1 MASS PARDONS IN HISTORY, LAW, AND POLITICS

2021 ◽  
pp. 24-49
Keyword(s):  
Law And Politics

Geoffrey Sawer and the Art of the Academic Commentator: A Preliminary Biographical Sketch

2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 389-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Coper
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
Major Influence ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Biographical Sketch ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
Law And Politics ◽  
National University ◽  
Oral History Interviews

Geoffrey Sawer was the Foundation Professor of Law at The Australian National University, appointed in 1950 at the age of 39. He was a pioneer in the understanding of law in a broader context, especially at the intersection between law and politics, and his fluid and incisive writing has been a major influence on succeeding generations of academics, practitioners and judges. Drawing on Sawer's writings, oral history interviews and private papers, Michael Coper makes an affectionate biographical sketch of this outstanding scholar and warm and genial human being. In particular, he explores how Sawer's scholarship stands up today, when so much has changed in the legal and political landscape; what is enduring and what is transient in a life's work; and what lessons we can draw when we look at law and life through the lens of biography.

Is Racial Equality Unconstitutional?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Golub
Keyword(s):  
Racial Formation ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
Racial Consciousness ◽  
Constitutional Order ◽  
Racial Democracy ◽  
Law And Politics ◽  
Peculiar Form ◽  
American Law ◽  
Racial Domination ◽  
Fundamental Transformation

This concluding chapter considers the implications of the book’s central claims: that constitutional law marks a contested site of racial formation, that color-blind constitutionalism represents an assertion of white racial interest and identity, and that the peculiar form of racial consciousness it enacts renders the pursuit of racial equality a violation of white rights. Taking up the question of political possibility within a legal system constituted by racial domination, the chapter suggests that racial equality may not be achievable within the current American constitutional order. It calls for a rethinking of American law and politics from the premise that racial equality will require a more fundamental transformation than these constraints would permit, and points toward an explicitly antiredemptive political vision upon which a more authentic racial democracy might be founded.

Proportionality Balancing and Constitutional Governance

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alec Stone Sweet ◽  
Jud Mathews
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Rights Protection ◽  
Law And Politics ◽  
Constitutional State ◽  
International Court ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Constitutional Justice ◽  
Proportionality Test ◽  
Basic Features

This book focuses on the law and politics of rights protection in democracies, and in human rights regimes in Europe, the Americas, and Africa. After introducing the basic features of modern constitutions, with their emphasis on rights and judicial review, the authors present a theory of proportionality that explains why constitutional judges embraced it. Proportionality analysis is a highly intrusive mode of judicial supervision: it permits state officials to limit rights, but only when necessary to achieve a sufficiently important public interest. Since the 1950s, virtually every powerful domestic and international court has adopted proportionality as the central method for protecting rights. In doing so, judges positioned themselves to review all important legislative and administrative decisions, and to invalidate them as unconstitutional when they fail the proportionality test. The result has been a massive—and global—transformation of law and politics. The book explicates the concepts of “trusteeship,” the “system of constitutional justice,” the “effectiveness” of rights adjudication, and the “zone of proportionality.” A wide range of case studies analyze: how proportionality has spread, and variation in how it is deployed; the extent to which the U.S. Supreme Court has evolved and resisted similar doctrines; the role of proportionality in building ongoing “constitutional dialogues” with the other branches of government; and the importance of the principle to the courts of regional human rights regimes. While there is variance in the intensity of proportionality-based dialogues, such interactions are today at the heart of governance in the modern constitutional state and beyond.

The role of pathos: from argumentative responses to feeling and emotions

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michel Meyer
Keyword(s):  
Short Distance ◽  
Social World ◽  
Legal Rhetoric ◽  
Law And Politics ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
First Time

Chapter 10 is devoted to the role of emotions or pathos. Pathos was the term ordinarily used to denote the notion of audience. For the first time since Aristotle, emotions receive a full role in a treatise on rhetoric. The responses of the audience are modulated by its emotions. What is their nature and how precisely do they operate? The areas of political and legal rhetoric are examined here in the light of an original view of the theory of distance: values at greater distance become passions at short distance, and this is one of the features which demarcates politics from law. Law and politics are not merely argumentative, nor are they entirely emotional. The norms they codify are often implicit in their shaping of our mutual expectations and behavior in the social world.

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