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British Empire
The British Empire comprised the dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates and other territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom. It originated with the overseas colonies and trading posts established by England in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. At its height, it was the largest empire in history and, for over a century, was the foremost global power. By 1922 the British Empire held sway over about 458 million people, one-fifth of the world's population at the time, and covered more than 33,700,000 km² (13,012,000 sq mi), almost a quarter of the Earth's total land area. As a result, its political, linguistic and cultural legacy is widespread. At the peak of its power, it was often said that "the sun never sets on the British Empire" because its span across the globe ensured that the sun was always shining on at least one of its numerous territories.
During the Age of Discovery in the 15th and 16th centuries, Portugal and Spain pioneered European exploration of the globe, and in the process established large overseas empires. Envious of the great wealth these empires generated, England, France and the Netherlands began to establish colonies and trade networks of their own in the Americas and Asia. A series of wars in the 17th and 18th centuries with the Netherlands and France left England (and then, following union between England and Scotland in 1707, Great Britain) the dominant colonial power in North America and India. The loss of the Thirteen Colonies in North America in 1783 after a war of independence deprived Britain of some of its oldest and most populous colonies.

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British Museum
Coordinates: 51°31′10″N 0°07′37″W / 51.519459°N 0.126931°W / 51.519459; -0.126931
The British Museum, in London, is widely considered to be one of the world's greatest museums of human history and culture. Its permanent collection, numbering some eight million works, is amongst the finest, most comprehensive, and largest in existence and originates from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its beginnings to the present.
The British Museum was established in 1753, largely based on the collections of the physician and scientist Sir Hans Sloane. The museum first opened to the public on 15 January 1759 in Montagu House in Bloomsbury, on the site of the current museum building. Its expansion over the following two and a half centuries was largely a result of an expanding British colonial footprint and has resulted in the creation of several branch institutions, the first being the British Museum (Natural History) in South Kensington in 1887. Some objects in the collection, most notably the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon, are the objects of intense controversy and of calls for restitution to their countries of origin.

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Bundestag
The Bundestag (Federal Diet; pronounced [ˈbʊndəstaːk]) is a legislative body in Germany. In practice Germany is governed by a bicameral legislature, of which the Bundestag serves as the lower house and the Bundesrat the upper house. The Bundestag was established by the German Basic Law of 1949, as the successor to the earlier Reichstag. Norbert Lammert is the current President of the Bundestag.
With the dissolution of the German Confederation in 1866 and the founding of the German Empire (Deutsches Reich) in 1871, the Reichstag was established as the German parliament in Berlin. Two decades later, the current parliament building was erected. The Reichstag delegates were elected by direct and equal male suffrage (and not the three-class electoral system prevailing in Prussia until 1918). The Reichstag did not participate in the appointment of the Chancellor until the parliamentary reforms of October 1918. After the Revolution of November 1918 and the establishment of the Weimar Constitution, women were given the right to vote for (and serve in) the Reichstag, and the parliament could use the no-confidence vote to force the chancellor or any cabinet member to resign. In March 1933, one month after the Reichstag fire, the then president, Paul von Hindenburg, a retired war hero, gave Hitler ultimate power through Enabling Act of 1933, he remained at the post of Federal Government Chancellor (though he called himself the Führer). After this the Reichstag met only rarely to unanimously rubber-stamp the decisions of the government. It last convened on 26 April 1942.

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Council of Europe
The Council of Europe (French: Conseil de l'Europe) is an international organization promoting co-operation between all countries of Europe in the areas of legal standards, human rights, democratic development, the rule of law and cultural co-operation. It was founded in 1949, has 47 member states with some 800 million citizens, and is an entirely separate body from the European Union (EU), which has only 27 member states. Unlike the EU, the Council of Europe cannot make binding laws. The two do however share certain symbols such as the flag of Europe. The Council of Europe has nothing to do with either the Council of the European Union or the European Council, which are both EU bodies.
The best known bodies of the Council of Europe are the European Court of Human Rights, which enforces the European Convention on Human Rights, and the European Pharmacopoeia Commission, which sets the quality standards for pharmaceutical products in Europe. The Council of Europe's work has resulted in standards, charters and conventions to facilitate cooperation between European countries.

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Duma
A Duma (Russian: Ду́ма, Russian pronunciation: [ˈdumə]) is any of various representative assemblies in modern Russia and Russian history. The State Duma in the Russian Empire and Russian Federation corresponds to the lower house of the parliament. Simply it is a form of Russian governmental institution, that was formed during the reign of the last Tsar, Nicholas II. It is also the term for a council to early Russian rulers (Boyar Duma), as well as for city councils in Imperial Russia ('Municipal dumas'), and city and regional legislative bodies in the Russian Federation.
The term comes from the Russian word думать (dumat’) meaning "to think" or "to consider", cognate with the English words "doom" and "deem" which connote a judgment or decision (usually negative). The Boyar Duma was an advisory council to the grand princes and czar of Russia. The Duma was discontinued by Peter the Great, who transferred its functions to the Governing Senate in 1721.
Since the year 1 the municipalities in European, Russia have had institutions like those of the zemstvos. All owners of houses, tax-paying merchants and workmen are enrolled on lists in a descending order according to their assessed wealth. The total valuation is then divided into three equal parts, representing three groups of electors very unequal in number, each of which elects an equal number of delegates to the municipal duma. The executive is in the hands of an elective mayor and an uprava, which consists of several members elected by the duma. Under Alexander III, however, by laws promulgated in 1892 and 1894, the municipal dumas were subordinated to the governors in the same way as the zemstvos. In 1894 municipal institutions, with still more restricted powers, were granted to several towns in Siberia, and in 1895 to some in Caucasia.

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European Parliament
The European Parliament (abbreviated as Europarl or the EP) is the directly elected parliamentary institution of the European Union (EU). Together with the Council of the European Union (the Council) and the European Commission, it exercises the legislative function of the EU and it has been described as one of the most powerful legislatures in the world. The Parliament is currently composed of 754 Members of the European Parliament, who represent the second largest democratic electorate in the world (after the Parliament of India) and the largest trans-national democratic electorate in the world (375 million eligible voters in 2009).
It has been directly elected every five years by universal suffrage since 1979. However, turnout at European Parliament elections has fallen consecutively at each election since that date, and has been under 50% since 1999. Turnout in 2009 stood at 43% of all European voters, ranging from 90% in Luxembourg and Belgium (where compulsory voting is used) to 20% in Slovakia. Turnout was under 50% in 18 out of 27 member states.

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Fordham University
Fordham University is a private, nonprofit, coeducational research university in the United States, with three campuses in and around New York City. It was founded by the Roman Catholic Diocese of New York in 1841 as St. John's College, placed in the care of the Society of Jesus shortly thereafter, and has since become an independent institution under a lay Board of Trustees, which describes the University as "in the Jesuit tradition."
Fordham is composed of four undergraduate colleges and six graduate schools. Enrollment at Fordham includes approximately 8,000 undergraduate and 7,000 graduate students spread over three campuses in New York State: Rose Hill in the Bronx, Lincoln Center in Manhattan, and Westchester in West Harrison. In addition, the University operates a foreign center in London Fordham awards bachelor's (BA, BFA, and BS), master's, and doctoral degrees. It also offers a five-year BA/BS engineering program in cooperation with Columbia University and Case Western Reserve University and a BFA program in dance in partnership with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

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House of Lords
The House of Lords is the upper house of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Like the House of Commons, it meets in the Palace of Westminster.
The House of Lords is independent from, and complements the work of, the House of Commons – they share responsibility for making laws and checking government action. Bills can be introduced into either the House of Lords or the House of Commons and members of the Lords may also take on roles as Government Ministers.
Unlike the House of Commons, most new members of the House of Lords are appointed. Membership of the House of Lords is made up of Lords Spiritual and Lords Temporal. There are currently 26 Lords Spiritual, who sit in the Lords by virtue of their ecclesiastical role in the established Church of England. The Lords Temporal make up the rest of the membership; of these, the majority are life peers who are appointed by the Monarch on the advice of the Prime Minister, or on the advice of the House of Lords Appointments Commission.
Membership was once a right of birth to hereditary peers but, following a series of reforms, only 92 members (as of 1 July 2011 (2011 -07-01)^[update]) sitting by virtue of a hereditary peerage remain. The number of members is not fixed; as of 1 April 2012 (2012 -04-01)^[update] the House of Lords has 786 members (plus 21 who are on leave of absence or otherwise disqualified from sitting), as against the fixed 650-seat membership of the House of Commons.

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Paisley
Coordinates: 55°50′48″N 4°25′25″W / 55.846627°N 4.423636°W / 55.846627; -4.423636
Paisley is the largest town in the historic county of Renfrewshire in the west central Lowlands of Scotland and serves as the administrative centre for the Renfrewshire council area. The town is situated on the northern edge of the Gleniffer Braes, straddling the banks of the White Cart Water, a tributary of the River Clyde.
The town, a former burgh, forms part of a contiguous urban area with Glasgow, Glasgow City Centre being 6.9 miles (11.1 km) to the east. The town came to prominence with the establishment of Paisley Abbey in the 12th century, an important religious hub in mediaeval Scotland which formerly had control over the other churches in the local area.
By the 19th century, Paisley had established itself as a centre of the weaving industry, giving its name to the Paisley Shawl and the Paisley Pattern. The town's associations with political Radicalism were highlighted by its involvement in the Radical War of 1820, with striking weavers being instrumental in the protests.

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Qing Dynasty
The Qing Dynasty was the last imperial dynasty of China, ruling from 1644 to 1912 with a brief, abortive restoration in 1917. It was preceded by the Ming Dynasty and followed by the Republic of China.
The dynasty was founded by the Jurchen Aisin Gioro clan in contemporary Northeastern China. The Aisin Gioro leader, Nurhachi, who was originally a vassal of the Ming emperors, began unifying the Jurchen clans in the late sixteenth century. By 1635, Nurhachi's son Hong Taiji could claim they constituted a single and united Manchu people and began forcing the Ming out of Liaoning in southern Manchuria. In 1644, the Ming capital Beijing was sacked by a peasant revolt led by Li Zicheng, a former minor Ming official who became the leader of the peasant revolt, who then proclaimed the Shun dynasty. The last Ming ruler, the Chongzhen Emperor, committed suicide when the city fell. When Li Zicheng moved against Ming general Wu Sangui, the latter made an alliance with the Manchus and opened the Shanhai Pass to the Manchurian army. Under Prince Dorgon, they seized control of Beijing and overthrew Li Zicheng's short-lived Shun Dynasty. Complete pacification of China was accomplished around 1683 under the Kangxi Emperor.

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Romford
Coordinates: 51°34′36″N 0°10′48″E / 51.5768°N 0.1801°E / 51.5768; 0.1801
Romford is a large suburban town in northeast London, England and the administrative headquarters of the London Borough of Havering. It is located 14.1 miles (22.7 km) northeast of Charing Cross and is one of the major metropolitan centres identified in the London Plan. It was historically a market town in the county of Essex and formed the administrative centre of the liberty of Havering, until it was dissolved in 1892. Good road links and the opening of the railway station in 1839 were key to the development of the town and the economic history of Romford is underpinned by a shift from agriculture to light industry and more recently to retail and commerce. As part of the suburban growth of London in the 20th century, Romford significantly expanded and increased in population,becoming a municipal borough in 1937 and has formed part of Greater London since 1965. It now forms one of the largest commercial, retail, entertainment and leisure districts outside central London and has a developed night time economy.

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Romford Market
Romford Market is a large open market with 270 stalls, located in Romford, London Borough of Havering, Greater London, England. The market is open on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays from 8.30 am to 4.30 pm (5 pm on Saturdays). There is a farmers' market at the site from 10 am to 3 pm on the second and fourth Sundays of the month.
The market originated as a sheep market in 1247. Under the Royal Charter of the Liberty of Havering, granted by King Henry III no other market is permitted to set up within a day's sheep drive (six and two-thirds miles) of Romford. The market is the subject of a 1726 legal case called Keech v. Sandford. This is one of the foundational cases of English trust law, on the fiduciary duty of loyalty. The market was also used to film parts of The Prodigy's music video for the track "Voodoo People" remixed by Pendulum, and also a film starring Chris Kamara.
The market is a hub on the London Bus network with services to Canning Town, Leytonstone, Stratford, Rainham, Dagenham, Barkingside, Cranham, Barking and Ilford.

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South Korea
South Korea ( listen), officially the Republic of Korea (Hangul: 대한민국; Hanja: 大韓民國; Daehan Minguk listen), is a sovereign state in the southern part of the Korean Peninsula. The name "Korea" is derived from Goryeo, a dynasty which ruled in the Middle Ages (an initial "G" in Korean is pronounced like an English "K").
Its neighbors are China to the west, Japan to the east, North Korea to the north, and the Korea Strait to the south. South Korea lies in the north temperate zone with a predominantly mountainous terrain. It covers a total area of 99,392 square kilometers and has a population of almost 50 million. The capital and largest city is Seoul, with a population of 9,794,304.
Archaeological findings show that the Korean Peninsula was occupied by the Lower Paleolithic period.Korean history begins with the founding of Gojoseon in 2333 BC by the legendary Dan-gun. Following the unification of the Three Kingdoms of Korea under Silla 668 AD, Korea went through the Goryeo Dynasty and Joseon Dynasty as one nation until the end of the Korean Empire in 1910, when it was annexed by Japan. After liberation and occupation by Soviet and U.S. forces at the end of World War II, the nation was divided into North and South Korea. The latter was established in 1948 as a democracy, though political turmoil and times of military rule and martial law characterized much of the period until the foundation of the Sixth Republic in 1987.

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Southampton
Southampton ⁱ/saʊθˈhæmptən/ is the largest city in the county of Hampshire on the south coast of England, and is situated 120 kilometres (75 mi) south-west of London and 30 kilometres (19 mi) north-west of Portsmouth. Southampton is a major port and the closest city to the New Forest. It lies at the northernmost point of Southampton Water at the confluence of the River Test and River Itchen, with the River Hamble joining to the south of the urban area. The local authority is Southampton City Council, which is a unitary authority.
The city represents the core of the Greater Southampton region, and the city itself has an estimated population of 239,700 Southampton combines with Portsmouth to form a single metropolitan area; with a population of over a million this makes the region one of the United Kingdom's most populous metropolitan areas. The city's name is sometimes abbreviated in writing to "So'ton" or "Soton", and a resident of Southampton is called a Sotonian.
Significant employers in Southampton include the University of Southampton, Southampton Airport, the Ford Transit factory, Ordnance Survey, BBC South, the NHS, ABP and Carnival. Southampton is noted for its association with the RMS Titanic, the Spitfire and more recently a number of the largest cruise ships in the world.

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Soviet Union
The Soviet Union (Russian: Советский Союз, tr. Sovetsky Soyuz), officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR; Russian: Сою́з Сове́тских Социалисти́ческих Респу́блик, tr. Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik; IPA: [sɐˈjus sɐˈvʲetskʲɪx sətsɨəlʲɪˈstʲitɕɪskʲɪx rʲɪsˈpublʲɪk] ( listen); abbreviated СССР, SSSR), was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991.
The Soviet Union was a single-party state ruled by the Communist Party from its foundation until 1990. A union of 15 subnational Soviet republics, the Soviet state was structured under a highly centralized government and economy.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 caused the downfall of the Russian Empire. Following the Russian Revolution, there was a struggle for power between the Bolshevik party, led by Vladimir Lenin, and the anti-communist White movement. In December 1922, the Bolsheviks won the civil war, and the Soviet Union was formed with the merger of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic.

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The Hague
The Hague (Dutch: Den Haag pronounced [dɛnˈɦaˑχ] ( listen), officially 's-Gravenhage pronounced [ˈsχraˑvə(n)ˌɦaˑɣə] ( listen)) is the capital city of the province of South Holland in the Netherlands. With a population of 500,000 inhabitants (as of 1 September 2011), and more than one million inhabitants including the suburbs, it is the third largest city of the Netherlands, after Amsterdam and Rotterdam. Located in the west of the Netherlands, The Hague is in the centre of the Haaglanden conurbation and lies at the southwest corner of the larger Randstad conurbation.
The Hague is the seat of the Dutch government and parliament, the Supreme Court, and the Council of State, but the city is not the capital of the Netherlands which constitutionally is Amsterdam. Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands lives at Huis ten Bosch and works at Noordeinde Palace in The Hague. Most foreign embassies in the Netherlands and 150 international organisations are located in the city, including the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, which makes The Hague one of the major cities hosting the United Nations, along with New York, Vienna and Geneva.

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Adam Smith
Adam Smith (baptised 16 June 1723 – 17 July 1790 [OS: 5 June 1723 – 17 July 1790]) was a Scottish social philosopher and a pioneer of political economy. One of the key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith is the author of The Principles Which Lead and Direct Philosophical Enquiries, Illustrated by the History of Astronomy, prior to 1758, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759, and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776. The latter, usually abbreviated as The Wealth of Nations, is considered his magnum opus and the first modern work of economics. It earned him an enormous reputation and would become one of the most influential works ever published. Smith is widely cited as the father of modern economics and capitalism and is still among the most influential thinkers in the field of economics today. In 2009, Smith was named among the 'Greatest Scots' of all time, in a vote run by Scottish television channel STV.
Smith studied social philosophy at the University of Glasgow and at Balliol College in the University of Oxford, where he was one of the first students to benefit from scholarships set up by his fellow Glaswegian John Snell. After graduating, he delivered a successful series of public lectures at Edinburgh, leading him to collaborate with David Hume during the Scottish Enlightenment. Smith obtained a professorship at Glasgow teaching moral philosophy, and during this time he wrote and published The Theory of Moral Sentiments. In his later life, he took a tutoring position that allowed him to travel throughout Europe, where he met other intellectual leaders of his day. Smith then returned home and spent the next ten years writing The Wealth of Nations, publishing it in 1776. He died in 1790 at the age of 67.

