bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Citizenship
Authors: Kymlicka Will 
Published: September 2018

Within political philosophy, citizenship refers not only to a legal status, but also to a normative ideal – the governed should be full and equal participants in the political process. As such, it is a distinctively democratic ideal. People who are governed by monarchs or military dictators are subjects, not citizens. Most philosophers therefore view citizenship theory as an extension of democratic theory. Democratic theory focuses on political institutions and procedures; citizenship theory focuses on the attributes of individual participants.
One important topic in citizenship theory concerns the need for citizens to actively participate in political life. In most countries participation in politics is not obligatory, and people are free to place private commitments ahead of political involvement. Yet if too many citizens are apathetic, democratic institutions will collapse. Another topic concerns the identity of citizens. Citizenship is intended to provide a common status and identity which helps integrate members of society. However, some theorists question whether common citizenship can accommodate the increasing social and cultural pluralism of modern societies.
Nozick, Robert (1938–2002)
Authors: Wolff Jonathan , Blackburn Simon 
Published: September 2018

Although Robert Nozick published on an enormous range of topics, he is best known as a political philosopher, and especially for his powerful and entertaining statement of libertarianism. In Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), Nozick presents an image of a fully voluntary society, in which people cooperate only on terms which violate no one’s rights.
Nozick’s other major contributions to philosophy include an analysis of knowledge, and an accompanying response to scepticism, an account of personal identity and contributions to decision theory and the theory of rationality.
Political philosophy, Jewish
Authors: Zohar Noam J. , Walzer Michael 
Published: September 2018

Jewish ideas about politics are embedded in the traditional genres of Judaic discourse, more often legal or homiletic than systematically philosophical. A defining feature of this tradition is its historical setting, as for most of their history the Jews lacked a state. Still, central issues of political thought were addressed primarily in the context of Judaism’s characteristic political entity, the medieval kahal – the by and large autonomous urban Jewish community. Discussions of issues such as authority, justice, or membership were informed by the Talmudic legal tradition, by biblical memories of Israel’s monarchic period and by dreams of restoration, inspired by ancient prophecies regarding the messianic era.
The central form defining political authority and allegiance is the covenant, enacted at Sinai between God and the Israelite people, whom He had elected and liberated from Egypt. The people recognized God’s supreme authority, consenting to live by His teachings, the Torah. The significance and demands of this divine election, and the parameters and requirements of membership of the covenantal community, are much-debated issues in the Jewish political tradition. Of equal concern are the concrete implications of divine sovereignty. On one view, this precludes any institutionalized form of human authority. On other views, divine authority is invested in one or more of various human agents, from kings and priests to prophets and rabbis; strikingly, the latter used their own reason to interpret God’s words, and in their assemblies would take a vote to decide among interpretations. In uneasy co-existence with these, the tradition includes prominent justifications for human political agency, the legitimacy of which derives not from divine authorization but from popular consent.
Living as a (sometimes) tolerated minority under non-Jewish rulers, the Jews dreamed of redemption, imagining the messianic king as leading them to triumph. Yet the foundational tale in Genesis is of humankind as one family, and the biblical prophets envisage world peace.
Since 1948 the state of Israel has become the locus for re-examination of the Jewish political tradition. A crucial question has been to what extent this tradition, which includes proto-democratic as well as theocratic elements, can inform political discourse in a modern democracy whose citizens are mostly Jewish but include also significant non-Jewish minorities.
Crime and punishment
Authors: Duff R.A. 
Published: September 2018

