This book examines the relationship between law and China's economic and human development. It explores the development of the Chinese legal system both from China's historical perspective considering the specific political and socioeconomic factors that are shaping Chinese law and from a comparative perspective, exploring the interaction between China and the rest of the world. It considers the both the linkages between the formal law and China's economic development, and issues of law, human rights, and social justice as they relate to economic and human development.

Deals with the concept of sources of international law.

This incisive book delineates the development of Law and Religion as a sub-discipline, critically reflecting on the author’s own role in constructing the field. It develops a subversive social systems theory in order to take both law and religion seriously and to challenge them equally.

This multi-faceted book combines theoretical, empirical and practical approaches to explore how family law is responding to the ever-changing social dynamics of the family. Bringing together a broad range of experts with innovative perspectives from across the globe, Rethinking Law's Families and Family Law highlights family law's current challenges and presents key avenues for future research.

This book explores the interface between copyright and higher education, and their complementarities for the advancement of sustainable human development. In its broader sense, the concept of human development is noted as a set of freedoms and human capabilities that are essential for human flourishing. Adopting a rights-based human development and capability approach (HDCA), this book primarily examines the relevant policy and legal flexibilities under the existing international copyright system, and their implications for access to knowledge required for creative innovation and higher education. Exploring the interfaces between copyright and higher education, this book argues that an unbalanced and restrictive copyright system impedes reasonable access to knowledge, and stifles creative and learning freedoms or capabilities. In effect, a restrictive copyright system results in serious ramifications for sustainable human development. In view of its findings, this book underscores the need for rethinking copyright and reframing its relevant flexibilities as users' rights that are vital for promoting creative and learning capabilities towards sustainable human development. Further, the book emphasizes the complementarities between copyright and higher education, and their joint roles for sustainable human development. Given its application of the HDCA to explore ranges of interlinked topics, this book will be of a great interest to researchers across the fields of intellectual property law, innovation, global development, human rights, and higher education.

‘Rethinking’ legal reasoning seems a bold aim given the large amount of literature devoted to this topic. In this thought-provoking book, Geoffrey Samuel proposes a different way of approaching legal reasoning by examining the topic through the context of legal knowledge (epistemology). What is it to have knowledge of legal reasoning?

This book is an antecedent study on the task facing China's legal science, more strictly speaking OCo China's legal philosophy, in post-Cold War world structure. In broader terms, this is an academic study of China's own OC identityOCO and future in the world structure. The author believes that from 1978 to 2004, in spite of its great achievements, China's legal science has at the same time had some of its grave problems of being exposed. A fundamental problem is its failure to provide a OC Chinese legal ideal pictureOCO as the standard of and direction for evaluating, assessing and guiding China's law/legal development. This is an age of law without China's own ideal picture(s). However, why has China failed to have its own legal ideal picture(s)? Apparently this question in and of itself implies a question, both more directly and fundamentally, of China's legal science, namely why China's legal science has failed to provide China's own legal picture(s)? Or, as an internal critical approach may suggest (namely to critique China's legal science from the perspective of its promised objectives), where is China's legal science heading? Based on this, this book attempts to expound a standard to evaluate China's legal science through a theoretical discussion of this issue, and to further explore the possible direction for China's legal science beyond this age. Contents: Introduction; China's Legal Science and the OC Paradigm of ModernisationOCO A Critique and Reflection on the OC Paradigm of ModernisationOCO The Absence of OC ChinaOCO in China's Legal Scholarship; Further Examination of China's Legal Science (Part I): A Critique of Liang Zhiping's OC Thesis of Legal CultureOCO Further Examination of China's Legal Science (Part II): A Critique of Su Li's OC Thesis of Indigenous ResourcesOCO Tentative Conclusion. Readership: Researchers, professionals, undergraduate and graduate students interested in China's legal science and legal philosophy studies.

This book addresses critical questions about how legal development works in practice. Can law be employed to shape behavior as a form of social engineering, or must social behavior change first, relegating legal change to follow as ratification or reinforcement? And what is legal development's source of legitimacy if not modernization? But by the same token, whose version of modernization will predominate absent a Western monopoly on change? There are now legal development alternatives, especially from Asia, so we need a better way to ask the right questions of different approaches primarily in (non-Western) Asia, Africa, the Islamic world, plus South America. Incoming waves of change like the 'Arab spring' lie on the horizon. Meanwhile, debates are sharpening about law's role in economic development versus democracy and governance under the rubric of the rule of law. More than a general survey of law and modernization theory and practice, this work is a timely reference for practitioners of institutional reform, and a thought-provoking interdisciplinary collection of essays in an area of renewed practical and scholarly interest. The contributors are a distinguished international group of scholars and practitioners of law, development, social sciences, and religion with extensive experience in the developing world.

Maltz reformulates the justification for originalist review and refines originalist theory itself; he argues that a pure originalist approach mandates excessive judicial intervention under the Constitution; and he shows that most nonoriginalist theorists have failed to provide a sufficient functional justification for nonoriginalist intervention.