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Anatole France
Anatole France (pronounced: [anatɔl fʁɑ̃s]) (16 April 1844 – 12 October 1924), born François-Anatole Thibault,[frɑ̃swa anatɔl tibo], was a French poet, journalist, and novelist. He was born in Paris, and died in Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire. He was a successful novelist, with several best-sellers. Ironic and skeptical, he was considered in his day the ideal French man of letters. He was a member of the Académie française, and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in recognition of his literary achievements.
France is also widely believed to be the model for narrator Marcel's literary idol Bergotte in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time.
The son of a bookseller, France spent most of his life around books. His father's bookstore, called the Librairie France, specialized in books and papers on the French Revolution and was frequented by many notable writers and scholars of the day. Anatole France studied at the Collège Stanislas, a private Catholic school, and after graduation he helped his father by working in his bookstore. After several years he secured the position of cataloguer at Bacheline-Deflorenne and at Lemerre. In 1876 he was appointed librarian for the French Senate.

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Aristotle
Aristotle (Ancient Greek: Ἀριστοτέλης, Aristotélēs) (384 BC – 322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology. Together with Plato and Socrates (Plato's teacher), Aristotle is one of the most important founding figures in Western philosophy. Aristotle's writings were the first to create a comprehensive system of Western philosophy, encompassing morality, aesthetics, logic, science, politics, and metaphysics.
Aristotle's views on the physical sciences profoundly shaped medieval scholarship, and their influence extended well into the Renaissance, although they were ultimately replaced by Newtonian physics. In the zoological sciences, some of his observations were confirmed to be accurate only in the 19th century. His works contain the earliest known formal study of logic, which was incorporated in the late 19th century into modern formal logic. In metaphysics, Aristotelianism had a profound influence on philosophical and theological thinking in the Islamic and Jewish traditions in the Middle Ages, and it continues to influence Christian theology, especially the scholastic tradition of the Catholic Church. His ethics, though always influential, gained renewed interest with the modern advent of virtue ethics. All aspects of Aristotle's philosophy continue to be the object of active academic study today. Though Aristotle wrote many elegant treatises and dialogues (Cicero described his literary style as "a river of gold"), it is thought that the majority of his writings are now lost and only about one-third of the original works have survived.

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Carl Schmitt
Carl Schmitt (July 11, 1888 – April 7, 1985) was a German jurist, philosopher, political theorist, and professor of law.
Schmitt published several essays, influential in the 20th century and beyond, on the mentalities that surround the effective wielding of political power. His ideas have attracted the attention of numerous philosophers and political theorists, including Walter Benjamin, Leo Strauss, Jacques Derrida, Étienne Balibar, Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri, Gianfranco Miglio, Paolo Virno, Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, Jacob Taubes, Gillian Rose, Chantal Mouffe, Eric Voegelin, Reinhart Koselleck, Álvaro d'Ors, and Paul Gottfried. Much of his work, especially from the Weimar period, remains both influential and controversial today.
Schmitt, whose father was a minor businessman, was the son of Roman Catholic parents from the German Eifel region who settled in Plettenberg, Westphalia. He studied law in Berlin, Munich and Strasbourg and took his graduation and state exams in the then-German Strasbourg in 1915. He volunteered for the army in 1916. The same year, he earned his habilitation in Strasbourg. He taught at various business schools and universities - in Munich, Greifswald, Bonn, Berlin, and Cologne.

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Civilization
Civilization (or civilisation) is a sometimes controversial term that has been used in several related ways. Primarily, the term has been used to refer to the material and instrumental side of human cultures that are complex in terms of technology, science, and division of labor. Such civilizations are generally hierarchical and urbanized. In a classical context, people were called "civilized" to set them apart from barbarians, while in a modern-day context, "civilized peoples" have been contrasted with primitive peoples.
There is a tendency to use the term in a less strict way, to mean approximately the same thing as "culture" and therefore, the term can more broadly refer to any important and clearly defined human society.^{[citation needed]} Still, even when used in this second sense, the word is often restricted to apply only to societies that have attained a particular level of advancement-especially the founding of cities.
The level of advancement of a civilization is often measured by its progress in agriculture, long-distance trade, occupational specialization, a special governing class and urbanism. Aside from these core elements, a civilization is often marked by any combination of a number of secondary elements, including a developed transportation system, writing, standardized measurement, currency, contractual and (tort-based) legal systems, characteristic art and architecture, mathematics, enhanced scientific understanding, metallurgy, political structures, and an astronomical understanding.

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David Hume
David Hume (7 May [O.S. 26 April] 1711 – 25 August 1776) was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and scepticism. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment. Hume is often grouped with John Locke, George Berkeley, and a handful of others as a British Empiricist.
Beginning with his A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Hume strove to create a total naturalistic "science of man" that examined the psychological basis of human nature. In stark opposition to the rationalists who preceded him, most notably Descartes, he concluded that desire rather than reason governed human behaviour, saying: "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions." A prominent figure in the sceptical philosophical tradition and a strong empiricist, he argued against the existence of innate ideas, concluding instead that humans have knowledge only of things they directly experience. Thus he divides perceptions between strong and lively "impressions" or direct sensations and fainter "ideas", which are copied from impressions. He developed the position that mental behaviour is governed by "custom"; our use of induction, for example, is justified only by our idea of the "constant conjunction" of causes and effects. Without direct impressions of a metaphysical "self", he concluded that humans have no actual conception of the self, only of a bundle of sensations associated with the self.

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Eugen Ehrlich
Eugen Ehrlich (born September 14, 1862; died May 2, 1922) was an Austrian legal scholar and sociologist of law.
He was born in Czernowitz (now Chernivtsi in Ukraine), which was at that time part of the Bukovina, a province of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Ehrlich studied law in Vienna, where he taught and practised as a lawyer before returning to Czernowitz to teach at the University there, a bastion of Germanic culture at the eastern edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He remained at the University for the rest of his teaching career and was Rector in 1906-7. During the turmoil of World War I, when Czernowitz was occupied several times by Russian forces, he moved to Switzerland. After the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the ceding of the Bukovina to Romania, Ehrlich planned to return to Czernowitz, where he would have been required to teach in Romanian, but he died of diabetes in Vienna, Austria in 1922.

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Francis Fukuyama
Yoshihiro Francis Fukuyama (born October 27, 1952) is an American political scientist, political economist, and author.
He is best known for his book The End of History and the Last Man (1992), which argued that the worldwide spread of liberal democracies and free market capitalism of the West and its lifestyle may signal the end point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and become the final form of human government. However, his subsequent book "Trust: Social Virtues and Creation of Prosperity" (1995) modified his earlier position to acknowledge that culture cannot be cleanly separated from economics. Fukuyama is also associated with the rise of the neoconservative movement, from which he has since distanced himself.
Fukuyama is a Senior Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. Before that he served as a professor and director of the International Development program at the School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University.

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Friedrich Hayek
Friedrich August Hayek CH (German pronunciation: [ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈaʊ̯ɡʊst ˈhaɪ̯ɛk]; 8 May 1899 – 23 March 1992), born in Austria-Hungary as Friedrich August von Hayek, was an economist and philosopher best known for his defense of classical liberalism. In 1974, Hayek shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (with his political rival, Gunnar Myrdal) for his "pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and... penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena." He considered the efficient allocation of capital to be the most important factor leading to sustainable and optimal GDP growth, and warned of harms from monetary authority manipulation of interest rates. Interest rates should be set naturally by equilibrium between consumption of goods or capital stock.
Hayek is considered to be a major economist and political philosopher of the twentieth century. Along with his mentor Ludwig von Mises, he was an important contributor to the Austrian school of economic thought. Hayek's account of how changing prices communicate information which enable individuals to coordinate their plans is widely regarded as an important achievement in economics. He also contributed to the fields of systems thinking, jurisprudence, neuroscience and the history of ideas.

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Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche ( /ˈniːtʃə/;German pronunciation: [ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈvɪlhɛlm ˈniːtsʃə]; October 15, 1844 – August 25, 1900) was a German philosopher, poet, cultural critic and classical philologist. He wrote critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy and science, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony and aphorism.
Nietzsche's influence remains substantial within and beyond philosophy, notably in existentialism, nihilism and postmodernism. His style and radical questioning of the value and objectivity of truth have resulted in much commentary and interpretation, mostly in the continental tradition. His key ideas include the death of God, the Übermensch, the eternal recurrence, the Apollonian and Dionysian dichotomy, perspectivism and the will to power. Central to his philosophy is the idea of "life-affirmation", which involves an honest questioning of all doctrines that drain life's expansive energies, however socially prevalent and radical those views might be.

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Fritz Berolzheimer
Fritz Berolzheimer, Juris Doctor (January 3, 1869 – 1920) was a German philosopher of law. He was the author of the five volume System der Rechts- und Wirtschaftsphilosophie (1904-07). In 1907 he co-founded the Archiv für Rechts- und Wirtschaftsphilosophie (ARWP).

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Gary Becker
Gary Stanley Becker (born December 2, 1930) is an American economist. He is a professor of economics and sociology at the University of Chicago and a professor at the Booth School of Business. He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1992 and received the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007. He is currently a Rose-Marie and Jack R. Anderson senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
Becker was one of the first economists to branch into what were traditionally considered topics belonging to sociology, including racial discrimination, crime, family organization, and drug addiction (see Rational addiction). He is known for arguing that many different types of human behavior can be seen as rational and utility maximizing. His approach can include altruistic behavior by defining individuals' utility appropriately. He is also among the foremost exponents of the study of human capital. Becker is also credited with the "rotten kid theorem". He is married to Guity Nashat, a historian of the Middle East whose research interests overlap his own.

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Geoffrey Robertson
Geoffrey Ronald Robertson QC (born 30 September 1946,Sydney, New South Wales) is an Australian-born human rights lawyer, academic, author and broadcaster. He holds dual Australian and British citizenship.
Robertson is the founder and head of Doughty Street Chambers. He serves as a Master of the Bench at the Middle Temple, a recorder, and visiting professor at Queen Mary, University of London.
Robertson was born in Australia and grew up in the Sydney suburb of Eastwood, attending Epping Boys' High School. He obtained his law degree from the Sydney Law School before winning a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Civil Law. In 2006 he was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws by the University of Sydney.
In 1990 Robertson married author Kathy Lette, and they live together in London with their children. They had met in 1988 during the filming of a Hypothetical episode for ABC Television; Robertson was going out with Nigella Lawson at the time and Lette was married to Kim Williams, today CEO of News Limited. In his 2010 Who's Who entry, he lists his hobbies as tennis, opera and fishing.

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Georges Gurvitch
Georges Gurvitch (Russian: Гео́ргий Дави́дович Гу́рвич; November 11, 1894, Novorossiysk - December 12, 1965, Paris) was a Russian born French sociologist and jurist. One of the leading sociologists of his times, he was a specialist of the sociology of knowledge. In 1944 he founded the journal Cahiers internationaux de Sociologie. He held a chair in sociology at the Sorbonne in Paris. An outspoken advocate of Algerian decolonization, Gurvitch and his wife were the victim of terrorist attack by the far-right nationalist group, L'O.A.S on June 22, 1962. Their apartment was destroyed by a bomb, and they took refuge for a time at the house of painter Marc Chagall.
Gurvitch is an important figure in the development of sociology of law. Like other legal sociologists, he insisted that law is not merely the rules or decisions produced, interpreted and enforced by asgencies of the state, such as legislatures, courts and police. Groups and communities of various kinds, whether formally structured or informally organised, produce regulation for themselves and others, which can properly be considered law from a sociological standpoint. Gurvitch's legal pluralism is, however, far more rigorous and radical than that of most legal sociologists and locates an immense variety of types of law in the various kinds of sociality - or social interaction - that he distinguished in his writings. He saw the need to stress the reality and significance of social law and social rights, in opposition to what he termed individual law. His Bill of Social Rights, drafted at the end of World War II was an attempt to state a blueprint of a legal framework of social law for a postwar world in which the idea of human rights had become newly powerful.

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Hammurabi
Hammurabi (Akkadian from Amorite ʻAmmurāpi, "the kinsman is a healer", from ʻAmmu, "paternal kinsman", and Rāpi, "healer"; (died c. 1750 BC) was the sixth king of Babylon (that is, of the First Babylonian Dynasty) from 1792 BC to 1750 BC middle chronology (1728 BC – 1686 BC short chronology). He became the first king of the Babylonian Empire following the abdication of his father, Sin-Muballit, extending Babylon's control over Mesopotamia by winning a series of wars against neighboring kingdoms. Although his empire controlled all of Mesopotamia at the time of his death, his successors were unable to maintain his empire.
Hammurabi is known for the set of laws called Hammurabi's Code, one of the first written codes of law in recorded history.^{[citation needed]} These laws were inscribed on stone tablets (stelae) standing over eight feet tall (2.4 meters), of unknown provenance, found in Persia in 1901. Owing to his reputation in modern times as an ancient law-giver, Hammurabi's portrait is in many government buildings throughout the world.

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Hans Kelsen
Hans Kelsen (October 11, 1881 – April 19, 1973) was a jurist and legal philosopher. He has been regarded as one of the most important legal scholars of the 20th century.
Kelsen was born in Prague to Jewish parents. He moved to Vienna with his family when he was three years old. Having graduated from the Akademisches Gymnasium, he studied law at the University of Vienna, taking his doctorate in 1906. In 1911, he achieved his habilitation (license to hold university lectures) in public law and legal philosophy and published his first major work, Main Problems in the Theory of Public Law (Hauptprobleme der Staatsrechtslehre).
In 1912, Kelsen married Margarete Bondi, and the couple had two daughters.
In 1919, he became full professor of public and administrative law at the University of Vienna. He established and edited the Journal of Public Law (Zeitschrift für öffentliches Recht) in Vienna. At the behest of Chancellor Karl Renner, Kelsen worked on drafting a new Austrian Constitution, enacted in 1920. The document still forms the basis of Austrian constitutional law. Kelsen was appointed to the Constitutional Court, for a life term. In 1925, he published General Theory of the State (Allgemeine Staatslehre) in Berlin.

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Hugo Grotius
Hugo Grotius (10 April 1583 – 28 August 1645), also known as Huig de Groot, Hugo Grocio or Hugo de Groot, was a jurist in the Dutch Republic. With Francisco de Vitoria and Alberico Gentili he laid the foundations for international law, based on natural law. He was also a philosopher, theologian, Christian apologist, playwright, and poet.
Grotius's influence on international law is paramount, and is acknowledged by, for instance, the American Society of International Law, which since 1999 holds an annual series of Grotius Lectures. Additionally, his contributions to Arminian theology provided the seeds for later Arminian-based movements, such as Methodism and Pentecostalism and he is acknowledged as a significant figure in the Arminianism-Calvinism debate.
Born in Delft during the Dutch Revolt, Hugo was the first child of Jan de Groot and Alida van Overschie. His father was a man of learning, once having studied with the eminent Justus Lipsius at Leiden, as well as of political distinction, and he groomed his son from an early age in a traditional humanist and Aristotelian education. A prodigious learner, Hugo entered the University of Leiden when he was just eleven years old. There he studied with some of the most acclaimed intellectuals in northern Europe, including Franciscus Junius, Joseph Justus Scaliger, and Rudolph Snellius. At age sixteen he published his first book: a scholarly edition of the late antique author Martianus Capella's work on the seven liberal arts, Martiani Minei Felicis Capellæ Carthaginiensis viri proconsularis Satyricon, in quo De nuptiis Philologiæ & Mercurij libri duo, & De septem artibus liberalibus libri singulares. Omnes, & emendati, & Notis, siue Februis Hug. Grotii illustrati.

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Hugo Sinzheimer
Hugo Sinzheimer (12 April 1875, in Worms, Grand Duchy of Hesse - 16 September 1945, in Bloemendaal-Overveen, the Netherlands) was a German legal scholar.
Sinzheimer was one of the first academics specialising in labour law; he published an introduction to this field (Der korporative Arbeitsnormenvertrag) in 1907. He was one of the members of the Weimar National Assembly, which promulgated the Weimar Constitution. As a major influence on the drafting of the labour law section of the constitution, he is considered to be "the father of labour law" in Germany. He was inspired by the ideals of the dignity and liberty of every human being, and was a humanist in the widest sense of the word.
As a lawyer, he frequently represented political and union-related groups. He joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany in 1914. From 1920 onward, he was professor of labour law and sociology of law at Frankfurt University.
In 1933, Sinzheimer, who was Jewish, was forced to emigrate to the Netherlands. He survived the war after he went into hiding.

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Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant (German pronunciation: [ɪˈmaːnu̯eːl ˈkant]; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher from Königsberg (today Kaliningrad of Russia), who researched, lectured, and wrote on philosophy and anthropology during the Enlightenment at the end of the 18th century. At the time, there were major successes and advances in the sciences (for example, Isaac Newton, Carl Friedrich Gauss, and Robert Boyle) applying reason and logic.
Kant’s major work, the Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1781), aimed to unite reason with experience to move beyond what he took to be failures of traditional philosophy and metaphysics. He hoped to end an age of speculation where objects outside experience were used to support what he saw as futile theories, while opposing the skepticism of thinkers such as Descartes, Berkeley and Hume.
He stated:
Kant proposed a ‘Copernican Revolution’ in reverse, saying that:
Kant published other important works on ethics, religion, law, aesthetics, astronomy, and history. These included the Critique of Practical Reason (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, 1788) and the Metaphysics of Morals (Die Metaphysik der Sitten, 1797), which dealt with ethics. And the Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790), which looks at aesthetics and teleology. He aimed to resolve disputes between empirical and rationalist approaches. The former asserted that all knowledge comes through experience; the latter maintained that reason and innate ideas were prior. Kant argued that experience is purely subjective without first being processed by pure reason. He also said that using reason without applying it to experience only leads to theoretical illusions. The free and proper exercise of reason by the individual was both a theme of the Enlightenment, and of Kant's approaches to the various problems of philosophy.

