Is it the Right Revolution? On Tushnet's The Rights Revolution in The Twentieth Century

2009 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 483-494 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rivka Weill

This is yet another manuscript by one of the most interesting and prolific American constitutional law professors that the Critical Legal Studies movement has produced. Mark Tushnet has written extensively and influentially in the fields of both American and comparative constitutional law. He is a known expert on twentieth century American legal history, bringing this expertise to bear in writing his ambitious and most recent book, The Rights Revolution in the Twentieth Century.This review of an early draft of the book will consist of three parts. The first portrays Tushnet's descriptive enterprise in a nutshell. The second discusses the historical dimensions of Tushnet's work. The last evaluates its contribution to legal theory along the lines suggested by Alon Harel.

2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Cotterrell

AbstractThe work of the Polish–Russian scholar Leon Petrażycki from the early decades of the twentieth century holds a strikingly paradoxical position in the literature of juristic and socio-legal scholarship: on the one hand, lauded as a supremely valuable contribution to knowledge about the nature of law and, on the other, widely neglected and little known. This paper asks how far Petrażycki's theories, expressed in writings by and about him available to an international readership, can provide insight for contemporary socio-legal studies – not as historical background but as living ideas. How far can his work speak to current issues and inform current debates? What obstacles stand in the way of this? Why have few international scholars engaged with his theories despite their rigour and originality? The paper starts from this last issue before addressing the others. It argues that Petrażycki's radical legal theory offers strikingly distinctive resources for rethinking issues about the role of law in multicultural societies, the nature of developing transnational law, and the significance of law as an aspect or expression of culture.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 270
Author(s):  
Ibnu Sina Chandranegara

Research on "checks and balances" in legal studies often raises high quality questions such as, is the checks and balances a doctrine, principle, or legal theory, or maybe precisely the formula of power in politics. History has been recorded that in any discussions regarding the formation of the constitutional separation, division and smelting power is something that is popular to be discussed before and even after becoming the constitution. Therefore, the casting of checks and balances into the constitution is an interesting study to determine the portion and posture. This study used using legal normative methodology. In addition, comparative studies on constitution was conducted using classic and modern constitutional law literature. Several approaches were used on this research such as, historical, political, economical approach on understanding the practice on checks and balance which stated in constitutions in some countries.


2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 467-470
Author(s):  
MILINDA BANERJEE ◽  
KERSTIN VON LINGEN

In recent years, there has been a deepening convergence between scholarship on global intellectual history and on legal history. To take just one example, a recent book on international law, by Arnulf Becker Lorca (2014), carries “global intellectual history” in its subtitle—a stance related to the author's emphasis on the constitutive role in the field of non-European legal actors. A sustained reflection on the convergence between legal studies and global intellectual history, however, still remains a desideratum, at least in the sense that we do not yet have even a basic platform where scholars with different space/time and (trans-) cultural specialization come together to reflect on how studying legal concepts gains from global intellectual history. This forum, which results from a conference organized at Heidelberg University in 2016, attempts a preliminary intervention here. The introductory remarks are not meant to be conclusive; they invite responses.


Author(s):  
Benito Aláez Corral ◽  
Francisco Balaguer Callejón ◽  
Raul Canosa Usera ◽  
María Jesús García Morales ◽  
Javier García Roca ◽  
...  

En esta encuesta un grupo de Catedráticos de Derecho Constitucional contestan un conjunto de preguntas sobre el uso del método comparado en el derecho constitucional español, y sobre la influencia de modelos o referentes extranjeros durante el proceso constituyente, en la actividad legislativa y en la del Tribunal Constitucional, así como también algunas preguntas sobre los estudios de derecho constitucional comparado.In this academic survey a group of Constitutional Law Professors answer some questions about the role of the comparative method in the Spanish constitutional law, and the influence of foreign models in the constitutional process, the legislator and the Constitutional Court, as well as about the present situation of comparative constitutional law studies.


1999 ◽  
Vol 93 (2) ◽  
pp. 413-428 ◽  
Author(s):  
John P. McCormick

Radical criticisms of liberalism's method of legal adjudication focus on its excessive formalism, its tendency to foster indeterminacy, and its naive maintenance of the separation of political from legal concerns. I examine these arguments as they appear in the work of Carl Schmitt, on the Right, and the Critical Legal Studies (CLS) movement, on the Left. Jürgen Habermas has recently attempted to refute the positions of these most scalding twentieth-century critics of liberal adjudication. I argue that by so extensively engaging these theorists, and in fact liberalism itself, on their own grounds, Habermas has abandoned some of the distinctive strengths of what he previously practiced as a critical social theory in his new reflexive or discourse theory of law.


Author(s):  
John Henry Schlegel

Historians affiliated with Critical Legal Studies (CLS) treated their critiques of law as complete when finished, as the last thing that could be said on the subject. Why this is so is quite unclear, especially given that they regularly cited late twentieth-century scholarship that offered reasons why all groundings for thought were debatable. By not critiquing their own set of assumptions as best as they could, CLS historians created the appearance that they believed they occupied a position outside of history and interest, this at the same time that they were objecting to the implicit adoption of such a position by others. CLS scholars thus lost the possibility of strengthening their own scholarship by failing to put their own grounding assumptions under pressure. A modest examination of CLS historical work on labour law suggests how a self-critical awareness might have strengthened even the strongest of such scholarship.


1951 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 648-670 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kurt Wilk

If, after the nineteenth century, there remained any question concerning the universality of international law, or of its fundamental rules, it appeared to be largely one of legal history. But as the world of the twentieth century has come to be divided by political ideologies, their legal ramifications have given the question new actuality as one of basic legal theory. That the Family of Nations, or the subjects of international law, embraced virtually all states of the world seemed no longer open to serious doubt when non-Christian states wholly outside Europe took part in the Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907 and when participation by such states was continued and further extended in the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and in the League of Nations. Yet the same period that saw the unquestioned global expansion of international law has had to face new challenges to its unity as a single, universally valid legal system. They were raised chiefly by German Nazis and Soviet Communists, or in turn against them by their respective critics and opponents. Confronted with these challenges, the universal validity of international law appears no longer as an existingphenomenon that may be traced back to its origins and on to its eventual completion, but as a debatable assumption that stands to be justified or rejected in the light of fresh examination.


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