“学”德沃金判案与德沃金判案——两种法律解释方法的案例比较

法律比较是反思法律的方法论与认识论的路径。功能比较法以比较对象和比较样本为基本概念,关注法律的功能及其实际效果。法律解释方法是法律规范的功能发挥机制中必不可少的关键一环。从中美两国各自的法治背景来看,德沃金所主张的法律的建设性的整体阐释是一种促进人们反思法律、反思自我的方法,对于思考中国的法治进程具有一定的启发意义。     

论和谐社会建构中司法的克制主义立场

我国和谐社会的建构是以法治为基础的,而法治就是法律主治.当前我国法治社会建构初级阶段的特定时代背景要求倡导严格法治主义的法治理念,法律解释的权威根源于法律文本自身,严格法治主义的法治理念表现在司法领域中,就是强调司法对法律文本含义的严格贯彻,这需要我们重视文义解释的法律解释方法,遵循文义解释方法优先性的元规则.严格法治主义的这一法律解释立场需要捍卫司法克制主义,文义解释方法的优先性元规则是需要我们倡导司法的克制主义立场,这也是实现司法方法科学化和维护法律权威的要求.     

作为间接法源的习惯法——刑法视域下习惯法立法机能之开辟

罪刑法定原则仿佛是套在习惯法头上的一个法箍,对刑法领域中习惯法的机能释放,施加着巨大的压制性作用。然而,正是在对主流理论———“罪刑法定排斥习惯法”这一论断的正本清源之中,隐含着挖掘和开辟习惯法机能的深刻契机。本文即是在这一进路指引下,对习惯法在刑法领域的功能予以拓展的初步努力。本文将着重分析习惯法在刑事立法领域的机能。文章在必要性与可能性的分析框架内,对习惯法作为刑事立法的间接法源的功能予以了初步考察。进一步地,文章以刑事和解制度为切入点,例证和说明了习惯法之于刑事立法的重要渊源式价值。     

Meanings of terrorism

Terrorism is a notoriously plastic word, depending on user, audience, and political context. This paper focuses on shifts in its meanings since the early 1970s. As federal statutes made terrorism a criminal offense, common usage changed from a broad meaning to one that specified terrorism as a political crime. The argument is that the state shapes meaning and public discourse through law. Peircean semiotics and the semiotic philosophy of Russian linguist Vološinov provide a framework to explore relationships among politics, law, and civil life. Applied to the events of September 11, 2001 such an analysis further allows better understanding of certain interpreters of the September 11 attacks, notably Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, and Jürgen Habermas.     

试论中国制定行政程序法典的必要性

行政程序法典化是20世纪以来行政法发展的一种世界性趋势,制定一部统一的中国行政程序法势在必行。本文在分析了当前关于行政程序立法模式的几种观点的基础上,主张我国应尽快制定一部统一的行政程序法,它是我国建立社会主义市场经济体制的必然要求,是保护公民合法权益的必然选择,也是适应我国加入WTO的必然趋势。     

试论普遍义务及其对国际刑法的影响

“普遍义务”是指国家对整个国际社会所负有的义务,是近代国际法中最为重要的概念之一。自该概念于上世纪70年代首次出现在国际法院的判决书中以来,它一直对国际法,特别是国际刑法的发展具有潜移默化的影响。研究普遍义务的含义、内容及其法律后果,并就该概念对国际刑法的影响加以分析,将为全面、深刻地理解国际刑法的内涵与发展具有积极意义。     

反垄断法再分配功能初探

法律是社会利益资源和权利的分配书。经济法是利益资源和权利的一种再分配法,是在民商法等法律所作的权利分配的基础上,对原有权利安排作出适当调整和再分配。反垄断法同样具有再分配功能,通过对美国反托拉斯法的产生历史的考察可以证明这一点。我国的社会现实也需要反垄断法再分配功能的发挥。     

船员法的部门属性及其主要制度研究

文章分析了船员法的部门属性及其主要制度的特殊性 ,从而得出船员法为海上劳动法的结论。希望对以后我国船员法的立法工作起到理论上的指导作用。     

The meaning of anger for Australian Indigenous offenders: the significance of context

The problem of overrepresentation of Indigenous offenders in Australian prisons highlights the need for effective tertiary intervention programs within correctional settings as a way of reducing Indigenous reincarceration. This study seeks to explore meanings of anger within an Indigenous context that might inform the development of more acceptable and potentially more effective rehabilitation programs. A methodology that acknowledges the importance of narrative, context, and culture was devised to explore how anger as an emotion is understood and experienced by a group of Indigenous men in a South Australian prison. Although some of the major themes reflected experiences of anger common to many offenders, it was evident that for these Indigenous men, anger was experienced within a broad social and political context that imbued the experience of anger with layers of culturally specific meaning. It is suggested that these layers of meaning constitute sufficient difference to warrant further exploration.     