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Insanity defense
In criminal trials, the insanity defense is where the defendant claims that he or she was not responsible for his or her actions due to mental health problems (psychiatric illness or mental handicap). The exemption of the insane from full criminal punishment dates back to at least the Code of Hammurabi.^{[citation needed]} There are different definitions of legal insanity, such as the M'Naghten Rules, the Durham Rule, the American Legal Institute definition, and various miscellaneous provisions (e.g. relating to lack of mens rea). .
In the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the United States, use of the defense is rare; however, since the Criminal Procedure (Insanity and Unfitness to Plead) Act 1991 , insanity pleas have steadily increased in the UK . Mitigating factors, including things not eligible for the insanity defense like intoxication^{[citation needed]} (or, more frequently, diminished capacity), may lead to reduced charges or reduced sentences.
The insanity defense is based on evaluations by forensic mental health professionals with the appropriate test according to the jurisdiction. Their testimony guides the jury, but they are not allowed to testify to the accused's criminal responsibility, as this is a matter for the jury to decide. Similarly, mental health practitioners are restrained from making a judgment on the issue of whether the defendant is or is not insane or what is known as the "ultimate issue".

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Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham ( /ˈbɛnθəm/; 15 February 1748 – 6 June 1832) was an English author, jurist, philosopher, and legal and social reformer. He became a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law, and a political radical whose ideas influenced the development of welfarism. He is best known for his advocacy of utilitarianism and animal rights, and the idea of the panopticon.
His position included arguments in favour of individual and economic freedom, usury, the separation of church and state, freedom of expression, equal rights for women, the right to divorce, and the decriminalising of homosexual acts. He argued for the abolition of slavery and the death penalty and for the abolition of physical punishment, including that of children. Although strongly in favour of the extension of individual legal rights, he opposed the idea of natural law and natural rights, calling them "nonsense upon stilts."
He has come to be considered the founding figure of modern utilitarianism, through his own work and that of his students. These included his secretary and collaborator on the utilitarian school of philosophy, James Mill; James Mill's son John Stuart Mill; John Austin, legal philosopher; and several political leaders, including Robert Owen, a founder of modern socialism. He has been described as the "spiritual founder" of University College London (UCL), though he played little direct part in its foundation.

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John Locke
John Locke FRS ( /ˈlɒk/; 29 August 1632 – 28 October 1704), widely known as the Father of Classical Liberalism, was an English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, he is equally important to social contract theory. His work had a great impact upon the development of epistemology and political philosophy. His writings influenced Voltaire and Rousseau, many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American revolutionaries. His contributions to classical republicanism and liberal theory are reflected in the United States Declaration of Independence.
Locke's theory of mind is often cited as the origin of modern conceptions of identity and the self, figuring prominently in the work of later philosophers such as Hume, Rousseau and Kant. Locke was the first to define the self through a continuity of consciousness. He postulated that the mind was a blank slate or tabula rasa. Contrary to pre-existing Cartesian philosophy, he maintained that we are born without innate ideas, and that knowledge is instead determined only by experience derived from sense perception.

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John Selden
John Selden (16 December 1584 – 30 November 1654) was an English jurist and a scholar of England's ancient laws and constitution and scholar of Jewish law. He was known as a polymath showing true intellectual depth and breadth; John Milton hailed Selden in 1644 as "the chief of learned men reputed in this land."
He was born at Salvington, in the parish of West Tarring, Sussex (now part of the town of Worthing), and was baptised at St Andrew's, the parish church.The cottage in which he was born survived until 1959 when it was destroyed by a fire caused by an electrical fault. His father, another John Selden, had a small farm. It is said that his skill as a violin-player was what attracted his wife, Margaret, who was from a better family, being the only child of Thomas Baker of Rustington and descended from a knightly family of Kent. Selden was educated at the free grammar school at Chichester, The Prebendal School, and in 1600 he went on to Hart Hall, Oxford. In 1603 he was admitted to Clifford's Inn, London; in 1604 he moved to the Inner Temple; and in 1612 he was called to the bar. His earliest patron was Sir Robert Bruce Cotton, the antiquary, who seems to have employed him to copy and summarise some of the parliamentary records then held at the Tower of London. For some reason, Selden very rarely practised in court, but his practice in chambers as a conveyancer and consulting counsel was large and apparently lucrative.

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Joseph Raz
Joseph Raz (Hebrew: יוסף רז‎; born 21 March 1939) is a legal, moral and political philosopher. He is one of the most prominent advocates of legal positivism. He has spent most of his career as professor of philosophy of law and a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and simultaneously as professor of law at Columbia University Law School. Raz is currently a visiting professor at King's College London. Several of Raz's students have become important legal and moral philosophers, including the two current Professors in Jurisprudence at Oxford, John Gardner and Leslie Green.
Born in Mandate Palestine in 1939, Joseph Raz graduated in 1963 from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel with a Magister Juris (Master of Jurisprudence), summa cum laude. Later, with funds provided by the Hebrew University, Raz pursued a Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) at Oxford University under the supervision of H. L. A. Hart. This was by no means coincidental; Raz had met Hart earlier at a conference in Israel. Hart says that at this meeting, Raz pointed out a flaw in his reasoning that had previously eluded him. Hart encouraged him to go to Oxford for further study.

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Julius Stone
Julius Stone (7 July 1907 – 1985) was Challis Professor of Jurisprudence and International Law at the University of Sydney from 1942 to 1972, and thereafter a visiting Professor of Law at the University of New South Wales and concurrently Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence and International Law at the Hastings College of Law, University of California.
He is the author of 27 books on jurisprudence and international law, and is hailed by his official biography at the Julius Stone Institute of Jurisprudence as one of the premier legal theorists.
Stone was born in Leeds, England to parents who were poor Lithuanian Jewish refugees.
Stone received a scholarship to Oxford University, where he earned Bachelor of Arts (Jurisprudence), Bachelor of Civil Law and Doctor of Civil Law degrees. He followed this with a Master of Laws from Leeds University, and then a Doctor of Juridical Science from Harvard University.
Stone taught at Harvard, and briefly at Leeds, then went to New Zealand where he worked at Auckland University College. In 1942, he was appointed Challis Professor of Jurisprudence and International Law at the University of Sydney, a position he held until 1972. Stone's appointment was controversial for several reasons; he was perceived to have a radical jurisprudential stance, some wanted the Chair to be held open until the end of the war as it was suggested that there were suitable candidates in active service. It was suspected that the fact that he was a Jew also played a role. A debate over his appointment was carried out in both the Australian parliament and local newspapers; the Chancellor of the University, and two Fellows of the University Senate, resigned in protest. This early experience of anti-Semitism influenced his lifelong commitment to justice, according to his biographer, Leonie Star (Star 1993).

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Justinian I
Justinian I ( /dʒʌˈstɪniən/) (Latin: Flavius Petrus Sabbatius Iustinianus Augustus, Ancient Greek: Φλάβιος Πέτρος Σαββάτιος Ἰουστινιανός) (c. 482 – 14 November 565), commonly known as Justinian the Great, was Byzantine Emperor from 527 to 565. During his reign, Justinian sought to revive the Empire's greatness and reconquer the lost western half of the classical Roman Empire.
One of the most important figures of Late Antiquity and the last Roman Emperor to speak Latin as a first language, Justinian's rule constitutes a distinct epoch in the history of the Eastern Roman Empire. The impact of his administration extended far beyond the boundaries of his time and domain. Justinian's reign is marked by the ambitious but only partly realized renovatio imperii, or "restoration of the Empire". This ambition was expressed by the partial recovery of the territories of the defunct Western Roman Empire. His general Belisarius swiftly conquered the Vandal Kingdom in North Africa, extending Roman control to the Atlantic Ocean. Subsequently Belisarius, Narses, and other generals conquered the Ostrogothic Kingdom, restoring Dalmatia, Sicily, Italy, and Rome to the Empire after more than half a century of barbarian control.

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Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx (5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement. He published various books during his lifetime, with the most notable being The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Capital (1867–1894); some of his works were co-written with his friend and fellow German revolutionary socialist, Friedrich Engels.
Born into a wealthy middle class family in Trier, formerly in Prussian Rhineland now called Rhineland-Palatinate, Marx studied at both the University of Bonn and the University of Berlin, where he became interested in the philosophical ideas of the Young Hegelians. In 1836, he became engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, marrying her in 1843. After his studies, he wrote for a radical newspaper in Cologne, and began to work out his theory of dialectical materialism. Moving to Paris in 1843, he began writing for other radical newspapers. He met Engels in Paris, and the two men worked together on a series of books. Exiled to Brussels, he became a leading figure of the Communist League, before moving back to Cologne, where he founded his own newspaper. In 1849 he was exiled again and moved to London together with his wife and children. In London, where the family was reduced to poverty, Marx continued writing and formulating his theories about the nature of society and how he believed it could be improved, and also campaigned for socialism—he became a significant figure in the International Workingmen's Association.

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Louis XIV of France
Louis XIV (5 September 1638 – 1 September 1715), known as Louis the Great or the Sun King (French: le Roi-Soleil), was a Bourbon monarch who ruled as King of France and Navarre. He holds the distinction of being the longest-reigning king in European history, reigning for 72 years and 110 days.
Louis began his personal rule of France in 1661 after the death of his chief minister, the Italian Cardinal Mazarin. An adherent of the theory of the divine right of kings, which advocates the divine origin and lack of temporal restraint of monarchical rule, Louis continued his predecessors' work of creating a centralized state governed from the capital. He sought to eliminate the remnants of feudalism persisting in parts of France and, by compelling the nobility to inhabit his lavish Palace of Versailles, succeeded in pacifying the aristocracy, many members of which had participated in the Fronde rebellion during Louis's minority. By these means he consolidated a system of absolute monarchical rule in France that endured until the French Revolution.

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Ludwig von Mises
Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises (German pronunciation: [ˈluːtvɪç fɔn ˈmiːzəs]; September 29, 1881 – October 10, 1973) was a philosopher, Austrian School economist, and classical liberal. He became a prominent figure in the Austrian School of economic thought and is best known for his work on praxeology. Fearing a Nazi takeover of Europe, Mises emigrated to the United States in 1940. Mises had a significant influence on the libertarian movement in the United States in the mid-20th century.
Ludwig von Mises was born to wealthy Jewish parents in the city of Lemberg, in Galicia, Austria-Hungary (now Lviv in Ukraine). The family of his father Arthur Edler von Mises had been elevated to the Austrian nobility in the 19th century, and was involved in building and financing railroads. Ludwig's mother, Adele (née Landau), was a niece of Dr. Joachim Landau, a Liberal Party deputy to the Austrian Parliament. Arthur was stationed there as a construction engineer with Czernowitz railway company. At the age of twelve Ludwig spoke fluent Yiddish, German, Polish, and French, read Latin, and could understand Ukrainian. Mises was the older brother of the famous applied physicist Richard von Mises, a member of the Vienna Circle. Another brother, Karl von Mises, died as a child from scarlet fever.^{[citation needed]} When Ludwig and Richard were children, his family moved back to their ancestral home of Vienna.

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Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong, also transliterated as Mao Tse-tung listen (help·info), and commonly referred to as Chairman Mao (December 26, 1893 – September 9, 1976), was a Chinese Communist revolutionary, guerrilla warfare strategist, Marxist political philosopher, and leader of the Chinese Revolution. He was the architect and founding father of the People's Republic of China (PRC) from its establishment in 1949, and held authoritarian control over the nation until his death in 1976. His theoretical contribution to Marxism–Leninism, along with his military strategies and brand of policies, are collectively known as Maoism.
Mao rose to power by commanding the Long March, forming a Second United Front with Kuomintang (KMT) during the Second Sino-Japanese War to repel a Japanese invasion, and leading the Communist Party of China (CPC) to victory against Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang (KMT) in the Chinese Civil War. After solidifying the reunification of China through his Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries, Mao enacted sweeping land reform, by using violence and terror to overthrow the feudal landlords before seizing their large estates and dividing the land into people's communes. During the years when Mao was China’s 'Great Helmsman', a range of positive changes came to China. These included promoting the status of women, improving popular literacy, doubling the school population, providing universal housing, abolishing unemployment and inflation, increasing health care access, and dramatically raising life expectancy. In addition, China's population almost doubled during the period of Mao's leadership (from around 550 to over 900 million). As a result, Mao is still officially held in high regard by many in China as a great political strategist, military mastermind, and savior of the nation. Maoists further promote his role as a theorist, statesman, poet, and visionary, while anti-revisionists continue to defend most of his policies.

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Max Weber
Maximilian Karl Emil "Max" Weber (German pronunciation: [ˈmaks ˈveːbɐ]; 21 April 1864 – 14 June 1920) was a German sociologist, philosopher, and political economist who profoundly influenced social theory, social research, and the discipline of sociology itself.
Weber was a key proponent of methodological antipositivism, presenting sociology as a non-empiricist field which must study social action through interpretive means based upon understanding the meanings and purposes that individuals attach to their own actions. Weber is often cited, with Émile Durkheim and Karl Marx, as one of the three principal architects of modern social science.
Weber's main intellectual concern was understanding the processes of rationalisation, secularization, and "disenchantment" that he associated with the rise of capitalism and modernity. Weber argued that the most important difference among societies is not how people produce things but how people think about the world. In Weber’s view, modern society was the product of a new way of thinking. Weber is perhaps best known for his thesis combining economic sociology and the sociology of religion, elaborated in his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber proposed that ascetic Protestantism was one of the major "elective affinities" associated with the rise of capitalism, bureaucracy and the rational-legal nation-state in the Western world. Against Marx's "historical materialism," Weber emphasised the importance of cultural influences embedded in religion as a means for understanding the genesis of capitalism. The Protestant Ethic formed the earliest part in Weber's broader investigations into world religion: he would go on to examine the religions of China, the religions of India and ancient Judaism, with particular regard to the apparent non-development of capitalism in the corresponding societies, as well as to their differing forms of social stratification.

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Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman (July 31, 1912 – November 16, 2006) was an American economist, statistician, and author who taught at the University of Chicago for more than three decades. He was a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, and is known for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory, and the complexity of stabilization policy. As a leader of the Chicago school of economics, he influenced the research agenda of the economics profession. A survey of economists ranked Friedman as the second most popular economist of the twentieth century behind John Maynard Keynes, and The Economist described him as "the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century…possibly of all of it."
Friedman's challenges to what he later called "naive Keynesian" (as opposed to New Keynesian) theory began with his 1950s reinterpretation of the consumption function, and he became the main advocate opposing activist Keynesian government policies. In the late 1960s he described his own approach (along with all of mainstream economics) as using "Keynesian language and apparatus" yet rejecting its "initial" conclusions. During the 1960s he promoted an alternative macroeconomic policy known as "monetarism". He theorized there existed a "natural" rate of unemployment, and argued that governments could increase employment above this rate (e.g., by increasing aggregate demand) only at the risk of causing inflation to accelerate. He argued that the Phillips curve was not stable and predicted what would come to be known as stagflation. Friedman argued that, given the existence of the Federal Reserve, a constant small expansion of the money supply was the only wise policy.

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Montesquieu
Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (/ˈmɒntɨskjuː/; French pronunciation: [mɔ̃tɛskjø]; 18 January 1689 – 10 February 1755), generally referred to as simply Montesquieu, was a French social commentator and political thinker who lived during the Enlightenment. He is famous for his articulation of the theory of separation of powers, which is taken for granted in modern discussions of government and implemented in many constitutions throughout the world. He was largely responsible for the popularization of the terms feudalism and Byzantine Empire.
He was born at the Château de la Brède in the southwest of France. His father, Jacques de Secondat, was a soldier with a long noble ancestry. His mother, Marie Françoise de Pesnel who died when Charles de Secondat was seven, was a female inheritor of a large monetary inheritance who brought the title of barony of La Brède to the Secondat family.^{[citation needed]} After having studied at the Catholic College of Juilly, Charles-Louis de Secondat married. His wife, Jeanne de Lartigue, a Protestant, brought him a substantial dowry when he was 26. The next year, he inherited a fortune upon the death of his uncle, as well as the title Baron de Montesquieu and Président à Mortier in the Parliament of Bordeaux. By that time, England had declared itself a constitutional monarchy in the wake of its Glorious Revolution (1688–89), and had joined with Scotland in the Union of 1707 to form the Kingdom of Great Britain. In 1715 the long-reigning Louis XIV died and was succeeded by the five-year-old Louis XV. These national transformations impacted Montesquieu greatly; he would later refer to them repeatedly in his work.

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Nikos Kazantzakis
Nikos Kazantzakis (Greek: Νίκος Καζαντζάκης; February 18, 1883 – October 26, 1957) was a Greek writer and philosopher, celebrated for his novel Zorba the Greek, considered his magnum opus. He became known globally after the 1964 release of the Michael Cacoyannis film Zorba the Greek, based on the novel.
When Kazantzakis was born in 1883 in Heraklion, Crete had not yet joined the modern Greek state, (which had been established in 1832) and was still under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. From 1902 Kazantzakis studied law at the University of Athens, then went to Paris in 1907 to study philosophy. Here he fell under the influence of Henri Bergson. His 1909 dissertation was titled "Friedrich Nietzsche on the Philosophy of Right and the State." Upon his return to Greece, he began translating works of philosophy. In 1914 he met Angelos Sikelianos. Together they travelled for two years in places where Greek Orthodox Christian culture flourished, largely influenced by the enthusiastic nationalism of Sikelianos.

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Peter Birks
Peter Birks QC, FBA (3 October 1941 – 6 July 2004) was the Regius Professor of Civil Law at the University of Oxford from 1989 until his death. He also become a Fellow of the British Academy in 1989, and an honorary Queen's counsel in 1995. He was a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is widely credited as having sparked academic enthusiasm for the English law of Restitution, and is often considered to have been one of the greatest English legal scholars of the 20th century.
He originally studied at Trinity College, Oxford and subsequently obtained a master of laws from University College London.
Birks was also the first general editor of English Private Law, a book which sought to summarise and rationalise the entire scope of English private law, in accordance with Birks' own passionate belief for order and charactersiation within a discipline (law) which he regarded as too eclectic and inconsistent. He also wrote An Introduction To The Law Of Restitution and Unjust Enrichment, and wrote some 142 contributions to legal reviews.

