Public Law and the Emergence of the Political

2013 ◽  
pp. 25-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Thornhill
Keyword(s):  
City, State ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 17-50
Author(s):  
Ran Hirschl

This chapter examines four introductory dimensions of the political and constitutional discourse around cities. The first is the tremendous interest in cities throughout much of the human sciences as contrasted with the silence of public law in general, and of comparative constitutional law in particular. Next, the chapter takes a look at the dominant statist stance embedded in constitutional law, in particular as it addresses sovereignty and spatial governance of the polity. A brief account of what national constitutions actually say about cities, and more significantly what they do not is then given. Finally, the chapter turns to the tendency in political discourse on collective identity to understand the “local” almost exclusively at the national or regional levels, rather than distinguishing urban interests from those of the state. Taken together, the four angles of city constitutional (non)status examined here highlight the bewildering silence of contemporary constitutional discourse with respect to cities and urbanization, as well as the strong statist outlook embedded in national constitutional orders, effectively rendering the metropolis a constitutionally non-tenable entity.


Author(s):  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Nicolai Von Eggers

In this text, Giorgio Agamben argues that the concept of democracy attests to a political, ontological amphibology: on the one side, democracy describes a constitution of a political order (and in this sense it belongs to public law); on the other side, democracy is a certain form of administration (in which case it belongs to administrative practice). It is argued that this amphibology can be located in the political theories of Aristotle and Jean-Jacques Rousseau who have been instrumental in forming our present conception of politics. Consequently, we misunderstand the fundamental nature of politics, and any hopes of genuine political life must therefore break with this tradition of Western political philosophy.


1977 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erich Hahn

This opening statement from Robert Mohl's study of ministerial responsibility, published in 1837, summed up an axiom of mid-nineteenth-century German liberalism. However, as Otto Pflanze has shown recently, most German liberals did not demand the political or parliamentary responsibility of ministers. They believed that legal responsibility, or the chambers' right to impeach ministers, would guarantee constitutional government and thereby fulfill their Rechtsstaat ideal, which called for the strict observance of public law.


Daímon ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 17-32
Author(s):  
David Guerrero

Una perspectiva reciente sobre los fundamentos normativos del derecho público ha propuesto concebir las relaciones entre ciudadanía y Estado como una “relación fiduciaria”, usando deberes fiduciarios del ámbito iusprivado para justificar limitaciones jurídicas y morales al poder del Estado. La gobernanza fiduciaria también ha sido señalada como una característica distintiva del republicanismo y la soberanía popular, ya que sitúa a la comunidad política como fideicomitente y beneficiaria de cualquier acto administrativo. En este artículo se revisan algunas concepciones protomodernas del gobierno considerando sus justificaciones explícitamente fiduciarias. Concluye con una interpretación fiduciaria del iusnaturalismo Leveller, especialmente necesario para entender (y puede que restaurar) la relación de la gobernanza fiduciaria con la democracia.   A recent perspective on the normative foundations of public law has proposed to conceive citizen-state relationships as a “fiduciary relationship”, using private-law fiduciary duties to justify legal and moral constrains on state power. Fiduciary governance has also been pointed as a distinct feature of republicanism and popular sovereignty, since it places the political community as trustor and beneficiary of any administrative act. This paper reviews some early modern conceptions of government considering their explicit fiduciary justifications. It concludes with a fiduciary account of Leveller natural law, especially needed to understand (and maybe to restore) the relationship between fiduciary governance and democracy.


2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 89-104
Author(s):  
F. Q. TOJIDINOV

The relationship of politics to religion is a characteristic feature of Islam. The rules of divine law have to be unswervingly respected in all matters related to social, economic and political problems, or at least should not contradict the essence of Islamic principles. But despite this, the political doctrine of Islam — the caliphate, being the main medieval Muslim political thought, still caused many controversies due to the lack of regulations on the nature of power in the Qur’an and Sunnah. Many scholars of the Islamic world, understanding the origins of the problem, tried in every way to write the concept of Islamic political science. Even the existence of political ideas related to the authority in Islam in such Muslim writings on the caliph could not reveal and provide the theory of government from a religious point of view. These works are mostly devoted to the art of power and refl ect the norms of behavior of the ruling authorities and other representatives of the state in order to solve the necessary tasks of national importance. The Islamic experience of the thinkers who wrote these works justifi es the existence of an Islamic element in them. The art of government has been revealed to them since the emergence of Islamic practice in their lives. But there were theories of Islamic political science based on the Koran and the Sunnah. Al-Mawardi is one of the authors of books on Islamic political science. His books became very important for subsequent Muslim thinkers, this importance lies in the fact that the very followers who wrote works on political theory accepted al-Mawardi as an authority on this issue and continue to accept not only for the theory of the caliphate/imamate, but also because of his works related to public law. It is important to note that the work of al-Mawardi is the fi rst work, which presents the theory of the imamate/caliphate, taking into account the political conditions that surrounded him. 


2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
Maria Zabłocka

An Overview of the Work of Polish Scholarship on Roman Law in the First Decade of the Twenty-First Century Summary In the first decade of the 21st century Polish scholars of Roman Law accomplished a considerable amount of work, adopting an entirely new area of research. While publications on private law had constituted the predominant trend since the Second World War, especially in the first forty years of the period, articles on public law were an exception until recent times. In the last few years nearly twice as many monographs have been published on a broad range of issues in public law, such as the political system, administration, and criminal law, as on private law. The numer of articles on public law has also been much larger than on other branches of Roman law. The work of Polish Romanists has earned acknowledgement abroad, as evidenced by the invitations Polish researchers have been receiving to contribute to foreign occasional volumes, and by the digests of Polish books and articles which have appeared in the Italian scholarly journal «Iura. Rivista internazionale di diritto romano e antico».


Author(s):  
Vincent Chiao

This chapter extends the public law conception to the theory of criminalization. The first half of the chapter is devoted to considering whether the criminal law has a privileged subject matter or “core,” focusing especially on Feinberg’s influential account of the criminal law as a system of direct prohibitions. The chapter argues that a subject-matter-based approach has difficulty coming to grips with actual criminal law systems in modern administrative states, in which so-called mala prohibita offenses predominate. The second half of the chapter turns to sketching how we might approach the question of criminalization from a public law point of view, both in general and with reference to the political ideal of anti-deference (sketched in Chapter 3) in particular. Along the way, the chapter argues that the (very popular) wrongfulness principle turns out to be either empty or implausible, and hence that we should reject any version of the harm principle, or of legal moralism, that presupposes it.


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