An account of how state punishment can be justified requires an account of the state, as having the authority to punish, and of crime, as that which is punished. Crime, as socially proscribed wrongdoing, may be formally censured, and may lead to the payment of compensation to those injured by it – but why should it also attract the kind of ‘hard-treatment’ punishment which characterizes a system of criminal law? How should we decide which kinds of wrongdoing should count as crimes?
Consequentialists justify punishment by its beneficial effects, notably in preventing crime by deterring, reforming or incapacitating potential criminals. They face the objection that the wholehearted pursuit of such goals would lead to injustice – punishment of those who do not deserve it. Even if that objection is met by imposing non-consequentialist constraints on the system, they also face the objection that a consequentialist system fails to respect criminals as responsible moral agents.
Retributivists hold that punishment must be deserved if it is to be justified, and that the guilty (and only the guilty) deserve punishment. Positive retributivists hold that the guilty should be punished as they deserve, even if this will achieve no consequential good. Negative retributivists hold that only the guilty may be punished, but that they should be punished only if their punishment will be beneficial. The main objection to retributivism is that it fails to explain why the guilty deserve punishment.
Some retributivists have argued that the guilty deserve censure, and that punishment serves to communicate that censure. But why should we use ‘hard treatment’ such as imprisonment or fines to communicate censure? Does the hard treatment function as a consequentialist deterrent? Or could such punishments serve to reform or educate criminals, thus bringing them to repent their crimes and restoring their relationships with those they have wronged?
A theory of justified punishment must be related to our existing penal institutions. It must, in particular, have something to say about sentencing: about what kinds of punishment should be imposed, and about how sentencers should decide on the appropriate severity of punishment. A central issue concerns the role of the principle of proportionality: the demand that the severity of punishment should be proportionate to the seriousness of the crime.
But we must also ask whether our existing penal practices can be justified at all. We must face the abolitionists’ argument that punishment should be abolished in favour of social practices which treat ‘crimes’ not as wrongdoings that must be punished, but as ‘conflicts’ which must be resolved by a reconciliatory rather than a punitive process.
Critical Legal Studies
Authors: Norrie Alan 
Published: September 2018

Critical Legal Studies first developed in the USA in the latter half of the 1970s. Drawing on the political inspiration of the contemporary New Left, it was an intellectual movement committed to radicalizing legal theory by bringing together US legal realism and modern European social theory. In so doing, it sought to provide a fundamental critique of the nature and place of law in modern capitalist society.
In its first phase, its main target was the liberal positivist theories of law that dominate Anglo-American jurisprudence. Such theories inform both the organization of the traditional legal curriculum and the nature of legal practice. By contrast, Critical Legal Studies saw law as based upon deeply contradictory premises, so that the orthodox positivist claim that law could be in principle rational and coherent was rejected in favour of the ‘indeterminacy thesis’. Legal decisions were in truth a matter not of logical deduction but of choice. They could always go one way or the other. Ultimately, therefore, it was an open political decision made by a judge which determined a legal conclusion. The idea of the ‘rule of law’ operating above politics was rejected, but regarded as important in terms of the political legitimation function it served in Western societies.
While the name ‘Critical Legal Studies’ has a US provenance, a number of different critical legal projects can be identified. These projects reflect the broader character of the national traditions of which they are a part. European approaches, particularly the German and the British, reveal a more sustained engagement with modern and postmodern social theory. However, as a result of problems in the original project, Critical Legal Studies has entered into a second phase in the USA in which there is an increasing interest in social theory. The result has been a convergence of European and US concerns, but around a highly fragmented group of modern and postmodern social theories. Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida and Habermas have been introduced into legal theory while Marx and Weber, the original theoretical mainstays of a critical approach to law, have been sidelined. There is a danger in this that Critical Legal Studies will become little more than a group of theorists talking among themselves. While the original US critique of legal doctrine may have run out of steam for want of sufficient theoretical sophistication, it is important not to lose sight of its direct focus on law and legal forms. It is arguable that the recent ‘turn to theory’ must validate itself in terms of the contribution it is able to make to a critical understanding of law and its practices; also that an important, as yet unaddressed, question concerns the relationship between postmodern forms of criticism and sociological analyses of the development of law.
Justice, equity and law
Authors: Tasioulas John 
Published: September 2018

Laws are intended to achieve justice, but the application of an otherwise just law may yield an injustice in the circumstances of a particular case. This is because laws are framed in terms of general rules which cannot adequately provide in advance for all possible variations in relevant circumstances. Equity modifies the rigid application of the law in such cases in order to secure justice in the light of all the relevant circumstances. So, in Aquinas’ example, the law may justly require the closure of the city gates after a certain hour, but officials may equitably decree the opening of the gates during the legal hours of closure in order to save fighters defending the city who are being pursued by an enemy. In this sense, the equitable decision is not distinct from justice, but rather secures justice in the particular case by remedying the deficiencies of positive law retrospectively at the point of application. The question of the proper relationship between justice, equity and law has been explored both by a rich philosophical tradition that finds its classic statement in the writings of Aristotle, and by the world’s major legal traditions.
At least two major problems arise for this complex of ideas. First, that of the ‘decadence’ of equity. As equity is incorporated into formal processes of legal adjudication, for instance in the form of ‘maxims’ of equity or equitable ‘doctrines’, it comes to acquire the generality of positive law. This creates the problem that the so-called equitable maxims or doctrines may themselves then be applied in a strict way that leads to injustice in the particular case, which is precisely the problem equity is meant to remedy. Second, in securing justice by the deployment of discretion in the particular case equity also threatens an injustice. For it seems to involve a departure from the principle of legality, that is, the duty to apply pre-existing laws declared beforehand to those subject to them. In being adversely affected by the retrospectively operative discretion of the adjudicator, the party who would have benefited from the strict application of the law may regard the resort to equity as itself unjust.
Institutionalism in law
Authors: Pintore Anna 
Published: September 2018