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Richard Posner
Richard Allen Posner (born January 11, 1939) is an American jurist, legal theorist, and economist who is currently a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago and a Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. He is an influential figure in the law and economics school of thought.
He is the author of nearly 40 books on jurisprudence, economics, and several other topics, including Economic Analysis of Law, The Economics of Justice, The Problems of Jurisprudence, Sex and Reason, Law, Pragmatism and Democracy, and The Crisis of Capitalist Democracy. The Journal of Legal Studies has identified Posner as the most cited legal scholar of the 20th century.
Born in New York City, Posner graduated from Yale College (A.B., 1959, summa cum laude), majoring in English, and from Harvard Law School (LL.B., 1962, magna cum laude), where he was first in his class and president of the Harvard Law Review. After clerking for Justice William J. Brennan of the United States Supreme Court during the 1962-63 term, he served as Attorney-Advisor to Federal Trade Commissioner Philip Elman; he would later argue that the Federal Trade Commission ought to be abolished. He went on to work in the Office of the Solicitor General in the U.S. Department of Justice, under Solicitor General Thurgood Marshall.

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Ronald Coase
Ronald Harry Coase (/ˈkoʊs/; born 29 December 1910) is a British-born, America-based economist and the Clifton R. Musser Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Chicago Law School. After studying with the University of London External Programme in 1927–29, Coase entered the London School of Economics, where he took courses with Arnold Plant. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1991.
Coase is best known for two articles in particular: "The Nature of the Firm" (1937), which introduces the concept of transaction costs to explain the nature and limits of firms, and "The Problem of Social Cost" (1960), which suggests that well-defined property rights could overcome the problems of externalities (see Coase Theorem). Coase is also often referred to as the "father" of reform in the policy for allocation of the electromagnetic spectrum, based on his article "The Federal Communications Commission" (1959), where he criticizes spectrum licensing, suggesting property rights as a more efficient method of allocating spectrum to users. Additionally, Coase's transaction costs approach is currently influential in modern organizational economics, where it was reintroduced by Oliver E. Williamson.

wn.com/Ronald_Coase
Ronald Dworkin
Ronald Myles Dworkin, FBA (born December 11, 1931) is an American philosopher and scholar of constitutional law. He is Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law and Philosophy at New York University and Emeritus Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London, and has taught previously at Yale Law School and the University of Oxford. An influential contributor to both philosophy of law and political philosophy, Dworkin received the 2007 Holberg International Memorial Prize in the Humanities for "his pioneering scholarly work" of "worldwide impact." According to a survey in The Journal of Legal Studies, Dworkin was the second most-cited American legal scholar of the twentieth century.
His theory of law as integrity, in which judges interpret the law in terms of consistent and communal moral principles, especially justice and fairness, is amongst the most influential contemporary theories about the nature of law. He advocates a "moral reading" of the United States Constitution, and an interpretivist approach to law and morality. He is a frequent commentator on contemporary political and legal issues, particularly those concerning the Supreme Court of the United States, often in the pages of The New York Review of Books.

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Show trial
The term show trial is a pejorative description of a type of highly public trial in which there is a strong connotation that the judicial authorities have already determined the guilt of the defendant. The actual trial has as its only goal to present the accusation and the verdict to the public as an impressive example and as a warning. Show trials tend to be retributive rather than correctional justice. The term was first recorded in the 1930s.

Cadaver Trial was a posthumous trial over Catholic Pope Formosus held in 897.
In the late 17th century, various people in Salem, Massachusetts were accused of practicing witchcraft and consorting with the Devil in the Salem witch trials. Nineteen people were executed, one was killed, and five died in prison.
The Dreyfus affair was a show trial in France in 1894, where a Jewish captain, Alfred Dreyfus, was accused of spying for Germany.
The trial of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927 was one in which two anarchist Italian immigrants were accused of an armed robbery in Massachusetts. Both were executed, despite international appeals.

wn.com/Show_trial
Society
A society, or a human society, is a group of people related to each other through persistent relations, or a large social grouping sharing the same geographical or virtual territory, subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations. Human societies are characterized by patterns of relationships (social relations) between individuals who share a distinctive culture and institutions; a given society may be described as the sum total of such relationships among its constituent members. In the social sciences, a larger society often evinces stratification and/or dominance patterns in subgroups.
Insofar as it is collaborative, a society can enable its members to benefit in ways that would not otherwise be possible on an individual basis; both individual and social (common) benefits can thus be distinguished, or in many cases found to overlap.
A society can also consist of like-minded people governed by their own norms and values within a dominant, larger society. This is sometimes referred to as a subculture, a term used extensively within criminology.

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Theodor Geiger
Theodor Julius Geiger (9 November 1891 in Munich, Germany - 16 June 1952) was a German socialist, lawyer and sociologist who studied Sociology of Law, social stratification and social mobility, methodology, and intelligentsia, among other things. He was Denmark's first professor of sociology, working at the University of Aarhus (1938–1940).
Geiger grew up in Landshut, Bavaria, showing an interest in Scandinavia and a talent in Scandinavian languages from an early age. The son of a gymnasium teacher, Geiger studied law and political science, first at the University of Munich from 1910–1912, then at the University of Würzburg from 1912 - 1914 where he received his doctorate in law.
In 1914 Geiger voluntarily joined the army ; he served until 1918 and was wounded. Simultaneously he wrote a dissertation on the supervision of criminals, Die Schutzaufsicht, supported by Friedrich Oetker. In 1918 he became a Doctor of Laws.
In 1920 Geiger joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). In the same year he became an assistant at the Statistischer Reichsamt, the statistics office, in Munich, working in the trade statistics department from 1924 to 1933. His home, however, was in Berlin, where he published the magazine Fremde Presse (Foreign Press), with news on the Reich ministry for the army from 1920 - 1929. At the same time he edited the information magazine of the newly-founded Berlin Volkshochschule (adult education centre) where he had begun to work as a teacher.

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Theodosius II
Theodosius II (Latin: Flavius Theodosius Junior Augustus; 10 April 401 – 28 July 450), commonly surnamed Theodosius the Younger, or Theodosius the Calligrapher, was Byzantine Emperor from 408 to 450. He is mostly known for promulgating the Theodosian law code, and for the construction of the Theodosian Walls of Constantinople. He also presided over the outbreak of two great christological controversies, Nestorianism and Eutychianism.
Theodosius was born in 401 as the only son of Emperor Arcadius and his Frankish-born wife Aelia Eudoxia. In 408, his father died and the seven-year-old boy became Emperor of the Eastern half of the Roman Empire.
Government was at first by the Praetorian Prefect Anthemius, under whose supervision the Theodosian land walls of Constantinople were constructed.
In 414, Theodosius' older sister Pulcheria was proclaimed Augusta and assumed the regency. By 416 Theodosius was capable of ruling himself, but his sister remained a strong influence on him. In June 421, Theodosius married Aelia Eudocia, a woman of Greek origin. The two had a daughter named Licinia Eudoxia.

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Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas, O.P. ( /əˈkwaɪnəs/ ə-KWY-nəs; 1225 – 7 March 1274), also Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, was an Italian Dominican priest of the Roman Catholic Church, and an immensely influential philosopher and theologian in the tradition of scholasticism, known as Doctor Angelicus ([the] Angelic Doctor), Doctor Communis, or Doctor Universalis. "Aquinas" is not a surname, but is a Latin demonym for a resident of Aquino, his place of birth. He was the foremost classical proponent of natural theology, and the father of Thomism. His influence on Western thought is considerable, and much of modern philosophy was conceived as a reaction against, or as an agreement with, his ideas, particularly in the areas of ethics, natural law, metaphysics, and political theory.
Thomas is held in the Catholic Church to be the model teacher for those studying for the priesthood. The works for which he is best-known are the Summa Theologica and the Summa Contra Gentiles. As one of the 33 Doctors of the Church, he is considered the Church's greatest theologian and philosopher. Pope Benedict XV declared: "This (Dominican) Order ... acquired new luster when the Church declared the teaching of Thomas to be her own and that Doctor, honored with the special praises of the Pontiffs, the master and patron of Catholic schools."

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Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury (5 April 1588 – 4 December 1679), in some older texts Thomas Hobbs of Malmsbury, was an English philosopher, best known today for his work on political philosophy. His 1651 book Leviathan established the foundation for most of Western political philosophy from the perspective of social contract theory.
Hobbes was a champion of absolutism for the sovereign but he also developed some of the fundamentals of European liberal thought: the right of the individual; the natural equality of all men; the artificial character of the political order (which led to the later distinction between civil society and the state); the view that all legitimate political power must be "representative" and based on the consent of the people; and a liberal interpretation of law which leaves people free to do whatever the law does not explicitly forbid.
He was one of the founders of modern political philosophy. His understanding of humans as being matter and motion, obeying the same physical laws as other matter and motion, remains influential; and his account of human nature as self-interested cooperation, and of political communities as being based upon a "social contract" remains one of the major topics of political philosophy.

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Thomas More
Sir Thomas More ( /ˈmɔr/; 7 February 1478 – 6 July 1535), known by Catholics as Saint Thomas More since 1935, was an English lawyer, social philosopher, author, statesman, and noted Renaissance humanist. He was an important councillor to Henry VIII of England and was Lord Chancellor from October 1529 to 16 May 1532. He is commemorated by the Church of England as a "Reformation martyr". He was an opponent of the Protestant Reformation and in particular of Martin Luther and William Tyndale.
More coined the word "utopia" – a name he gave to the ideal and imaginary island nation, the political system of which he described in Utopia published in 1516. He opposed the King's separation from the Catholic Church and refused to accept the King as Supreme Head of the Church of England, a title which had been given by parliament through the Act of Supremacy of 1534. He was imprisoned in 1534 for his refusal to take the oath required by the First Succession Act, because the act disparaged papal power and Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon. In 1535, he was tried for treason, convicted on perjured testimony and beheaded.

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William Blackstone
Sir William Blackstone KC SL (10 July 1723 – 14 February 1780) was an English jurist, judge and Tory politician of the eighteenth century. He is most noted for writing the Commentaries on the Laws of England. Born into a middle class family in London, Blackstone was educated at Charterhouse School before matriculating at Pembroke College, Oxford in 1738. After switching to and completing a Bachelor of Civil Law degree, he was made a Fellow of All Souls, Oxford on 2 November 1743, admitted to Middle Temple, and called to the Bar there in 1746. Following a slow start to his career as a barrister, Blackstone became heavily involved in university administration, becoming accountant, treasurer and bursar on 28 November 1746 and Senior Bursar in 1750. Blackstone is considered responsible for completing the Codrington Library and Warton Building, and simplifying the complex accounting system used by the college. On 3 July 1753 he formally gave up his practise as a barrister and instead embarked on a series of lectures on English law, the first of their kind. These were massively successful, earning him a total of £56,000 in 2012 terms, and led to the publication of An Analysis of the Laws of England in 1756, which repeatedly sold out and was used to preface his later works.

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Winston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, KG, OM, CH, TD, PC, DL, FRS, Hon. RA (30 November 1874 – 24 January 1965) was a British Conservative politician and statesman known for his leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. Widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the century, he served as Prime Minister twice (1940–45 and 1951–55). A noted statesman and orator, Churchill was also an officer in the British Army, a historian, a writer, and an artist. He is the only British prime minister to have received the Nobel Prize in Literature, and was the first person to be made an Honorary Citizen of the United States.
Churchill was born into the aristocratic family of the Dukes of Marlborough. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was a charismatic politician who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer; his mother, Jenny Jerome, was an American socialite. As a young army officer, he saw action in British India, the Sudan, and the Second Boer War. He gained fame as a war correspondent and wrote books about his campaigns.

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Émile Durkheim
David Émile Durkheim (French pronunciation: [emil dyʁˈkɛm], [dyʁˈkajm]) (April 15, 1858 – November 15, 1917) was a French sociologist. He formally established the academic discipline and, with Karl Marx and Max Weber, is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science and father of sociology.
Much of Durkheim's work was concerned with how societies could maintain their integrity and coherence in modernity; an era in which traditional social and religious ties are no longer assumed, and in which new social institutions have come into being. His first major sociological work was The Division of Labor in Society (1893). In 1895, he published his Rules of the Sociological Method and set up the first European department of sociology, becoming France's first professor of sociology. In 1898, he established the journal L'Année Sociologique. Durkheim's seminal monograph, Suicide (1897), a study of suicide rates amongst Catholic and Protestant populations, pioneered modern social research and served to distinguish social science from psychology and political philosophy. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), presented a theory of religion, comparing the social and cultural lives of aboriginal and modern societies.

wn.com/Émile_Durkheim

Armed Forces Special Powers Act: Legal cover or draconian law?

The Buck Stops Here: What Irom Sharmila is fighting for is a complex issue - a change to t...

published: 05 Mar 2013

author: ndtv

Legal Law - Acceptable.TV

On her first day as a lawyer, Lacy is found in contempt of court andgets entangled in an o...

published: 08 Mar 2007

author: AcceptableTV

President of NJ Second Amendment Society Says New Laws Would Only Hurt Legal Gun Owners

Frank Fiamingo, President of the New Jersey Second Amendment Society, says the latest roun...

published: 27 Feb 2013

author: NJTodayOnline

The Newshour Debate: Are politicians above the law? (The Full Debate)

In a debate moderated by TIMES NOW's Editor-in-Chief Arnab Goswami, panelists -- Dr Rita B...

published: 05 Mar 2013

author: timesnowonline

VV 26 English Legal Vocabulary - Contract Law (Part 1)

This episode of www.VideoVocab.TV is the first of our two-part series on English vocabular...

published: 24 Oct 2011

author: bizpod

The Newshour Debate: Are politicians above the law? (Part 1 of 2)

In a debate moderated by TIMES NOW's Editor-in-Chief Arnab Goswami, panelists -- Dr Rita B...

published: 05 Mar 2013

author: timesnowonline

Policing Legal Marijuana

March 04, 2013 Current TV News http://MOXNews.com....

published: 05 Mar 2013

author: MOXNEWSd0tC0M

The Faculty of Law's Legal Clinics - Serving the Community

The Faculty of Law at Bar-Ilan University has established eight Legal Clinics, providing l...

published: 14 Jan 2013

author: barilanuniversity

US Gun Law Part 1: History, Legal Precedent, & Reasons to Own Guns (BO2 Gameplay Commentary)

Part 1 of a 3 part series on gun laws, gun control, and gun violence in the United States....

published: 16 Jan 2013

author: Drift0r

Some Fear New Internet Gambling Law Will Be Detrimental for Addicts

With easier access to gambling online, some worry more problem gambling will occur. For mo...

published: 27 Feb 2013

author: NJTodayOnline

Lecture 10. Biblical Law: The Three Legal Corpora of JE (Exodus), P (Leviticus and Numbers) and D

Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) (RLST 145) with Christine Hayes This lect...

published: 06 Dec 2012

author: YaleCourses

The Lies Behind The Law....Legal & Lawful Are Not The Same Thing.

Dan`s interpretation of how the law works and the difference between legal and lawful. Ins...

published: 30 Jun 2012

author: 61shirley

Re J - Uncertain Perpetrators in Child Protection Cases

In Re J (Children) [2013] UKSC 9 the Supreme Court considered a child protection case invo...

published: 27 Feb 2013

author: CambridgeUniversity

Sea Business: Current Issues in International and Domestic Maritime Law

Battlefields, Boardrooms, and Backyards: The New Face of National Security Law Moderator: ...

published: 01 Mar 2013

author: dukelaw

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet

Tell Congress not to censor the internet NOW! - thecenterforrights.org/pipa PROTECT-IP i...

published: 25 Oct 2011

author: Center For Rights

The Manhattan Project HD

This time-lapse production has been a wild and exhilarating ride, with a lot of physical w...

published: 06 Jun 2012

author: Cameron Michael

Everything is a Remix Part 4

Our system of law doesn't acknowledge the derivative nature of creativity. Instead, ideas ...

published: 16 Feb 2012

author: Kirby Ferguson

TO UNDERSTAND IS TO PERCEIVE PATTERNS

By @jason_silva and @notthisbody - Special thanks to filmmaker/photographer Rob Whitworth...

published: 24 Dec 2011

author: Jason Silva

photo: AP / Lai Seng Sin

Malaysian police officers carry the coffins of two policemen who were killed in an ambush in Semporna, Malaysia, as they arrive at the Royal Malaysian Air Force base in Subang, near Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Monday, March 4, 2013. Malaysia sent hundreds of soldiers to a Borneo state on Monday to help neutralize armed Filipino intruders who have killed eight police officers in the country's bloodiest security emergency in years. (AP Photo/Lai Seng Sin)

Malaysian security forces attack Filipinos to end Borneo village siege

The Times of India

05 Mar 2013

KUALA LUMPUR. Malaysian security forces attacked a group of armed Filipinos early Tuesday to end the group's three-week occupation of a Borneo village, the prime minister said after the siege turned violent and became Malaysia's biggest security crisis in years ... The Philippine government asked Malaysia on Monday to exercise maximum tolerance to avoid further bloodshed ... 9 ... ....(size: 4.7Kb)

photo: AP / Gali Tibbon, Pool

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visits the national police headquarters in Jerusalem

Biden, Netanyahu set tone on Iran for Obama visit to Israel

China Daily

05 Mar 2013

WASHINGTON - US Vice-President Joe Biden insisted on Monday that President Barack Obama was not bluffing about using force to thwart Iran's nuclear ambitions if all else fails, even as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called for a "credible military threat" against Tehran ... "Words alone will not stop Iran. Sanctions alone will not stop Iran ... Tehran denies it is seeking one ... "We are not looking for war ... Previous Page 1 2 Next Page....(size: 3.5Kb)

photo: AP / Aaron Favila

Detained former Muslim rebel chieftain Nur Misuari joins others during celebrations of Eid al-Fitr marking the end of the holy fasting month of Ramadan in suburban Manila on Monday Oct. 23, 2006.