Making War on Terror? Global Lessons from Northern Ireland

In place of the simple modelling employed in anti-terrorist legal discourse, this article posits an interactive model of the relationship between the state and violent political actors, exploring law's role in both the repression and mobilisation of challengers. Drawing on social movement theory, it hypothesises a process of 'legally implicated mobilisation' which takes account both of law's presence and its partial absence in 'legal grey zones' during violent conflict, and it suggests how law may impact upon key elements of the mobilisation process. The hypothesis is applied to qualitative data from Northern Ireland on violent challengers. The data point to the importance of 'messaging' about law in the state of exception, supporting claims that law can have a 'damping' effect on violent conflict. The relationship between repression and violence is partly symbiotic, and in the global 'war on terror,' prisoner-abuse may have a mobilising effect on violent challengers.     

Rethinking subjectivity in law and ideology: A semiotic perspective

Post-Renaissance thought ushered in a new global optimism; however, postmodernist thought has recently challenged many of the claims to truth that form the basis of this line of inquiry and semiotic analysis has been one of its critical tools. Accordingly, this paper focuses on establishing a psychoanalytic semiotic perspective in law which is materially based. Law, ideology, and subjectivity are investigated in terms of discourse analysis. A Lacanian framework is integrated with a critically informed analysis that examines how the ‘what happened’ in the courtroom is constructed. It is argued that subjectivity is intrinsically connected with discourse. Two levels of discourse analysis are examined: the level of juridico-semiotic production, and the sphere of intra- and inter-subjective semiotic production. The notion of a semiotic grid constituted by three axes is developed, and extraverbal context is conceptualized as determinative. An alternative conceptualization of subjectivity in law based on Lacan is then argued for.     

Fazhi vs/and/or Rule of Law?: A Semiotic Venture into Chinese Law

The paper is an investigation offazhi (rule of law) in China. The studyproposes a tentative semiotic framework for theinterpretation of the rule of law as a legalconcept to be applied to China in the light ofits recent incorporation into the ChineseConstitution. The paper argues that legalconcepts such as the rule of law are triadic innature and their constituents are relative,relational and contextual in the semioticinterpretative process. The study examines howthe concept can be explicated with the thin orformal theory of the rule of law as a frame ofreference, and how the semiotic model maycontribute to the understanding of the Chineserule of law or the lack thereof. This approachalso attempts to account for the gap betweenthe legal ideal and reality in China andcanvasses cross-cultural considerations. In thefirst part of the paper, a semiotic frameworkfor legal concepts is postulated forconstructing the meaning of the rule of law,followed by its application to contemporaryChina.     

The War on Terrorism: When the Exception Becomes the Rule

This article argues that the semiotics of the war on terrorism points at a significant shift in United States' discourses on security. This shift can best be described as a move from defence to prevention or from danger to risk. Whereas the notion of defence is closely connected to the state of war, this article claims that the war on terrorism instead institutionalises a permanent state of exception. Building upon Agamben's notion that the state of exception is the non-localisable foundation of a political order, this article makes two claims. First, it argues that semiotic shifts in United States' security politics point at a general trend that, to some extent, structures international American interventions. In a sense, the semiotic shifts in American security discourse declare the United States as the sovereign of the global order: they allow the United States to exempt itself from the (international) framework of law, while demanding compliance by others. Second, it claims that this production of American sovereignty is paralleled by reducing the life of (some) individuals to the bare life of homo sacer(life that can be killed without punishment). In the war on terrorism, the production of bare life is mainly brought about by bureaucratic techniques of risk management and surveillance, which reduce human life to biographic risk profiles.     

Food,Meaning, and the Law: Confessions of a Vegan Semiotician

The essay that follows combines several genres along an unconventional path. It departs from the psycho-semiotic analysis of a personal turning point: the author’s ‘conversion’ to veganism. After exposing the rationale for this change in semiotic terms, however, the essay extends its theorization to the social level, inquiring about the intersection between vegan conviction and commensality. In a world where different food ideologies co-occur, converge, conflict, and sometimes clash, what is the role of the law in establishing value priorities and strike a balance among different sociocultural and political trends? The essay concludes with a synthetic definition, in semiotic terms, of the perspective on food, meaning, and law promoted by the author: a vegan liberalism that is tolerant of food pluralism but simultaneously militates for the evolution of culture and society toward the accomplishment of a utopia, that of a world immune from the exploitation of animal suffering.     