‘Institutionalism’ is the name for an approach to the theory of law worked out in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by a number of scholars from continental Europe, working mainly in independence from each other. Their common characteristics can be stated only in rather generic and negative terms. They are all critical of statalism, that is, too readily identifying law and state; of voluntarism, that is, treating will as an essential element of law; and of normativism, defining law as a body of norms. In positive terms, they have in common a generic emphasis on the social character of law, and a sense of the need to take a view of legal experience broader than that defined by its traditional boundaries, and to extend the ‘official’ catalogue of the sources of law.
Nowadays, there is new talk of institutionalism in the philosophy of law, but in a different sense, with reference to the idea of law as made up of institutional facts, that is, facts whose meaning depends on norms. This neo-institutionalism is normativist, analytical and hermeneutic in approach and has only the most tenuous links with classical institutionalism.
Legal concepts
Authors: Frandberg Ake 
Published: September 2018

Concept-formation is an important component of law-formation. Well-developed legal orders are profoundly conceptual in nature. Throughout Western legal history, legislators have aimed at basing their law-making on concepts of a general scope (such as ‘property’, ‘possession’, ‘usufruct’, ‘criminal intent’ and many others) – and even more so legal scholars in their reconstruction and development of law. Legal thinking makes use of concepts with many different functions and varying logical status. A distinction can be made between concepts that are an integral part of law themselves (here called L-concepts) and concepts that belong to the professional vocabulary of lawyers and jurists in their handling of the law (J-concepts). Among the L-concepts there are on the one hand concepts whose meaning is totally determined by the rules of one single legal system and on the other hand concepts that pertain to two or more legal systems. The latter concepts have a comparative function.
J-concepts provide lawyers with a language enabling them to give an intellectual structure to the legal material, to characterize and discuss the professional-juridical handling of law and the methods used for performing that task, to specify the functions of law and to formulate the underlying values of (the handling of) the legal system.
There was a tendency in earlier legal philosophy to hypostasize legal concepts, for example, the concept of ‘right’ in classical natural-law doctrine: that is, to postulate real entities to which our concepts/terms refer. The legal philosophy of the twentieth century has to a large extent been a reaction against this tendency. This reaction has taken three different directions: (1) to reduce the abstract legal concepts to factual phenomena such as certain human behaviour or socio-psychological factors (mainly within US and Scandinavian realism); (2) to assign to legal concepts a normative ontological status, placing them in a world of norms, distinct from the world of facts; and (3) to analyse legal concepts in a contextual setting, that is, to find out how they function in actual legal discourse.
Rule of law (Rechtsstaat)
Authors: Allan T.R.S. 
Published: September 2018

The ‘rule of law’ most simply expresses the idea that everyone is subject to the law, and should therefore obey it. Governments in particular are to obey law – to govern under, or in accordance with, law. The rule of law thus requires constitutional government, and constitutes a shield against tyranny or arbitrary rule: political rulers and their agents (police and so on) must exercise power under legal constraints, respecting accepted constitutional limits. The British and US conceptions of this ideal find a parallel in the Germanic concept of the Rechtsstaat, or ‘state-under-law’, where the state as an organized entity is conceived to be limited by laws and by fundamental principles of legality, rather than being a purely political organization that can dispense with law in the interests of policy. Such concepts play an essential part in the political philosophy of liberalism; yet, characteristically, their more detailed exposition and indeed their nature and meaning are contested and controversial.
In a wider sense, the rule of law articulates values of procedural fairness or due process which affect the form of legal rules and govern the manner of their application. Those values both enhance the utility of legal regulation and also acknowledge underlying ideas of human dignity and autonomy. In a further sense, the rule of law refers to the faithful application of those rules and principles which constitute the law of a particular legal system. It expresses the idea that legal obligation should always be determined in particular cases by analysis of existing law – as opposed to ad hoc legislation by judges – even where disagreement may exist about the true meaning or content of the law.
The connection between the rule of law and justice is complex. The rule of law cannot itself guarantee justice, but it forms an essential precondition. In so far as it imposes formal constraints on the laws enacted or enforced, which ensure that they are capable of being obeyed and that they are fairly administered, the rule of law assumes a conception of moral personality – of how individuals should be treated, as responsible human beings, capable of a sense of justice – which links the idea with the values of freedom and autonomy, and the ideal of equality.
Law and morality
Authors: Simmonds N.E. 
Published: September 2018