Muslim Rebels Involved in Malaysia: MNLF

Jakarta Globe

05 Mar 2013

Manila. Members of a major Philippine Muslim rebel force who were meant to have disarmed in the 1990s as part of a peace pact are involved in deadly battles in Malaysia, the group’s leader said on Tuesday. Nur Misuari, who founded the Moro National Liberation Front in the late 1960s, confirmed “freedom fighters” from his group were part of the militia sent by a self-proclaimed sultan to claim the Malaysian state of Sabah....(size: 2.6Kb)

photo: US Navy / MCS1 Daniel N. Woods

File - U.S. Army Soldiers aboard an M1126 Stryker Infantry Carrier Vehicle from Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 27th Infantry Regiment prepare to fire its .50-caliber heavy machine gun during live-fire exercises at Rodriguez Range Complex, South Korea, as part of exercise Reception, Staging, Onward movement, and Integration / Foal Eagle 2007 March 22, 2007.

NKorea: Cold War history with US justifies nukes

Philadelphia Daily News

05 Mar 2013

FOSTER KLUG , The Associated Press. Posted. Tuesday, March 5, 2013, 4.12 AM. SEOUL, South Korea - The Cold War still rages in North Korea, and enemy No. 1 is the United States, which Pyongyang blames for making its much-condemned drive to develop nuclear weapons necessary ... Security Council sanctions ... invasion plans. U.S ... Pyongyang uses Cold War history with the U.S ... From the News Desk. Latest Videos ... Ex-agent, 2 others cheated IRS, jury told ... ....(size: 9.2Kb)

photo: AP / Narciso Contreras

In this Tuesday, Dec. 4, 2012 file photo, Syrians walk past damaged homes during heavy fighting between Free Syrian Army fighters and government forces in Aleppo, Syria.

Massacre of Syrian Soldiers in Iraq Raises Risk of Widening Conflict

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

04 Mar 2013

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- More than 40 Syrian soldiers who had sought temporary safety in Iraq from rebel fighters along the border were killed on Monday in an attack by unidentified gunmen as the Iraqi military was transporting the soldiers back to Syria in a bus convoy, the government said ... He said Iraq would deploy more security forces on the border ... "We will not allow any terrorist to enter the Iraqi lands," Mr ... Mr ... Mr ... Mr ... But last week, Mr ... ....(size: 7.0Kb)

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Pro-gun lobby seeks to block former New York solicitor general's nomination to federal appeals court judgeship

New York Daily News

06 Mar 2013

WASHINGTON — A former New York solicitor general will have her nomination to the federal bench filibustered Wednesday by Senate Republicans determined to thwart her because of her “radical” anti-gun past, lawmakers say ... highest court in the land....(size: 1.2Kb)

HC rap for terminus shift delay OUR LEGAL REPORTER The high court on Tuesday directed ...

The Telegraph India

06 Mar 2013

The high court on Tuesday directed the ......(size: 0.2Kb)

POLYGAMY PARLEYS Should civil courts interpret Muslim Personal Law? A recent judgment on polygamy being ...

The Telegraph India

06 Mar 2013

....(size: 0.2Kb)

DC Superior Court, DC Bar to Co-Host Youth Law Fair for Area Teens (City of Washington, DC - District of Columbia)

noodls

06 Mar 2013

PRESS ADVISORY DC SUPERIOR COURT, DC BAR TO CO-HOST YOUTH LAW FAIR FOR AREA TEENS ... This year's Youth Law Fair - the 14th such fair - will allow students to consider the legal ramifications of bullying, through speak-out sessions and mock trials centered on the District's Youth Bullying Prevention Act ... As a joint effort of the DC Superior Court and DC ......(size: 2.2Kb)

DC Courts to host national conference on racial and ethnic fairness in the justice system (City of Washington, DC - District of Columbia)

noodls

06 Mar 2013

MEDIA ADVISORY DC Courts to host national conference on racial and ethnic fairness in the justice system ... Fairness in the Courts ... Racial and Ethnic Fairness in the Courts will be held on March 20-23 in Washington, DC ... "The 25th anniversary of the National Consortium is a milestone and we are excited to be in the Nation's Capital," said Justice Edward Clifton of the Rhode Island Superior Court and president of the National Consortium....(size: 3.8Kb)

Simpson Thacher Successful in Second Circuit Appeal in Auction Rate Securities Antitrust Litigation (Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP)

noodls

06 Mar 2013

Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP) Simpson Thacher Successful in Second Circuit Appeal in Auction Rate Securities Antitrust Litigation ... • Litigation. • Securities/Shareholder Litigation....(size: 1.6Kb)

Justice Waghela elevated as chief justice of Karnataka HC

Indian Express

06 Mar 2013

One of the sitting judges of the Gujarat High Court, Justice D H Waghela, has been elevated as the Chief Justice of the Karnataka High Court by the Supreme Court ... "He will take oath as the Chief Justice of the Karnataka HC on March 7."....(size: 1.2Kb)

Jury finds father guilty in son's death

MSNBC

06 Mar 2013

Click to read more. ....(size: 0.3Kb)

Defendant's ex-girlfriend enters jury room

Star Telegram

06 Mar 2013

... begun in the trial of Robert Earl Oliver at the county's criminal courts building Tuesday when the woman entered the jury room and confronted jurors in Oliver's trial....(size: 0.9Kb)

Jury finds Emeritus liable for wrongful death of elderly woman at their facility

Sacramento Bee

06 Mar 2013

A Sacramento Superior Court jury today found the Emeritus Corp ... With most of their answers to the key questions on the verdict form coming on 12-0 votes, the jury awarded the family of Joan Boice $3.875 million for her pain and suffering ... be capped at $250,000 by state law....(size: 1.4Kb)

Hollywood reimburses police union for attorney fees

The Miami Herald

06 Mar 2013

A judge ruled over the summer that city had to cover the union’s court costs....(size: 0.9Kb)

Judge: 'Shocked' by Peterson's former attorney

STL Today

06 Mar 2013

The Chicago Sun-Times (http.//bit.ly/XUq7Vr) reports Burmila denied a request by Peterson's current attorneys for an order instructing Joel Brodsky to keep quiet....(size: 0.9Kb)

Trayvon Martin's killer will not seek key pre-trial hearing: attorney

Orlando Sentinel

06 Mar 2013

... neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman under Florida's controversial Stand Your Ground law....(size: 0.5Kb)

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For other uses, see Law (disambiguation) and Legal (disambiguation).

The examples and perspective in this article may not represent a worldwide view of the subject. Please improve this article and discuss the issue on the talk page. (May 2012)

Lady Justice is the symbol of justice. Lady Justice is depicted as a goddess equipped with three symbols of justice: a sword symbolising the court's coercive power; scales representing an objective standard by which competing claims are weighed; and a blindfold indicating that justice is (or should be) meted out objectively, without fear or favor, regardless of identity, money, power, or weakness.^[1]

The Law^[2] is a system of rules and guidelines which are enforced through social institutions to govern behavior.^[3] Laws are made by governments, specifically by their legislatures. The formation of laws themselves may be influenced by a constitution (written or unwritten) and the rights encoded therein. The law shapes politics, economics and society in countless ways and serves as a social mediator of relations between people.

A general distinction can be made between civil law jurisdictions (including Canon and Socialist law), in which the legislature or other central body codifies and consolidates their laws and common law systems (including Sharia), where judge-made binding precedents are accepted. In some countries, religion may inform the law; for example, in jurisdictions that practice Islamic law, Jewish law or Canon law.

The adjudication of the law is generally divided into two main areas. Criminal law deals with conduct that is designated dishonest by the government and in which the guilty party may be imprisioned or fined. Civil law (not to be confused with civil law jurisdictions above) deals with disputes between individuals or organizations, in which compensation may be awarded to the wronged litigant.

Under civil law, the following specialties, among others, exist: Contract law regulates everything from buying a bus ticket to trading on derivatives markets. Property law regulates the transfer and title of personal property and real property. Trust law applies to assets held for investment and financial security. Tort law allows claims for compensation if a person's property are harmed. Constitutional law provides a framework for the creation of law, the protection of human rights and the election of political representatives. Administrative law is used to review the decisions of government agencies. International law governs affairs between sovereign states in activities ranging from trade to military action.

To implement and enforce the law and provide services to the public, a government's bureaucracy, the military and police are vital. While all these organs of the state are creatures created and bound by law, an independent legal profession and a vibrant civil society inform and support their progress^{[citation needed]}.

Law provides a rich source of scholarly inquiry into legal history, philosophy, economic analysis and sociology. Law also raises important and complex issues concerning equality, fairness, and justice. "In its majestic equality", said the author Anatole France in 1894, "the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread."^[4] Writing in 350 BCE, the Greek philosopher Aristotle declared, "The rule of law is better than the rule of any individual."^[5]

In a presidential democracy, the constitution is sovereign and the central institutions for interpreting and creating law are the three main branches of government, namely an impartial judiciary, a democratic legislature, and an accountable executive. In parliamentary systems, the legislature is sovereign and appoints one of its members as the executive (often called the prime minister). The judicial branch is under the parliament.

Legal subjects [link]

All legal systems deal with the same basic issues, but jurisdictions categorise and identify its legal subjects in different ways. A common distinction is that between "public law" (a term related closely to the state, and including constitutional, administrative and criminal law), and "private law" (which covers contract, tort and property).^[6] In civil law systems, contract and tort fall under a general law of obligations, while trusts law is dealt with under statutory regimes or international conventions. International, constitutional and administrative law, criminal law, contract, tort, property law and trusts are regarded as the "traditional core subjects",^[7] although there are many further disciplines .

International law [link]

Main articles: Public international law, Conflict of laws, and European Union law

Providing a constitution for public international law, the United Nations system was agreed during World War II

International law can refer to three things: public international law, private international law or conflict of laws and the law of supranational organisations.

Public international law concerns relationships between sovereign nations. The sources for public international law development are custom, practice and treaties between sovereign nations, such as the Geneva Conventions. Public international law can be formed by international organisations, such as the United Nations (which was established after the failure of the League of Nations to prevent the Second World War),^[8] the International Labour Organisation, the World Trade Organisation, or the International Monetary Fund. Public international law has a special status as law because there is no international police force, and courts (e.g. the International Court of Justice as the primary UN judicial organ) lack the capacity to penalise disobedience.^[9] However, a few bodies, such as the WTO, have effective systems of binding arbitration and dispute resolution backed up by trade sanctions.^[10]

Conflict of laws (or "private international law" in civil law countries) concerns which jurisdiction a legal dispute between private parties should be heard in and which jurisdiction's law should be applied. Today, businesses are increasingly capable of shifting capital and labour supply chains across borders, as well as trading with overseas businesses, making the question of which country has jurisdiction even more pressing. Increasing numbers of businesses opt for commercial arbitration under the New York Convention 1958.^[11]

European Union law is the first and, so far, only example of a internationally accepted legal system other than the UN and the World Trade Organisation. Given the trend of increasing global economic integration, many regional agreements—especially the Union of South American Nations—are on track to follow the same model. In the EU, sovereign nations have gathered their authority in a system of courts and political institutions. These institutions are allowed the ability to enforce legal norms both against or for member states and citizens in a manner which is not possible through public international law.^[12] As the European Court of Justice said in the 1960s, European Union law constitutes "a new legal order of international law" for the mutual social and economic benefit of the member states.^[13]

Constitutional and administrative law [link]

Main articles: Constitutional law and Administrative law

The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, whose principles still have constitutional value

Constitutional and administrative law govern the affairs of the state. Constitutional law concerns both the relationships between the executive, legislature and judiciary and the human rights or civil liberties of individuals against the state. Most jurisdictions, like the United States and France, have a single codified constitution with a bill of rights. A few, like the United Kingdom, have no such document. A "constitution" is simply those laws which constitute the body politic, from statute, case law and convention. A case named Entick v Carrington^[14] illustrates a constitutional principle deriving from the common law. Mr Entick's house was searched and ransacked by Sheriff Carrington. When Mr Entick complained in court, Sheriff Carrington argued that a warrant from a Government minister, the Earl of Halifax, was valid authority. However, there was no written statutory provision or court authority. The leading judge, Lord Camden, stated that,

The great end, for which men entered into society, was to secure their property. That right is preserved sacred and incommunicable in all instances, where it has not been taken away or abridged by some public law for the good of the whole ... If no excuse can be found or produced, the silence of the books is an authority against the defendant, and the plaintiff must have judgment.^[15]

The fundamental constitutional principle, inspired by John Locke, holds that the individual can do anything but that which is forbidden by law, and the state may do nothing but that which is authorised by law.^[16]^[17] Administrative law is the chief method for people to hold state bodies to account. People can apply for judicial review of actions or decisions by local councils, public services or government ministries, to ensure that they comply with the law. The first specialist administrative court was the Conseil d'État set up in 1799, as Napoleon assumed power in France.^[18]

Criminal law [link]

Main article: Criminal law

Criminal law, also known as penal law, pertains to crimes and punishment.^[19] It thus regulates the definition of and penalties for offences found to have a sufficiently deleterious social impact but, in itself, makes no moral judgment on an offender nor imposes restrictions on society that physically prevents people from committing a crime in the first place.^[20] Investigating, apprehending, charging, and trying suspected offenders is regulated by the law of criminal procedure.^[21] The paradigm case of a crime lies in the proof, beyond reasonable doubt, that a person is guilty of two things. First, the accused must commit an act which is deemed by society to be criminal, or actus reus (guilty act).^[22] Second, the accused must have the requisite malicious intent to do a criminal act, or mens rea (guilty mind). However for so called "strict liability" crimes, an actus reus is enough.^[23] Criminal systems of the civil law tradition distinguish between intention in the broad sense (dolus directus and dolus eventualis), and negligence. Negligence does not carry criminal responsibility unless a particular crime provides for its punishment.^[24]^[25]

A depiction of a 1600s criminal trial, for witchcraft in Salem

Examples of crimes include murder, assault, fraud and theft. In exceptional circumstances defences can apply to specific acts, such as killing in self defence, or pleading insanity. Another example is in the 19th century English case of R v Dudley and Stephens, which tested a defence of "necessity". The Mignonette, sailing from Southampton to Sydney, sank. Three crew members and Richard Parker, a 17 year old cabin boy, were stranded on a raft. They were starving and the cabin boy was close to death. Driven to extreme hunger, the crew killed and ate the cabin boy. The crew survived and were rescued, but put on trial for murder. They argued it was necessary to kill the cabin boy to preserve their own lives. Lord Coleridge, expressing immense disapproval, ruled, "to preserve one's life is generally speaking a duty, but it may be the plainest and the highest duty to sacrifice it." The men were sentenced to hang, but public opinion was overwhelmingly supportive of the crew's right to preserve their own lives. In the end, the Crown commuted their sentences to six months in jail.^[26]

Criminal law offences are viewed as offences against not just individual victims, but the community as well.^[20] The state, usually with the help of police, takes the lead in prosecution, which is why in common law countries cases are cited as "The People v ..." or "R (for Rex or Regina) v ..." Also, lay juries are often used to determine the guilt of defendants on points of fact: juries cannot change legal rules. Some developed countries still condone capital punishment for criminal activity, but the normal punishment for a crime will be imprisonment, fines, state supervision (such as probation), or community service. Modern criminal law has been affected considerably by the social sciences, especially with respect to sentencing, legal research, legislation, and rehabilitation.^[27] On the international field, 111 countries are members of the International Criminal Court, which was established to try people for crimes against humanity.^[28]

Contract law [link]

Main article: Contract

The famous Carbolic Smoke Ball advertisement to cure influenza was held to be a unilateral contract

Contract law concerns enforceable promises, and can be summed up in the Latin phrase pacta sunt servanda (agreements must be kept).^[29] In common law jurisdictions, three key elements to the creation of a contract are necessary: offer and acceptance, consideration and the intention to create legal relations. In Carlill v Carbolic Smoke Ball Company a medical firm advertised that its new wonder drug, the smokeball, would cure people's flu, and if it did not, the buyers would get £100. Many people sued for their £100 when the drug did not work. Fearing bankruptcy, Carbolic argued the advert was not to be taken as a serious, legally binding offer. It was an invitation to treat, mere puff, a gimmick. But the court of appeal held that to a reasonable man Carbolic had made a serious offer. People had given good consideration for it by going to the "distinct inconvenience" of using a faulty product. "Read the advertisement how you will, and twist it about as you will", said Lord Justice Lindley, "here is a distinct promise expressed in language which is perfectly unmistakable".^[30]

"Consideration" indicates the fact that all parties to a contract have exchanged something of value. Some common law systems, including Australia, are moving away from the idea of consideration as a requirement. The idea of estoppel or culpa in contrahendo, can be used to create obligations during pre-contractual negotiations.^[31] In civil law jurisdictions, consideration is not required for a contract to be binding.^[32] In France, an ordinary contract is said to form simply on the basis of a "meeting of the minds" or a "concurrence of wills". Germany has a special approach to contracts, which ties into property law. Their 'abstraction principle' (Abstraktionsprinzip) means that the personal obligation of contract forms separately from the title of property being conferred. When contracts are invalidated for some reason (e.g. a car buyer is so drunk that he lacks legal capacity to contract)^[33] the contractual obligation to pay can be invalidated separately from the proprietary title of the car. Unjust enrichment law, rather than contract law, is then used to restore title to the rightful owner.^[34]

Tort law [link]

Main article: Tort

The "McLibel" two were involved in the longest running case in UK history for publishing a pamphlet criticising McDonald's restaurants.

