Allan C. Hutchinson

Great cases are those judicial decisions around which the common law develops. This book explores eight exemplary cases from the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia that show the law as a living, breathing, and down-the-street experience. It explores the social circumstances in which the cases arose and the ordinary people whose stories influenced and shaped the law as well as the characters and institutions (lawyers, judges, and courts) that did much of the heavy lifting. By examining the consequences and fallout of these decisions, the book depicts the common law as an experimental, dynamic, messy, productive, tantalizing, and bottom-up process, thereby revealing the diverse and uncoordinated attempts by the courts to adapt the law to changing conditions and shifting demands. Great cases are one way to glimpse the workings of the common law as an untidy, but stimulating exercise in human judgment and social accomplishment.

Great Legal Cases and How they Shaped the World

Is Eating People Wrong?

Corporate scandals will thrive without a fundamental change in how corporations are viewed and regulated. This book situates the existence of large corporations within a more encompassing social, political, and economic context. It examines governance structures and culture and recommends reforms, offering an original and provocative challenge to turn corporations into civic sites for democratic advancement.

Corporate Governance in a Democratic Society

The Companies We Keep

Klaus Petersen

Socially organized activity cannot occur without censorship. Going beyond ideological arguments, this collections of essays explores the extent of censorship in Canada today, the forms censorship takes, and the interests it serves.

Interpreting Censorship in Canada

Any effort to understand how law works has to take seriously its main players – judges. Like any performance, judging should be evaluated by reference to those who are its best exponents. Not surprisingly, the debate about what makes a 'great judge' is as heated and inconclusive as the debate about the purpose and nature of law itself. History shows that those who are candidates for a judicial hall of fame are game changers who oblige us to rethink what it is to be a good judge. So the best of judges must tread a thin line between modesty and hubris; they must be neither mere umpires nor demigods. The eight judges showcased in this book demonstrate that, if the test of good judging is not about getting it right, but doing it well, then the measure of great judging is about setting new standards for what counts as judging well.

Great Judges and How They Made the Common Law

Laughing at the Gods

This book draws an extended analogy with military theory to propose a new model for legal ethics.

Fighting Fair

The Province of Jurisprudence Democratized explores the implications of taking a vigorously democratic approach to issues of traditional legal theory. Allan C. Hutchinson introduces the democratic vision and examines the complementary philosophy of a Dewey-inspired pragmatism. This is followed by an examination from a pragmatic perspective of the dominant theories of analytical jurisprudence in both their positivist and naturalist forms. He emphasizes the contested concepts of 'truth', 'facts' and 'law/morality relation' and explores what a more uncompromising democratic/pragmatic agenda for law and legal theory would entail. The Author's intent is to contribute to the shift away from a technical and elite philosophical approach to jurisprudence to a more democratic engagement. It advances and follows through on the critical claim that there is no position of theoretical or political innocence. Like the law it seeks to illuminate, legal theory must recognize its own political and social setting as well as its own responsibilities. Moreover, whatever else democracy might entail or imply, it opposes elite rule whether by autocrats, functionaries or theorists, however enlightened or principled their proposals or interventions may be: authority must come from below, not above.

The Province of Jurisprudence Democratized

This book offers a radical challenge to accounts of the common law's development. Contrary to received jurisprudential wisdom, it maintains there is no grand theory which will explain satisfactorily the dynamic interactions of change and stability in the common law's history. Offering original readings of Charles Darwin's and Hans-Georg Gadamer's works, the book shows that law is a rhetorical activity that can only be properly appreciated in its historical and political context; tradition and transformation are locked in a mutually reinforcing but thoroughly contingent embrace. In contrast to the dewy-eyed offerings of much contemporary work, it demonstrates that, like life, law is an organic process (i.e., events are the products of functional and localized causes) rather than a miraculous one (i.e., events are the result of some grand plan or intervention). In short, common law is a perpetual work-in-progress - evanescent, dynamic, messy, productive, tantalising, and bottom-up.

Evolution and the Common Law

This book examines how the common law works through profiles of eight great cases.

Is Killing People Right?

This book showcases eight judges that exemplify judicial greatness and looks at what role they play in law and society.

As a social process that places great stock in its stability and predictability, law does not deal easily or well with change. In a modern world that is in a constant and rapid state of flux, law is being placed under considerable stress in its efforts to fulfill its task as a primary regulator of social and economic behaviour. This challenge is particularly acute in the realm of technology and its profound ramifications for social and economic behaviour. The innovative Techno-Age not only offers fresh ways of handling old problems, but also throws up entirely new problems; traditional ways of thinking about and responding to these old and new problems and their optimal resolution are no longer as tenable as many once thought. One such example is the burgeoning world of cryptocurrencies – this peer-to-peer digital network presents a profound challenge to the status quo of the financial services sector, to the established modes of state-backed fiat currency, and to the regulatory authority and reach of law. Taken together, these related challenges demand the urgent attention of jurists, lawyers and law reformers. It is the future and relevance of legal regulation as much as cryptocurrency that is at stake. This book proposes an approach to regulating cryptocurrency that recognises and retains its innovative and transformative potential, but also identifies and deals with some of its less appealing qualities and implications.

Cryptocurrencies and the Regulatory Challenge

DIVThe author argues for an understanding of judging that rejects foundationalism (the effort to ground legal thought on something), attempts to carve out a "middle way" between formalist and the political visions of law, and offers a reconceptual/div

A Nonfoundationalist Account of Law and Adjudication

It's All in the Game

Combining autobiography and scholarship, this volume asks how lawyers and legal theorists' experiences affect their legal practice and research.

Allan C. Hutchinson

About

Books

Join the club