Within the tradition of natural law thinking which finds its roots in the philosophies of Aristotle and Aquinas, the political community has generally been understood in terms of a fundamental goal: that of fostering the ethical good of citizens. Law, on this conception, should seek to inculcate habits of good conduct, and should support a social environment which will encourage citizens to pursue worthy goals, and to lead valuable lives. Pragmatic considerations may sometimes suggest the wisdom of restraint in the pursuit of these goals, and citizens may therefore, on appropriate occasions, be left free to indulge depraved tastes or otherwise fall short of acceptable standards. Such pragmatic arguments for the freedom to engage in vice, however, do not call into question the legitimacy of the state’s concern with individual morality.
By contrast the liberal tradition has tended to place constraints of principle upon the scope and aims of the law. The most influential such attempt was J.S. Mill’s advocacy of ‘the harm principle’: that the law may forbid only such behaviour as is liable to cause harm to persons other than the agent. Many difficulties surround this and other, more recent, attempts to formulate and defend constraining principles. For instance, should one take into account only the immediate effects of behaviour, or more remote and diffuse effects as well? Thus it is argued that immoral behaviour which in the short term ‘harms nobody’ may, in the long run, lead to a decline in morality in society at large and thereby to diffuse harmful effects.
International law, philosophy of
Authors: Buchanan Allen 
Published: September 2018

The philosophy of international law has a long history, reaching back on some accounts beyond the Medieval period to late Hellenistic philosophy. In the twentieth century work in this field was limited, at least among analytic philosophers. From the late 1970s onward, a rich literature developed on global justice, human rights, just war theory, and other key issues of direct relevance to the philosophy of international law, but for the most part it did not directly engage international law or international legal institutions. Quite recently, interest in the philosophy of international law has re-awakened.
The questions the philosophy of international law tries to answer may be divided into two categories: international jurisprudence and the morality of international law. The first includes: (a) is what we call international law really law and if so what makes a norm an international law (as distinct from, say, a political or social norm) and (b) how do we know whether a norm is an international law? International jurisprudence explores fundamental conceptual and epistemic questions about international law, typically with an eye toward determining how and to what extent international law differs from domestic (national) law. The second category encompasses the reasoned moral evaluation of existing international law and legal institutions and principled proposals for reforming them.
Natural law in early modern philosophy
Authors: Heydt Colin 
Published: September 2018

Are there moral norms for action applicable in all times and places? It was common in the early modern period to answer ‘Yes’ to this question and to appeal to natural law as expressing those norms.
Natural law developed in the early modern period through the work of Suarez, Grotius, Hobbes, Cumberland and Pufendorf, among others. Natural law is a universal, obligatory set of rules for action, known without revelation and legislated by God. The phrase ‘natural law’ carries with it a set of claims about moral norms – where they originate, what justifies them, how we know them.
Early modern natural law has roots in the ancients (particularly in Stoicism) and Christianity. It is a standard part of medieval and early modern Aristotelian moral philosophy, where it informs discussions of law, moral action, and the Ten Commandments. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, one sees something novel: philosophers claiming that moral philosophy is fundamentally legal or jural or, even more pronounced, nothing other than natural law. On a jural view of morality, moral principles are imposed – in some sense or other – through legislation. It has often been claimed that this marks a break between modern and pre-modern moral philosophies – from views oriented by happiness, good and virtue to views focused on obligation, law, right, duty and authority.
The most important differences between a scholastic or eudaimonistic conception and a natural law or jural conception of moral philosophy arise in claims about the summum bonum (highest good), the emphasis on law, action and justice, and the nature of moral reasons. Perhaps, most generally, natural law can be thought of as reorganizing morality towards the goal of adjudicating conflict, particularly among religious confessions, warring states, traders and alien cultures.
Natural law informed much academic moral philosophy in the eighteenth century and exerted strong influence on moral and political thought (for example, the American Declaration of Independence). By the nineteenth century, however, utilitarian and historicist critics attacked the ideas of morality as law and of timeless, universal norms as constituting morality. In the present day, natural law ideas are manifest in the human rights tradition.