Torts, sometimes called delicts, are civil wrongs. To have acted tortiously, one must have breached a duty to another person, or infringed some pre-existing legal right. A simple example might be accidentally hitting someone with a cricket ball.^[35] Under the law of negligence, the most common form of tort, the injured party could potentially claim compensation for his injuries from the party responsible. The principles of negligence are illustrated by Donoghue v Stevenson.^[36] A friend of Mrs Donoghue ordered an opaque bottle of ginger beer (intended for the consumption of Mrs Donoghue) in a café in Paisley. Having consumed half of it, Mrs Donoghue poured the remainder into a tumbler. The decomposing remains of a snail floated out. She claimed to have suffered from shock, fell ill with gastroenteritis and sued the manufacturer for carelessly allowing the drink to be contaminated. The House of Lords decided that the manufacturer was liable for Mrs Donoghue's illness. Lord Atkin took a distinctly moral approach, and said,

The liability for negligence ... is no doubt based upon a general public sentiment of moral wrongdoing for which the offender must pay ... The rule that you are to love your neighbour becomes in law, you must not injure your neighbour; and the lawyer's question, Who is my neighbour? receives a restricted reply. You must take reasonable care to avoid acts or omissions which you can reasonably foresee would be likely to injure your neighbour.^[37]

This became the basis for the four principles of negligence; (1) Mr Stevenson owed Mrs Donoghue a duty of care to provide safe drinks (2) he breached his duty of care (3) the harm would not have occurred but for his breach and (4) his act was the proximate cause, or not too remote a consequence, of her harm.^[36] Another example of tort might be a neighbour making excessively loud noises with machinery on his property.^[38] Under a nuisance claim the noise could be stopped. Torts can also involve intentional acts, such as assault, battery or trespass. A better known tort is defamation, which occurs, for example, when a newspaper makes unsupportable allegations that damage a politician's reputation.^[39] More infamous are economic torts, which form the basis of labour law in some countries by making trade unions liable for strikes,^[40] when statute does not provide immunity.^[41]

Property law [link]

Main article: Property law

A painting of the South Sea Bubble, one of the world's first ever speculations and crashes, led to strict regulation on share trading.^[42]

Property law governs valuable things that people call 'theirs'. Real property, sometimes called 'real estate' refers to ownership of land and things attached to it.^[43] Personal property, refers to everything else; movable objects, such as computers, cars, jewelry or intangible rights, such as stocks and shares. A right in rem is a right to a specific piece of property, contrasting to a right in personam which allows compensation for a loss, but not a particular thing back. Land law forms the basis for most kinds of property law, and is the most complex. It concerns mortgages, rental agreements, licences, covenants, easements and the statutory systems for land registration. Regulations on the use of personal property fall under intellectual property, company law, trusts and commercial law. An example of a basic case of most property law is Armory v Delamirie [1722].^[44] A chimney sweep's boy found a jewel encrusted with precious stones. He took it to a goldsmith to have it valued. The goldsmith's apprentice looked at it, sneakily removed the stones, told the boy it was worth three halfpence and that he would buy it. The boy said he would prefer the jewel back, so the apprentice gave it to him, but without the stones. The boy sued the goldsmith for his apprentice's attempt to cheat him. Lord Chief Justice Pratt ruled that even though the boy could not be said to own the jewel, he should be considered the rightful keeper ("finders keeper") until the original owner is found. In fact the apprentice and the boy both had a right of possession in the jewel (a technical concept, meaning evidence that something could belong to someone), but the boy's possessory interest was considered better, because it could be shown to be first in time. Possession may be nine tenths of the law, but not all.

This case is used to support the view of property in common law jurisdictions, that the person who can show the best claim to a piece of property, against any contesting party, is the owner.^[45] By contrast, the classic civil law approach to property, propounded by Friedrich Carl von Savigny, is that it is a right good against the world. Obligations, like contracts and torts are conceptualised as rights good between individuals.^[46] The idea of property raises many further philosophical and political issues. Locke argued that our "lives, liberties and estates" are our property because we own our bodies and mix our labour with our surroundings.^[47]

Equity and trusts [link]

Main articles: Equity (law) and Trust law

The Court of Chancery, London, early 19th century

Equity is a body of rules that developed in England separately from the "common law". The common law was administered by judges. The Lord Chancellor on the other hand, as the King's keeper of conscience, could overrule the judge made law if he thought it equitable to do so.^[48] This meant equity came to operate more through principles than rigid rules. For instance, whereas neither the common law nor civil law systems allow people to split the ownership from the control of one piece of property, equity allows this through an arrangement known as a 'trust'. 'Trustees' control property, whereas the 'beneficial' (or 'equitable') ownership of trust property is held by people known as 'beneficiaries'. Trustees owe duties to their beneficiaries to take good care of the entrusted property.^[49] In the early case of Keech v Sandford [1722]^[50] a child had inherited the lease on a market in Romford, London. Mr Sandford was entrusted to look after this property until the child matured. But before then, the lease expired. The landlord had (apparently) told Mr Sandford that he did not want the child to have the renewed lease. Yet the landlord was happy (apparently) to give Mr Sandford the opportunity of the lease instead. Mr Sandford took it. When the child (now Mr Keech) grew up, he sued Mr Sandford for the profit that he had been making by getting the market's lease. Mr Sandford was meant to be trusted, but he put himself in a position of conflict of interest. The Lord Chancellor, Lord King, agreed and ordered Mr Sandford should disgorge his profits. He wrote,

I very well see, if a trustee, on the refusal to renew, might have a lease to himself few trust-estates would be renewed ... This may seem very hard, that the trustee is the only person of all mankind who might not have the lease; but it is very proper that the rule should be strictly pursued and not at all relaxed.

Of course, Lord King LC was worried that trustees might exploit opportunities to use trust property for themselves instead of looking after it. Business speculators using trusts had just recently caused a stock market crash. Strict duties for trustees made their way into company law and were applied to directors and chief executive officers. Another example of a trustee's duty might be to invest property wisely or sell it.^[51] This is especially the case for pension funds, the most important form of trust, where investors are trustees for people's savings until retirement. But trusts can also be set up for charitable purposes, famous examples being the British Museum or the Rockefeller Foundation.

Further disciplines [link]

Law spreads far beyond the core subjects into virtually every area of life. Three categories are presented for convenience, though the subjects intertwine and overlap.

Law and society

A trade union protest by UNISON while on strike

Labour law is the study of a tripartite industrial relationship between worker, employer and trade union. This involves collective bargaining regulation, and the right to strike. Individual employment law refers to workplace rights, such as job securiy, health and safety or a minimum wage.
Human rights, civil rights and human rights law are important fields to guarantee everyone basic freedoms and entitlements. These are laid down in codes such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the European Convention on Human Rights (which founded the European Court of Human Rights) and the U.S. Bill of Rights. The Treaty of Lisbon makes the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union legally binding in allmember states except Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union – Poland and the United Kingdom.^[52]
Civil procedure and criminal procedure concern the rules that courts must follow as a trial and appeals proceed. Both concern a citizen's right to a fair trial or hearing.
Evidence law involves which materials are admissible in courts for a case to be built.
Immigration law and nationality law concern the rights of foreigners to live and work in a nation-state that is not their own and to acquire or lose citizenship. Both also involve the right of asylum and the problem of stateless individuals.
Social security law refers to the rights people have to social insurance, such as jobseekers' allowances or housing benefits.
Family law covers marriage and divorce proceedings, the rights of children and rights to property and money in the event of separation.

Law and commerce

Company law sprang from the law of trusts, on the principle of separating ownership of property and control.^[53] The law of the modern company began with the Joint Stock Companies Act 1856, passed in the United Kingdom, which provided investors with a simple registration procedure to gain limited liability under the separate legal personality of the corporation.
Commercial law covers complex contract and property law. The law of agency, insurance law, bills of exchange, insolvency and bankruptcy law and sales law are all important, and trace back to the mediæval Lex Mercatoria. The UK Sale of Goods Act 1979 and the US Uniform Commercial Code are examples of codified common law commercial principles.
Admiralty law and the Law of the Sea lay a basic framework for free trade and commerce across the world's oceans and seas, where outside of a country's zone of control. Shipping companies operate through ordinary principles of commercial law, generalised for a global market. Admiralty law also encompasses specialised issues such as salvage, maritime liens, and injuries to passengers.
Intellectual property law aims at safeguarding creators and other producers of intellectual goods and services. These are legal rights (copyrights, trademarks, patents, and related rights) which result from intellectual activity in the industrial, literary and artistic fields.^[54]
Restitution deals with the recovery of someone else's gain, rather than compensation for one's own loss.
Unjust enrichment When someone has been unjustly enriched (or there is an "absence of basis" for a transaction) at another's expense, this event generates the right to restitution to reverse that gain.

Law and regulation

The New York Stock Exchange trading floor after the Wall Street Crash of 1929, before tougher banking regulation was introduced

Tax law involves regulations that concern value added tax, corporate tax, income tax.
Banking law and financial regulation set minimum standards on the amounts of capital banks must hold, and rules about best practice for investment. This is to insure against the risk of economic crises, such as the Wall Street Crash of 1929.
Regulation deals with the provision of public services and utilities. Water law is one example. Especially since privatisation became popular and took management of services away from public law, private companies doing the jobs previously controlled by government have been bound by varying degrees of social responsibility. Energy, gas, telecomms and water are regulated industries in most OECD countries.
Competition law, known in the U.S. as antitrust law, is an evolving field that traces as far back as Roman decrees against price fixing and the English restraint of trade doctrine. Modern competition law derives from the U.S. anti-cartel and anti-monopoly statutes (the Sherman Act and Clayton Act) of the turn of the 20th century. It is used to control businesses who attempt to use their economic influence to distort market prices at the expense of consumer welfare.
Consumer law could include anything from regulations on unfair contractual terms and clauses to directives on airline baggage insurance.
Environmental law is increasingly important, especially in light of the Kyoto Protocol and the potential danger of climate change. Environmental protection also serves to penalise polluters within domestic legal systems.

Legal systems [link]

Main article: Legal systems of the world

In general, legal systems can be split between civil law and common law systems.^[55] The term "civil law" referring to a legal system should not be confused with "civil law" as a group of legal subjects distinct from criminal or public law. A third type of legal system—accepted by some countries without separation of church and state—is religious law, based on scriptures. The specific system that a country is ruled by is often determined by its history, connections with other countries, or its adherence to international standards. The sources that jurisdictions adopt as authoritatively binding are the defining features of any legal system. Yet classification is a matter of form rather than substance, since similar rules often prevail.

Civil law [link]

Main article: Civil law (legal system)

First page of the 1804 edition of the Napoleonic Code

Civil law is the legal system used in most countries around the world today. In civil law the sources recognised as authoritative are, primarily, legislation—especially codifications in constitutions or statutes passed by government—and custom.^[56] Codifications date back millennia, with one early example being the Babylonian Codex Hammurabi. Modern civil law systems essentially derive from the legal practice of the 6th-century Eastern Roman Empire whose texts were rediscovered by late medieval Western Europe. Roman law in the days of the Roman Republic and Empire was heavily procedural, and lacked a professional legal class.^[57] Instead a lay magistrate, iudex, was chosen to adjudicate. Precedents were not reported, so any case law that developed was disguised and almost unrecognised.^[58] Each case was to be decided afresh from the laws of the State, which mirrors the (theoretical) unimportance of judges' decisions for future cases in civil law systems today. From 529–534 AD the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I codified and consolidated Roman law up until that point, so that what remained was one-twentieth of the mass of legal texts from before.^[59] This became known as the Corpus Juris Civilis. As one legal historian wrote, "Justinian consciously looked back to the golden age of Roman law and aimed to restore it to the peak it had reached three centuries before."^[60] The Justinian Code remained in force in the East until the fall of the Byzantine Empire. Western Europe, meanwhile, relied on a mix of the Theodosian Code and Germanic customary law until the Justinian Code was rediscovered in the 11th century, and scholars at the University of Bologna used it to interpret their own laws.^[61] Civil law codifications based closely on Roman law, alongside some influences from religious laws such as Canon law, continued to spread throughout Europe until the Enlightenment; then, in the 19th century, both France, with the Code Civil, and Germany, with the Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, modernised their legal codes. Both these codes influenced heavily not only the law systems of the countries in continental Europe (e.g. Greece), but also the Japanese and Korean legal traditions.^[62]^[63] Today, countries that have civil law systems range from Russia and China to most of Central and Latin America.^[64] The United States follows the common law system described below.

Common law and equity [link]

Main article: Common law

King John of England signs Magna Carta

Common law and equity are legal systems where decisions by courts are explicitly acknowledged to be legal sources. The "doctrine of precedent", or stare decisis (Latin for "to stand by decisions") means that decisions by higher courts bind lower courts. Common law systems also rely on statutes, passed by the legislature, but may make less of a systematic attempt to codify their laws than in a "civil law" system. Common law originated from England and has been inherited by almost every country once tied to the British Empire (except Malta, Scotland, the U.S. state of Louisiana, and the Canadian province of Quebec). In medieval England, the Norman conquest led to a unification of various tribal customs and hence a law "common" to the whole country. The common law developed when the English monarchy had been weakened by the enormous cost of fighting for control over large parts of France. King John had been forced by his barons to sign a document limiting his authority to pass laws. This "great charter" or Magna Carta of 1215 also required that the King's entourage of judges hold their courts and judgments at "a certain place" rather than dispensing autocratic justice in unpredictable places about the country.^[65] A concentrated and elite group of judges acquired a dominant role in law-making under this system, and compared to its European counterparts the English judiciary became highly centralised. In 1297, for instance, while the highest court in France had fifty-one judges, the English Court of Common Pleas had five.^[66] This powerful and tight-knit judiciary gave rise to a rigid and inflexible system of common law.^[67] As a result, as time went on, increasing numbers of citizens petitioned the King to override the common law, and on the King's behalf the Lord Chancellor gave judgment to do what was equitable in a case. From the time of Sir Thomas More, the first lawyer to be appointed as Lord Chancellor, a systematic body of equity grew up alongside the rigid common law, and developed its own Court of Chancery. At first, equity was often criticised as erratic, that it varied according to the length of the Chancellor's foot.^[68] But over time it developed solid principles, especially under Lord Eldon.^[69] In the 19th century the two systems were fused into one another. In developing the common law and equity, academic authors have always played an important part. William Blackstone, from around 1760, was the first scholar to describe and teach it.^[70] But merely in describing, scholars who sought explanations and underlying structures slowly changed the way the law actually worked.^[71]

Religious law [link]

Main article: Religious law

Religious law is explicitly based on religious precepts. Examples include the Jewish Halakha and Islamic Sharia—both of which translate as the "path to follow"—while Christian canon law also survives in some church communities. Often the implication of religion for law is unalterability, because the word of God cannot be amended or legislated against by judges or governments. However a thorough and detailed legal system generally requires human elaboration. For instance, the Quran has some law, and it acts as a source of further law through interpretation,^[72] Qiyas (reasoning by analogy), Ijma (consensus) and precedent. This is mainly contained in a body of law and jurisprudence known as Sharia and Fiqh respectively. Another example is the Torah or Old Testament, in the Pentateuch or Five Books of Moses. This contains the basic code of Jewish law, which some Israeli communities choose to use. The Halakha is a code of Jewish law which summarises some of the Talmud's interpretations. Nevertheless, Israeli law allows litigants to use religious laws only if they choose. Canon law is only in use by members of the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Anglican Communion.

A trial in the Ottoman Empire, 1879, when religious law applied under the Mecelle

Until the 18th century, Sharia law was practiced throughout the Muslim world in a non-codified form, with the Ottoman Empire's Mecelle code in the 19th century being first attempt at codifying elements of Sharia law. Since the mid-1940s, efforts have been made, in country after country, to bring Sharia law more into line with modern conditions and conceptions.^[73]^[74] In modern times, the legal systems of many Muslim countries draw upon both civil and common law traditions as well as Islamic law and custom. The constitutions of certain Muslim states, such as Egypt and Afghanistan, recognise Islam as the religion of the state, obliging legislature to adhere to Sharia.^[75] Saudi Arabia recognises Quran as its constitution, and is governed on the basis of Islamic law.^[76] Iran has also witnessed a reiteration of Islamic law into its legal system after 1979.^[77] During the last few decades, one of the fundamental features of the movement of Islamic resurgence has been the call to restore the Sharia, which has generated a vast amount of literature and affected world politics.^[78]

Legal theory [link]

Main article: Jurisprudence

History of law [link]

Main article: Legal history

King Hammurabi is revealed the code of laws by the Mesopotamian sun god Shamash, also revered as the god of justice

The history of law is closely connected to the development of civilization. Ancient Egyptian law, dating as far back as 3000 BC, contained a civil code that was probably broken into twelve books. It was based on the concept of Ma'at, characterised by tradition, rhetorical speech, social equality and impartiality.^[79]^[80] By the 22nd century BC, the ancient Sumerian ruler Ur-Nammu had formulated the first law code, which consisted of casuistic statements ("if ... then ..."). Around 1760 BC, King Hammurabi further developed Babylonian law, by codifying and inscribing it in stone. Hammurabi placed several copies of his law code throughout the kingdom of Babylon as stelae, for the entire public to see; this became known as the Codex Hammurabi. The most intact copy of these stelae was discovered in the 19th century by British Assyriologists, and has since been fully transliterated and translated into various languages, including English, German, and French.^[81]

The Old Testament dates back to 1280 BC and takes the form of moral imperatives as recommendations for a good society. The small Greek city-state, ancient Athens, from about the 8th century BC was the first society to be based on broad inclusion of its citizenry, excluding women and the slave class. However, Athens had no legal science or single word for "law",^[82] relying instead on the three-way distinction between divine law (thémis), human decree (nomos) and custom (díkē).^[83] Yet Ancient Greek law contained major constitutional innovations in the development of democracy.^[84]

Roman law was heavily influenced by Greek philosophy, but its detailed rules were developed by professional jurists and were highly sophisticated.^[85]^[86] Over the centuries between the rise and decline of the Roman Empire, law was adapted to cope with the changing social situations and underwent major codification under Theodosius II and Justinian I.^[87] Although codes were replaced by custom and case law during the Dark Ages, Roman law was rediscovered around the 11th century when mediæval legal scholars began to research Roman codes and adapt their concepts. In mediæval England, royal courts developed a body of precedent which later became the common law. A Europe-wide Law Merchant was formed so that merchants could trade with common standards of practice rather than with the many splintered facets of local laws. The Law Merchant, a precursor to modern commercial law, emphasised the freedom to contract and alienability of property.^[88] As nationalism grew in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Law Merchant was incorporated into countries' local law under new civil codes. The Napoleonic and German Codes became the most influential. In contrast to English common law, which consists of enormous tomes of case law, codes in small books are easy to export and easy for judges to apply. However, today there are signs that civil and common law are converging.^[89] EU law is codified in treaties, but develops through the precedent laid down by the European Court of Justice.

