any of the normative considerations that the authority in question is supposed to rely on in its judgment. This article argues that the sources thesis fails to account for the role of jurisdictional considerations (namely, considerations about the scope of a de facto authority's power) in the identification of valid law. It examines a legal system with a legislature and courts and a practice of constitutional review of legislation by the courts for its conformity with fundamental rights and argues that the special normative status of (at least some) authoritative directives in this legal system depends on respect for jurisdiction. An assessment of whether an authority has stayed intra vires involves recourse to the normative considerations that it is the authority's job to weigh up. This criticism of the sources thesis highlights the importance of incorporating jurisdiction into our philosophical accounts of legal authority.