Preserving the Copyright Balance: Statutory and Constitutional Preemption of Contract-Based Claims

Some copyright owners in the digital age have turned from copyright to contract law to protect their intellectual property, employing licensing agreements that override fair use and other public interest safeguards. State laws or common law claims that conflict with general copyright policy may be preempted through application of Section 301 of the Copyright Act or through general Supremacy Clause preemption. This article examines the role of preemption in protecting the public interest against attempts to circumvent the copyright law through such means. After examining the relationship between copyright and contract law, the article reviews the case law regarding statutory preemption and Supremacy Clause preemption of contract-based claims. It concludes that application of Section 301 preemption is not sufficient to protect longstanding principles in copyright law that are at risk from the increased use of contracts to displace default copyright rules. The article calls for the courts to return to Supremacy Clause preemption to prevent the degradation of important public interest safeguards in the copyright law.     

Deadly Words: State Power and the Entanglement of Speech and Violence in Hate Crime

Any analysis of hate crime that attempts to separate speech from action, language from violence, faces epistemological difficulties that limit the range of conversations about laws responding to identity-based injury in the United States. Active debates have raged over the implications of bias crime sentence enhancement laws for the protection of ‘freespeech’, thus addressing the inextricability of language and meaning from hate crime. Those in favor of legal responses to identity-based injury tend toward essentialist claims which assume the stability of identity and of meanings inherent in words or actions. Those opposed assert the impossibility of codifying the meaning of words or actions in the law, and/or they worry about the reification of (victimized) identities accompanying bias crime statutes. This article argues that the focus on language and speech in these debates simultaneously enables an evasion of discussion about the law's response to bias-related violence, and misleadingly assumes too much stability in the functions of law and the nature of state power. Interviews conducted by the author with individuals involved in a 1992 racist hate crime are used to show the diverse elements of state power suffusing the incident and its aftermath. An analysis of the crime's investigation and prosecution under a Maryland hate crime statute suggests that law enforcement officers are primarily using hate crime laws as public relations tools in a fight against community perceptions that they are themselves bigots. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Trademarks as a System of Signs: A Semiotic Look at Trademark Law

This essay attempts to explore trademark law and the marks themselves from a semiotic viewpoint to provide a deeper understanding to (trademark) law as a system of signs. Although the language of trademark law may suggest slightly different meanings, for the purpose of this essay “trademark” will refer to an area of law (unless otherwise indicated) and “mark” will refer to the individual sign. The first part of this essay will provide a brief overview of semiotics. Second, it will outline a general look at trademark law as set forth in the Lanham Act. The third section is a semiotic approach to provide a deeper understanding of trademark law. Finally, the essay will analyze a seminal trademark case whilst using semiotics to address legal meaning within the case. Semiotics teaches that no absolute meaning can be found. This essay, then, attempts to secure at least one particular meaning of the Qualitex case and what it means in trademark law today.     

Moral theories of torts: Their scope and limits: Part I

One approach to legal theory is to provide some sort of rational reconstruction of all or of a large body of the common law. For philosophers of law this has usually meant trying to rationalize a body of law under one or another principle of justice. This paper explores the efforts of the leading tort theorists to provide a moral basis — for the law of torts. The paper is divided into two parts. In the first part I consider and reject the view that tort law is best understood as falling either within the ambit of the principle of retributive justice, a comprehensive theory of moral responsibility, or an ideal of fairness inherent in the idea that one should impose on others only those risks others impose on one. The second part of the paper distinguishes among various conceptions of corrective or compensatory justice and considers arguments — including previous arguments by the author himself — to the effect that tort law is best understood as rooted in principles of corrective justice. This paper argues that although the use of principles of justice may render defensible many (but by no means all) of the claims to repair and to liability recognized in torts, it cannot explain why we have adopted a tort system as the approach to vindicating those claims. Some other principle — probably not one of justice — is needed to explain why it is that the victims claims to repair is satisfied by having his losses shifted to his injurer — rather than through some other means of doing so. The paper concludes that the law of torts cannot be understood — in the sense of being given a rational reconstruction — under any one principle of morality.     

What's Law Got To Do With it? How and Why Law Matters in the Regulation of Sex Work

Drawing on recent empirical work that considers the relationship between different legal approaches to the 'problem' of prostitution, this article argues that the frequently drawn distinction between apparently diametrically opposed positions, such as prohibitionism and legalization, is certainly less significant than is often assumed and may, in fact, be illusory. This lack of distinction raises serious questions as to law's role in regulating sex work. In response to claims that law is 'merely' symbolic in its influence, I argue that these similarities arise precisely because law does matter (albeit in a different way from that assumed by a sovereign-centred understanding of the legal complex), and offer a complex and critical account of the role of modern law in regulating sex work. This approach not only more accurately elucidates the ways in which law supports dominant structures, in this case neo-liberalism, but offers some optimism for its (albeit limited) potential to transform.