The Constitution of India is the longest written constitution for a country, containing 444 articles, 12 schedules, numerous amendments and 117,369 words

Ancient India and China represent distinct traditions of law, and have historically had independent schools of legal theory and practice. The Arthashastra, probably compiled around 100 AD (although it contains older material), and the Manusmriti (c. 100–300 AD) were foundational treatises in India, and comprise texts considered authoritative legal guidance.^[90] Manu's central philosophy was tolerance and Pluralism, and was cited across Southeast Asia.^[91] This Hindu tradition, along with Islamic law, was supplanted by the common law when India became part of the British Empire.^[92] Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore and Hong Kong also adopted the common law. The eastern Asia legal tradition reflects a unique blend of secular and religious influences.^[93] Japan was the first country to begin modernising its legal system along western lines, by importing bits of the French, but mostly the German Civil Code.^[94] This partly reflected Germany's status as a rising power in the late 19th century. Similarly, traditional Chinese law gave way to westernisation towards the final years of the Ch'ing dynasty in the form of six private law codes based mainly on the Japanese model of German law.^[95] Today Taiwanese law retains the closest affinity to the codifications from that period, because of the split between Chiang Kai-shek's nationalists, who fled there, and Mao Zedong's communists who won control of the mainland in 1949. The current legal infrastructure in the People's Republic of China was heavily influenced by Soviet Socialist law, which essentially inflates administrative law at the expense of private law rights.^[96] Due to rapid industrialisation, today China is undergoing a process of reform, at least in terms of economic, if not social and political, rights. A new contract code in 1999 represented a move away from administrative domination.^[97] Furthermore, after negotiations lasting fifteen years, in 2001 China joined the World Trade Organisation.^[98]

Philosophy of law [link]

Main article: Philosophy of law

"But what, after all, is a law? [...] When I say that the object of laws is always general, I mean that law considers subjects en masse and actions in the abstract, and never a particular person or action. [...] On this view, we at once see that it can no longer be asked whose business it is to make laws, since they are acts of the general will; nor whether the prince is above the law, since he is a member of the State; nor whether the law can be unjust, since no one is unjust to himself; nor how we can be both free and subject to the laws, since they are but registers of our wills."

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, II, 6.^[99]

The philosophy of law is commonly known as jurisprudence. Normative jurisprudence is essentially political philosophy, and asks "what should law be?", while analytic jurisprudence asks "what is law?". John Austin's utilitarian answer was that law is "commands, backed by threat of sanctions, from a sovereign, to whom people have a habit of obedience".^[100] Natural lawyers on the other side, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, argue that law reflects essentially moral and unchangeable laws of nature. The concept of "natural law" emerged in ancient Greek philosophy concurrently and in entanglement with the notion of justice, and re-entered the mainstream of Western culture through the writings of Thomas Aquinas.

Hugo Grotius, the founder of a purely rationalistic system of natural law, argued that law arises from both a social impulse—as Aristotle had indicated—and reason.^[101] Immanuel Kant believed a moral imperative requires laws "be chosen as though they should hold as universal laws of nature".^[102] Jeremy Bentham and his student Austin, following David Hume, believed that this conflated the "is" and what "ought to be" problem. Bentham and Austin argued for law's positivism; that real law is entirely separate from "morality".^[103] Kant was also criticised by Friedrich Nietzsche, who rejected the principle of equality, and believed that law emanates from the will to power, and cannot be labelled as "moral" or "immoral".^[104]^[105]^[106]

In 1934, the Austrian philosopher Hans Kelsen continued the positivist tradition in his book the Pure Theory of Law.^[107] Kelsen believed that although law is separate from morality, it is endowed with "normativity"; meaning we ought to obey it. While laws are positive "is" statements (e.g. the fine for reversing on a highway is €500); law tells us what we "should" do. Thus, each legal system can be hypothesised to have a basic norm (Grundnorm) instructing us to obey. Kelsen's major opponent, Carl Schmitt, rejected both positivism and the idea of the rule of law because he did not accept the primacy of abstract normative principles over concrete political positions and decisions.^[108] Therefore, Schmitt advocated a jurisprudence of the exception (state of emergency), which denied that legal norms could encompass of all political experience.^[109]

Bentham's utilitarian theories remained dominant in law until the 20th century

Later in the 20th century, H. L. A. Hart attacked Austin for his simplifications and Kelsen for his fictions in The Concept of Law.^[110] Hart argued law is a system of rules, divided into primary (rules of conduct) and secondary ones (rules addressed to officials to administer primary rules). Secondary rules are further divided into rules of adjudication (to resolve legal disputes), rules of change (allowing laws to be varied) and the rule of recognition (allowing laws to be identified as valid). Two of Hart's students continued the debate: In his book Law's Empire, Ronald Dworkin attacked Hart and the positivists for their refusal to treat law as a moral issue. Dworkin argues that law is an "interpretive concept",^[111] that requires judges to find the best fitting and most just solution to a legal dispute, given their constitutional traditions. Joseph Raz, on the other hand, defended the positivist outlook and criticised Hart's "soft social thesis" approach in The Authority of Law.^[112] Raz argues that law is authority, identifiable purely through social sources and without reference to moral reasoning. In his view, any categorisation of rules beyond their role as authoritative instruments in mediation are best left to sociology, rather than jurisprudence.^[113]

Economic analysis of law [link]

Main article: Law and economics

In the 18th century Adam Smith presented a philosophical foundation for explaining the relationship between law and economics.^[114] The discipline arose partly out of a critique of trade unions and U.S. antitrust law. The most influential proponents, such as Richard Posner and Oliver Williamson and the so-called Chicago School of economists and lawyers including Milton Friedman and Gary Becker, are generally advocates of deregulation and privatisation, and are hostile to state regulation or what they see as restrictions on the operation of free markets.^[115]

Richard Posner, one of the Chicago School, runs a blog with Bank of Sweden Prize winning economist Gary Becker.^[116]

The most prominent economic analyst of law is 1991 Nobel Prize winner Ronald Coase, whose first major article, The Nature of the Firm (1937), argued that the reason for the existence of firms (companies, partnerships, etc.) is the existence of transaction costs.^[117] Rational individuals trade through bilateral contracts on open markets until the costs of transactions mean that using corporations to produce things is more cost-effective. His second major article, The Problem of Social Cost (1960), argued that if we lived in a world without transaction costs, people would bargain with one another to create the same allocation of resources, regardless of the way a court might rule in property disputes.^[118] Coase used the example of a nuisance case named Sturges v Bridgman, where a noisy sweetmaker and a quiet doctor were neighbours and went to court to see who should have to move.^[38] Coase said that regardless of whether the judge ruled that the sweetmaker had to stop using his machinery, or that the doctor had to put up with it, they could strike a mutually beneficial bargain about who moves house that reaches the same outcome of resource distribution. Only the existence of transaction costs may prevent this.^[119] So the law ought to pre-empt what would happen, and be guided by the most efficient solution. The idea is that law and regulation are not as important or effective at helping people as lawyers and government planners believe.^[120] Coase and others like him wanted a change of approach, to put the burden of proof for positive effects on a government that was intervening in the market, by analysing the costs of action.^[121]

Sociology of law [link]

Main article: Sociology of law

Sociology of law is a diverse field of study that examines the interaction of law with society and overlaps with jurisprudence, economic analysis of law and more specialised subjects such as criminology.^[122] The institutions of social construction and legal frameworks are the relevant areas for the discipline's inquiry. At first, legal theorists were suspicious of the discipline. Kelsen attacked one of its founders, Eugen Ehrlich, who sought to make distinct the differences between positive law, which lawyers learn and apply, and other forms of 'law' or social norms that regulate everyday life, generally preventing conflicts from reaching lawyers and courts.^[123]^[124]

Max Weber in 1917, Weber began his career as a lawyer, and is regarded as one of the founders of sociology and sociology of law

Around 1900 Max Weber defined his "scientific" approach to law, identifying the "legal rational form" as a type of domination, not attributable to people but to abstract norms.^[125] Legal rationalism was his term for a body of coherent and calculable law which formed a precondition for modern political developments and the modern bureaucratic state and developed in parallel with the growth of capitalism.^[122] Another sociologist, Émile Durkheim, wrote in The Division of Labour in Society that as society becomes more complex, the body of civil law concerned primarily with restitution and compensation grows at the expense of criminal laws and penal sanctions.^[126] Other notable early legal sociologists included Hugo Sinzheimer, Theodor Geiger, Georges Gurvitch and Leon Petrażycki in Europe, and William Graham Sumner in the U.S.^[127]^[128]

Legal institutions [link]

It is a real unity of them all in one and the same person, made by covenant of every man with every man, in such manner as if every man should say to every man: I authorise and give up my right of governing myself to this man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition; that thou givest up, thy right to him, and authorise all his actions in like manner.

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, XVII

The main institutions of law in industrialised countries are independent courts, representative parliaments, an accountable executive, the military and police, bureaucratic organisation, the legal profession and civil society itself. John Locke, in his Two Treatises of Government, and Baron de Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws, advocated for a separation of powers between the political, legislature and executive bodies.^[129] Their principle was that no person should be able to usurp all powers of the state, in contrast to the absolutist theory of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan.^[130]

Max Weber and others reshaped thinking on the extension of state. Modern military, policing and bureaucratic power over ordinary citizens' daily lives pose special problems for accountability that earlier writers such as Locke or Montesquieu could not have foreseen. The custom and practice of the legal profession is an important part of people's access to justice, whilst civil society is a term used to refer to the social institutions, communities and partnerships that form law's political basis.

Judiciary [link]

Main article: Judiciary

A judiciary is a number of judges mediating disputes to determine outcome. Most countries have systems of appeal courts, answering up to a supreme legal authority. In the United States, this is the Supreme Court;^[131] in Australia, the High Court; in the UK, the Supreme Court;^[132] in Germany, the Bundesverfassungsgericht; in France, the Cour de Cassation.^[133]^[134] For most European countries the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg can overrule national law, when EU law is relevant. The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg allows citizens of the Council of Europe member states to bring cases relating to human rights issues before it.^[135]

File:Public hearing at the ICJ.jpg

The judges of the International Court of Justice in the Hague

Some countries allow their highest judicial authority to overrule legislation they determine to be unconstitutional. For example, in Brown v. Board of Education, the United States Supreme Court nullified many state statutes that had established racially segregated schools, finding such statutes to be incompatible with the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.^[136]

A judiciary is theoretically bound by the constitution, just as all other government bodies are. In most countries judges may only interpret the constitution and all other laws. But in common law countries, where matters are not constitutional, the judiciary may also create law under the doctrine of precedent. The UK, Finland and New Zealand assert the ideal of parliamentary sovereignty, whereby the unelected judiciary may not overturn law passed by a democratic legislature.^[137]

In communist states, such as China, the courts are often regarded as parts of the executive, or subservient to the legislature; governmental institutions and actors exert thus various forms of influence on the judiciary.^[138] In Muslim countries, courts often examine whether state laws adhere to the Sharia: the Supreme Constitutional Court of Egypt may invalidate such laws,^[139] and in Iran the Guardian Council ensures the compatibility of the legislation with the "criteria of Islam".^[139]^[140]

Legislature [link]

Main article: Legislature

The debating chamber of the European Parliament

Prominent examples of legislatures are the Houses of Parliament in London, the Congress in Washington D.C., the Bundestag in Berlin, the Duma in Moscow, the Parlamento Italiano in Rome and the Assemblée nationale in Paris. By the principle of representative government people vote for politicians to carry out their wishes. Although countries like Israel, Greece, Sweden and China are unicameral, most countries are bicameral, meaning they have two separately appointed legislative houses.^[141]

In the 'lower house' politicians are elected to represent smaller constituencies. The 'upper house' is usually elected to represent states in a federal system (as in Australia, Germany or the United States) or different voting configuration in a unitary system (as in France). In the UK the upper house is appointed by the government as a house of review. One criticism of bicameral systems with two elected chambers is that the upper and lower houses may simply mirror one another. The traditional justification of bicameralism is that an upper chamber acts as a house of review. This can minimise arbitrariness and injustice in governmental action.^[142]

To pass legislation, a majority of the members of a legislature must vote for a bill (proposed law) in each house. Normally there will be several readings and amendments proposed by the different political factions. If a country has an entrenched constitution, a special majority for changes to the constitution may be required, making changes to the law more difficult. A government usually leads the process, which can be formed from Members of Parliament (e.g. the UK or Germany). However, in a presidential system, the government is usually formed by an executive and his or her appointed cabinet officials (e.g. the United States or Brazil).^[143]

Executive [link]

Main article: Executive (government)

The G20 meetings are composed of representatives of each country's executive branch

The executive in a legal system serves as a government's centre of political authority. In a parliamentary system, as with Britain, Italy, Germany, India, and Japan, the executive is known as the cabinet, and composed of members of the legislature. The executive is chosen by the Prime Minister or Chancellor, whose office holds power under the confidence of the legislature. Because popular elections appoint political parties to govern, the leader of a party can change in between elections.^[144]

The head of state is apart from the executive, and symbolically enacts laws and acts as representative of the nation. Examples include the German president (appointed by members of federal and state Parliaments) the Queen of the United Kingdom (a hereditary title), and the Austrian president (elected by popular vote). The other important model is the presidential system, found in France, the U.S. and Russia. In presidential systems, the executive acts as both head of state and head of government, and has power to appoint an unelected cabinet. Under a presidential system, the executive branch is separate from the legislature to which it is not accountable.^[145]^[146]

Although the role of the executive varies from country to country, usually it will propose the majority of legislation, and propose government agenda. In presidential systems, the executive often has the power to veto legislation. Most executives in both systems are responsible for foreign relations, the military and police, and the bureaucracy. Ministers or other officials head a country's public offices, such as a foreign ministry or interior ministry. The election of a different executive is therefore capable of revolutionising an entire country's approach to government.

Military and police [link]

Main articles: Military and Police

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers

While military organizations have existed as long as government itself, the idea of a standing police force is relatively modern concept. For example, Mediæval England's system of traveling criminal courts, or assizes, used show trials and public executions to instill communities with fear to maintain control.^[147] The first modern police were probably those in 17th-century Paris, in the court of Louis XIV,^[148] although the Paris Prefecture of Police claim they were the world's first uniformed policemen.^[149]

Max Weber famously argued that the state is that which controls the monopoly on the legitimate use of force.^[150]^[151] The military and police carry out enforcement at the request of the government or the courts. The term failed state refers to states that cannot implement or enforce policies; their police and military no longer control security and order and society moves into anarchy, the absence of government.^[152]

Bureaucracy [link]

Main article: Bureaucracy

The United Nations' New York headquarters houses civil servants that serve its 192 member states.

The etymology of "bureaucracy" derives from the French word for "office" (bureau) and the Ancient Greek for word "power" (kratos).^[153] Like the military and police, a legal system's government servants and bodies that make up its bureaucracy carry out the directives of the executive. One of the earliest references to the concept was made by Baron de Grimm, a German author who lived in France. In 1765 he wrote,

The real spirit of the laws in France is that bureaucracy of which the late Monsieur de Gournay used to complain so greatly; here the offices, clerks, secretaries, inspectors and intendants are not appointed to benefit the public interest, indeed the public interest appears to have been established so that offices might exist.^[154]

Cynicism over "officialdom" is still common, and the workings of public servants is typically contrasted to private enterprise motivated by profit.^[155] In fact private companies, especially large ones, also have bureaucracies.^[156] Negative perceptions of "red tape" aside, public services such as schooling, health care, policing or public transport are a crucial state function making public bureaucratic action the locus of government power.^[156]

Writing in the early 20th century, Max Weber believed that a definitive feature of a developed state had come to be its bureaucratic support.^[157] Weber wrote that the typical characteristics of modern bureaucracy are that officials define its mission, the scope of work is bound by rules, management is composed of career experts, who manage top down, communicating through writing and binding public servants' discretion with rules.^[158]

Legal profession [link]

Main article: Legal profession

In civil law systems such as those of France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Greece, there is a distinct category of notary, a legally trained public official, compensated by the parties to a transaction.^[159] This is a 16th-century painting of such a notary by Flemish painter Quentin Massys.

