Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, made a powerful impact on several major areas of thought and policy: ethics, jurisprudence, political and constitutional theory, and social and administrative reform. Yet from the start his ideas have been subject to misunderstanding and caricature. John Dinwiddy's Bentham is regarded as the best introduction to this important jurist and reformer. Dinwiddy examines the various components of Bentham's philosophy and shows how each was shaped by the radical rethinking entailed by the utilitarian approach. He also discusses interpretations of Benthamism and its contemporary significance and the controversial question of Bentham's influence on reform. Bentham is reproduced here in full together with three classic essays that deal with key issues in understanding Bentham: his conversion to political radicalism, the relations between private and public ethics, and his theory of adjudication. A new introduction and select bibliography by William Twining set the context and survey the developments in Bentham studies since the book's original publication in 1989.
This book addresses a puzzle in policing: Honesty and good faith are important to the police institution, but so are deception, dishonesty, and bad faith. Drawing on legal and political philosophy-as well as empirical data and cases studies-the book examines how cooperative relations steeped in honesty and good faith are a necessity for any viable society. This is especially relevant to the police institution because the police are entrusted to promote justice and security. As with other state institutions, the police institution is supposed to be based on legitimacy. Legitimacy is a function of authority, which is grounded in reciprocal public relationships generating rights and duties. Despite the necessity of societal honesty and good faith, the police institution has embraced deception, dishonesty, and bad faith as tools of the trade for providing security. In fact, it seems that providing security is impossible without using deception and dishonesty during interrogations, undercover operations, pretextual detentions, and other common scenarios. The book addresses this puzzle by showing that many of our assumptions about policing and security are unjustified given fundamental norms of political morality regarding fraud, honesty, transparency, and the rule of law. Although there is a time and a place for the police's use of proactive deception and dishonesty, the book illustrates why the use of such tactics should be much more limited than current practices suggest-especially considering the erosion of public faith in the police institution and the weakening of the police's legitimacy"--
Evidence, proof and probabilities, rationality, skepticism and narrative in legal discourse, and the reform of criminal evidence have all been the subject of lively debates in recent years. This book brings together seminal and new essays from a leading contributor to this new evidence scholarship. Rethinking Evidence contains a series of linked essays which consider historical, theoretical, and applied themes from a broad interdisciplinary perspective. It brings together well-known papers and also includes substantial new essays on the nature and scope of the law of evidence, lawyers' stories, and the case of Edith Thompson. These readable and provocative essays represent a major contribution not only to legal theory but also to the general study of discourse about evidence in many disciplines.
This volume examines legal ideology in the US from the height of the Gilded Age through the time of the New Deal, when the Supreme Court began to discard orthodox thought in favour of more modernist approaches to law. Wiecek places this era of legal thought in its historical context, integrating social, economic, and intellectual analyses.
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