It is commonly understood that in its focus on rights and obligations law is centrally concerned with organising responsibility. In defining how obligations are created, in contract or property law, say, or imposed, as in tort, public, or criminal law, law and legal institutions are usually seen as society’s key mode of asserting and defining the content and scope of responsibilities. This book takes the converse view: legal institutions are centrally involved in organising irresponsibility. Particularly with respect to the production (...) of large-scale harms – including extensive human rights violations, forms of colonialism, or environmental or nuclear devastation – and in opposition to conventional understandings of responsibility in law, morality and politics, the book provides a detailed analysis of the ways in which legal institutions – their practices, concepts, and categories – themselves operate as much to deflect responsibility for harms suffered as they do to acknowledge them. Drawing on a series of case studies from local, national, and global concerns the book analyses how law facilitates dispersals and disavowals of responsibility, and it shows how it does so in consistent and patterned ways. In assessing how this ‘organised irresponsibility’ operates, and what its consequences are for both legal analysis and society generally, a thoroughgoing re-evaluation of law’s methods, operation, and consequences is required. At stake is nothing less than a fundamental re-assessment of the role of modern law in the production and legitimation of human suffering. This innovative and interdisciplinary book provides a sustained challenge to conventional thinking about law and legal institutions. It will be of major interest to those working in law, political and legal theory, sociology and moral philosophy. (shrink)

This article is based on the Inaugural Adam Smith Lecture in Jurisprudence given at the University of Glasgow in 2016. It asks this question: is it not an age of obligation that we live in as much as, if not more so than, an age of rights? To answer this it explores a number of different senses of obligation to be found across a range of social practices. After an overview of some of the main concerns of Smith’s work, it (...) looks at two types of ‘obligation practices’ prominent in contemporary society: those that make rights effective, and those that operationalise debt. In paying attention to the often less visible work done by and through obligations, it also highlights certain vulnerabilities citizens are susceptible to when the distinction between obligation and obedience threatens to collapse. (shrink)

This book offers a series of original essays by an international group of scholars whose work looks comparatively at law's attempts to deal with the past.

This new book takes an innovative and novel approach to the study of jurisprudence. Drawing together a range of specialists, making original contributions, it provides a summary, analysis, and critique of basic themes in, and major contributions to, the study of jurisprudence. The book explores issues and ideas in jurisprudence in a way that integrates them with legal study more broadly, avoiding the tendency in recent years for the subject to become overly inward-looking, specialist and technical, leaving students and the (...) subject adrift. It picks up mid-range concepts such as rights, sovereignty, and adjudication and charts their interrelation and uses in law and legal theory. The approach taken to the subject is an interdisciplinary one, and involves making linkages with contemporary issues in political and social theory, such as the changing role of the state, forms of dispute resolution and the courts. It also addresses topics not normally covered, or covered only indirectly in other jurisprudence textbooks, such as globalisation and legal culture. Its coverage is therefore broad and links legal, political, philosophical, and social analysis. (shrink)

Law and modernity -- The Advent of modernity -- Theorists and critics of modern law -- Transformations of modern law -- Legal system and legal reasoning -- Legality and validity -- Theories of legal reasoning -- Advanced sections.

This article analyses the limits of legal norms and institutions in holding to account the emerging power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning. It demonstrates how a symbiosis of capitalism and new forms of digital power is mutating to produce novel and dangerous styles of organised irresponsibility that go beyond the reach of conventional legal mechanisms. It draws on the work of Pashukanis, Baudrillard, and Alain Supiot to show how this transformation is taking place. Referring to the role of (...) AI in the spread of Financial Technologies, it introduces a new term – ‘venture legalism’ – to describe how unprecedented risks are currently being created. It concludes by observing how ethical and democratic registers are equally implausible modes of accountability. (shrink)