A corollary of the rule of law is the existence of a legal profession sufficiently autonomous to be able to invoke the authority of the independent judiciary; the right to assistance of an advocate in a court proceeding emanates from this corollary—in England the function of barrister or advocate is distinguished from legal counselor (solicitor).^[160] As the European Court of Human Rights has stated, the law should be adequately accessible to everyone and people should be able to foresee how the law affects them.^[161]

In order to maintain professionalism, the practice of law is typically overseen by either a government or independent regulating body such as a bar association, bar council or law society. Modern lawyers achieve distinct professional identity through specified legal procedures (e.g. successfully passing a qualifying examination), are required by law to have a special qualification (a legal education earning the student a Bachelor of Laws, a Bachelor of Civil Law or a Juris Doctor degree^[162]), and are constituted in office by legal forms of appointment (being admitted to the bar). Most Muslim countries have developed similar rules about legal education and the legal profession, but some still allow lawyers with training in traditional Islamic law to practice law before personal status law courts.^[163] In China and other developing countries there are not sufficient professionally-trained people to staff the existing judicial systems, and, accordingly, formal standards are more relaxed.^[164]

Once accredited, a lawyer will often work in a law firm, in a chambers as a sole practitioner, in a government post or in a private corporation as an internal counsel. In addition a lawyer may become a legal researcher who provides on-demand legal research through a library, a commercial service or through freelance work. Many people trained in law put their skills to use outside the legal field entirely.^[165]

Significant to the practice of law in the common law tradition is the legal research to determine the current state of the law. This usually entails exploring case-law reports, legal periodicals and legislation. Law practice also involves drafting documents such as court pleadings, persuasive briefs, contracts, or wills and trusts. Negotiation and dispute resolution skills (including ADR techniques) are also important to legal practice, depending on the field.^[166]

Civil society [link]

Main article: Civil society

A march in Washington D.C. during the U.S. Civil Rights Movement in 1963

Classical republican concept of "civil society" dates back to Hobbes and Locke.^[167] Locke saw civil society as people who have "a common established law and judicature to appeal to, with authority to decide controversies between them."^[168] German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel distinguished the "state" from "civil society" (burgerliche Gesellschaft) in Elements of the Philosophy of Right.^[169]

Hegel believed that civil society and the state were polar opposites, within the scheme of his dialectic theory of history. The modern dipole state–civil society was reproduced in the theories of Alexis de Tocqueville and Karl Marx.^[170]^[171] Nowadays in post-modern theory civil society is necessarily a source of law, by being the basis from which people form opinions and lobby for what they believe law should be. As Australian barrister and author Geoffrey Robertson QC wrote of international law,

... one of its primary modern sources is found in the responses of ordinary men and women, and of the non-governmental organizations which many of them support, to the human rights abuses they see on the television screen in their living rooms.^[172]

Freedom of speech, freedom of association and many other individual rights allow people to gather, discuss, criticise and hold to account their governments, from which the basis of a deliberative democracy is formed. The more people are involved with, concerned by and capable of changing how political power is exercised over their lives, the more acceptable and legitimate the law becomes to the people. The most familiar institutions of civil society include economic markets, profit-oriented firms, families, trade unions, hospitals, universities, schools, charities, debating clubs, non-governmental organisations, neighbourhoods, churches, and religious associations.^[173]

Notes [link]

^ Luban, Law's Blindfold, 23
^ From Old English lagu; legal comes from Latin legalis, from lex "law", "statute" (Law, Online Etymology Dictionary; Legal, Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary)
^ Robertson, Crimes against humanity, 90; see "analytical jurisprudence" for extensive debate on what law is; in The Concept of Law Hart argued law is a "system of rules" (Campbell, The Contribution of Legal Studies, 184); Austin said law was "the command of a sovereign, backed by the threat of a sanction" (Bix, John Austin); Dworkin describes law as an "interpretive concept" to achieve justice (Dworkin, Law's Empire, 410); and Raz argues law is an "authority" to mediate people's interests (Raz, The Authority of Law, 3–36).
^ The original French is: "La loi, dans un grand souci d'égalité, interdit aux riches comme aux pauvres de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain" (France, The Red Lily, Chapter VII).
^ Aristotle. Politics, Book 3#3:16. n.b. This translation reads, "it is more proper that law should govern than any one of the citizens"
^ Although many scholars argue that "the boundaries between public and private law are becoming blurred", and that this distinction has become mere "folklore" (Bergkamp, Liability and Environment, 1–2).
^ E.g. in England these seven subjects, with EU law substituted for international law, make up a "qualifying law degree". For criticism, see Peter Birks' poignant comments attached to a previous version of the Notice to Law Schools.
^ History of the UN, United Nations. Winston Churchill (The Hinge of Fate, 719) comments on the League of Nations' failure: "It was wrong to say that the League failed. It was rather the member states who had failed the League."
^ The prevailing manner of enforcing international law is still essentially "self help"; that is the reaction by states to alleged breaches of international obligations by other states (Robertson, Crimes against Humanity, 90; Schermers-Blokker, International Institutional Law, 900–901).
^ Petersmann, The GATT/WTO Dispute Settlement System International Criminal Court, 32
^ Redfem, International Commercial Arbitration, 68–69
^ Schermers–Blokker, International Institutional Law, 943
^ See the fundamental C-26/62 Van Gend en Loos v Nederlandse Administratie der Belastingen, and Flaminio Costa v E.N.E.L. decisions of the European Court.
^ Entick v Carrington (1765) 19 Howell's State Trials 1030; [1765] 95 ER 807
^ "Entick v Carrington". 19 Howell’s State Trials 1029 (1765). US: Constitution Society. http://www.constitution.org/trials/entick/entick_v_carrington.htm. Retrieved 13 November 2008.
^ Locke, The Second Treatise, Chapter 9, section 124
^ Tamanaha, On the Rule of Law, 47
^ Auby, Administrative Law in France, 75
^ Cesare Beccaria's seminal treatise of 1763–1764 is titled On Crimes and Punishments (Dei delitti e delle pene).
^ ^a ^b Brody, Acker and Logan, Criminal Law, 2; Wilson, Criminal Law, 2
^ Dennis J. Baker, Glanville Williams Textbook of Criminal Law (London: 2012), 2
^ See e.g. Brody, Acker and Logan, Criminal Law, 205 about Robinson v. California, 370 U.S. 660 (1962).
^ See e.g. Feinman, Law 111, 260–261 about Powell v. Texas, 392 U.S. 514 (1968).
^ Dörmann, Doswald-Beck and Kolb, Elements of War Crimes, 491
^ Kaiser, Leistungsstörungen, 333
^ About R v Dudley and Stephens [1884] 14 QBD 273 DC, see Simpson, Cannibalism and the Common Law, 212–217, 229–237
^ Pelser, Criminal Legislation, 198
^ The States Parties to the Rome Statute, International Criminal Court
^ Wehberg, Pacta Sunt Servanda, 775
^ About Carlill v Carbolic Smoke Ball Company [1893] 1 QB 256, and the element of consideration, see Beale and Tallon, Contract Law, 142–143
^ Austotel v Franklins (1989) 16 NSWLR 582
^ e.g. In Germany, § 311 Abs. II BGB
^ § 105 Abs. II BGB
^ Smith, The Structure of Unjust Enrichment Law, 1037
^ Bolton v Stone [1951] AC 850
^ ^a ^b Donoghue v Stevenson ([1932] A.C. 532, 1932 S.C. (H.L.) 31, [1932] All ER Rep 1). See the original text of the case in UK Law Online.
^ Donoghue v Stevenson [1932] AC 532, 580
^ ^a ^b Sturges v Bridgman (1879) 11 Ch D 852
^ e.g. concerning a British politician and the Iraq War, George Galloway v Telegraph Group Ltd [2004] EWHC 2786
^ Taff Vale Railway Co v Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants [1901] AC 426
^ In the UK, Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992; c.f. in the U.S., National Labor Relations Act
^ Harris, The Bubble Act, 610–627
^ eg Hunter v Canary Wharf Ltd [1997] 2 All ER 426
^ Armory v Delamirie (1722) 93 ER 664, 1 Strange 505
^ Matthews, The Man of Property, 251–274
^ Savigny, Das Recht des Besitzes, 25
^ Locke, Second Treatise on Civil Government, Chap. IX. Of the Ends of Political Society and Government. Chapter 9, section 123.
^ McGhee, Snell's Equity, 7
^ c.f. Bristol and West Building Society v Mothew [1998] Ch 1
^ Keech v Sandford (1726) Sel Cas Ch 61
^ Nestlé v National Westminster Bank plc [1993] 1 WLR 1260
^ A Guide to the Treaty of Lisbon, The Law Society
^ Berle, Modern Corporation and Private Property
^ WIPO, Intellectual Property, 3
^ Modern scholars argue that the significance of this distinction has progressively declined; the numerous legal transplants, typical of modern law, result in the sharing by modern legal systems of many features traditionally considered typical of either common law or civil law (Mattei, Comparative Law and Economics, 71)
^ Civil law jurisdictions recognise custom as "the other source of law"; hence, scholars tend to divide the civil law into the broad categories of "written law" (ius scriptum) or legislation, and "unwritten law" (ius non scriptum) or custom. Yet they tend to dismiss custom as being of slight importance compared to legislation (Georgiadis, General Principles of Civil Law, 19; Washofsky, Taking Precedent Seriously, 7).
^ Gordley-von Mehren, Comparative Study of Private Law, 18
^ Gordley-von Mehren, Comparative Study of Private Law, 21
^ Stein, Roman Law in European History, 32
^ Stein, Roman Law in European History, 35
^ Stein, Roman Law in European History, 43
^ Hatzis, The Short-Lived Influence of the Napoleonic Civil Code in Greece, 253–263
^ Demirgüç-Kunt -Levine, Financial Structures and Economic Growth, 204
^ The World Factbook – Field Listing – Legal system, CIA
^ Magna Carta, Fordham University
^ Gordley-von Mehren, Comparative Study of Private Law, 4
^ Gordley-von Mehren, Comparative Study of Private Law, 3
^ Pollock (ed) Table Talk of John Selden (1927) 43; "Equity is a roguish thing. For law we have a measure... equity is according to the conscience of him that is Chancellor, and as that is longer or narrower, so is equity. 'Tis all one as if they should make the standard for the measure a Chancellor's foot."
^ Gee v Pritchard (1818) 2 Swans. 402, 414
^ Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Book the First – Chapter the First
^ Gordley-von Mehren, Comparative Study of Private Law, 17
^ Glenn, Legal Traditions of the World, 159
^ Anderson, Law Reform in the Middle East, 43
^ Giannoulatos, Islam, 274–275
^ Sherif, Constitutions of Arab Countries, 157–158
^ Saudi Arabia, Jurist
^ Akhlagi, Iranian Commercial Law, 127
^ Hallaq, The Origins and Evolution of Islamic Law, 1
^ Théodoridés. "law". Encyclopedia of the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt.
^ VerSteeg, Law in ancient Egypt
^ Richardson, Hammurabi's Laws, 11
^ Kelly, A Short History of Western Legal Theory, 5–6
^ J.P. Mallory, "Law", in Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, 346
^ Ober, The Nature of Athenian Democracy, 121
^ Kelly, A Short History of Western Legal Theory, 39
^ Stein, Roman Law in European History, 1
^ As a legal system, Roman law has affected the development of law worldwide. It also forms the basis for the law codes of most countries of continental Europe and has played an important role in the creation of the idea of a common European culture (Stein, Roman Law in European History, 2, 104–107).
^ Sealey-Hooley, Commercial Law, 14
^ Mattei, Comparative Law and Economics, 71
^ For discussion of the composition and dating of these sources, see Olivelle, Manu's Code of Law, 18–25.
^ Glenn, Legal Traditions of the World, 276
^ Glenn, Legal Traditions of the World, 273
^ Glenn, Legal Traditions of the World, 287
^ Glenn, Legal Traditions of the World, 304
^ Glenn, Legal Traditions of the World, 305
^ Glenn, Legal Traditions of the World, 307
^ Glenn, Legal Traditions of the World, 309
^ Farah, Five Years of China WTO Membership, 263–304
^ Rousseau, The Social Contract, Book II: Chapter 6 (Law)
^ Bix, John Austin
^ Fritz Berolzheimer, The World's Legal Philosophies, 115–116
^ Kant, Immanuel, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 42 (par. 434)
^ Green, Legal Positivism
^ Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral, Second Essay, 11
^ Kazantzakis, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Philosophy of Law, 97–98
^ Linarelli, Nietzsche in Law's Cathedral, 23–26
^ Marmor, The Pure Theory of Law
^ Bielefeldt, Carl Schmitt's Critique of Liberalism, 25–26
^ Finn, Constitutions in Crisis, 170–171
^ Bayles, Hart's Legal Philosophy, 21
^ Dworkin, Law's Empire, 410
^ Raz, The Authority of Law, 3–36
^ Raz, The Authority of Law, 37 etc.
^ According to Malloy (Law and Economics, 114), Smith established "a classical liberal philosophy that made individuals the key referential sign while acknowledging that we live not alone but in community with others".
^ Jakoby, Economic Ideas and the Labour Market, 53
^ "The Becker-Posner Blog". http://uchicagolaw.typepad.com/beckerposner/. Retrieved 20 May 2010.
^ Coase, The Nature of the Firm, 386–405
^ Coase, The Problem of Social Cost, 1–44
^ Coase, The Problem of Social Cost, IV, 7
^ Coase, The Problem of Social Cost, V, 9
^ Coase, The Problem of Social Cost, VIII, 23
^ ^a ^b Jary, Collins Dictionary of Sociology, 636
^ Rottleuthner, La Sociologie du Droit en Allemagne, 109
^ Rottleuthner, Rechtstheoritische Probleme der Sociologie des Rechts, 521
^ Rheinstein, Max Weber on Law and Economy in Society, 336
^ Johnson, The Blackwell Dictionary of Sociology, 156
^ Gurvitch, Sociology of Law, 142
^ Papachristou, Sociology of Law, 81–82
^ Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, Book XI: Of the Laws Which Establish Political Liberty, with Regard to the Constitution, Chapters 6–7
^ Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, XVII
^ A Brief Overview of the Supreme Court, Supreme Court of the United States
^ House of Lords Judgments, House of Lords
^ Entscheidungen des Bundesverfassungsgerichts, Bundesverfassungsgericht
^ Jurisprudence, publications, documentation, Cour de cassation
^ Goldhaber, European Court of Human Rights, 1–2
^ Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education
^ Dicey, Law of the Constitution, 37–82
^ E.g., the court president is a political appointee (Jensen–Heller, Introduction, 11–12). About the notion of "judicial independence" in China, see Findlay, Judiciary in the PRC, 282–284
^ ^a ^b Sherif, Constitutions of Arab Countries, 158
^ Rasekh, Islamism and Republicanism, 115–116
^ Riker, The Justification of Bicameralism, 101
^ Riker, The Justification of Bicameralism, 101
^ About "cabinet accountability" in both presidential and parliamentary systems, see Shugart–Haggard, Presidential Systems, 67 etc.
^ Haggard, Presidents, Parliaments and Policy, 71
^ Haggard, Presidents, Parliaments and Policy, 71
^ Olson, The New Parliaments of Central and Eastern Europe, 7
^ See, eg Tuberville v Savage (1669), 1 Mod. Rep. 3, 86 Eng. Rep. 684, where a knight said in a threatening tone to a layman, "If it were not assize time, I would not take such language from you."
^ History of Police Forces, History.com Encyclopedia
^ Des Sergents de Ville et Gardiens de la Paix à la Police de Proximité, La Préfecture de Police
^ Weber, Politics as a Vocation
^ Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organisation, 154
^ In these cases sovereignty is eroded, and often warlords acquire excessive powers (Fukuyama, State-Building, 166–167).
^ Bureaucracy, Online Etymology Dictionary
^ Albrow, Bureaucracy, 16
^ Mises, Bureaucracy, II, Bureaucratic Management
^ ^a ^b Kettl, Public Bureaucracies, 367
^ Weber, Economy and Society, I, 393
^ Kettl, Public Bureaucracies, 371
^ Hazard–Dondi, Legal Ethics, 22
^ Hazard–Dondi, Legal Ethics, 1
^ The Sunday Times v The United Kingdom [1979] ECHR 1 at 49 Case no. 6538/74
^ Higher academic degrees may also be pursued. Examples include a Master of Laws, a Master of Legal Studies or a Doctor of Laws.
^ Ahamd, Lawyers: Islamic Law^{[dead link]}
^ Hazard–Dondi, Legal Ethics, 22–23
^ Fine, The Globalisation of Legal Education, 364
^ Fine, The Globalisation of Legal Education, 364
^ Warren, Civil Society, 3–4
^ Locke, Second Treatise, Chap. VII, Of Political or Civil_Society. Chapter 7, section 87
^ Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 3, II, 182; Karkatsoulis, The State in Transition, 277–278
^ (Pelczynski, The State and Civil Society, 1–13; Warren, Civil Society, 5–9)
^ Zaleski, Pawel (2008). "Tocqueville on Civilian Society. A Romantic Vision of the Dichotomic Structure of Social Reality". Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte (Felix Meiner Verlag) 50.
^ Robertson, Crimes Against Humanity, 98–99
^ There is no clear legal definition of the civil society, and of the institutions it includes. Most of the institutions and bodies who try to give a list of institutions (such as the European Economic and Social Committee) exclude the political parties. For further information, see Jakobs, Pursuing Equal Opportunities, 5–6; Kaldor–Anheier–Glasius, Global Civil Society, passim^{[dead link]} (PDF); Karkatsoulis, The State in Transition, 282–283.

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v t e Law of Asia

Sovereign states	Afghanistan Armenia Azerbaijan Bahrain Bangladesh Bhutan Brunei Burma (Myanmar) Cambodia People's Republic of China Cyprus East Timor (Timor-Leste) Egypt Georgia India Indonesia Iran Iraq Israel Japan Jordan Kazakhstan North Korea South Korea Kuwait Kyrgyzstan Laos Lebanon Malaysia Maldives Mongolia Nepal Oman Pakistan Philippines Qatar Russia Saudi Arabia Singapore Sri Lanka Syria Tajikistan Thailand Turkey Turkmenistan United Arab Emirates Uzbekistan Vietnam Yemen

States with limited recognition	Abkhazia Nagorno-Karabakh Northern Cyprus Palestine Republic of China (Taiwan) South Ossetia

Dependencies and other territories	British Indian Ocean Territory Christmas Island Cocos (Keeling) Islands Hong Kong Macau

v t e Law in Europe

Sovereign states	Albania Andorra Armenia Austria Azerbaijan Belarus Belgium Bosnia and Herzegovina Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Georgia Germany Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Kazakhstan Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Macedonia Malta Moldova Monaco Montenegro Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Russia San Marino Serbia Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden Switzerland Turkey Ukraine United Kingdom England Northern Ireland Scotland Wales Vatican City

States with limited recognition	Abkhazia Kosovo Nagorno-Karabakh Northern Cyprus South Ossetia Transnistria

Dependencies and other territories	Åland Faroe Islands Gibraltar Guernsey Jersey Isle of Man Svalbard

Other entities	European Union

v t e Law of Oceania

Sovereign states	Australia East Timor (Timor-Leste) Fiji Indonesia Kiribati Marshall Islands Federated States of Micronesia Nauru New Zealand Palau Papua New Guinea Samoa Solomon Islands Tonga Tuvalu Vanuatu

Dependencies and other territories	American Samoa Christmas Island Cocos (Keeling) Islands Cook Islands Easter Island French Polynesia Guam Hawaii New Caledonia Niue Norfolk Island Northern Mariana Islands Pitcairn Islands Tokelau Wallis and Futuna

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