A more conservative supreme court will likely have the chance to overrule Roe v. Wade. Many states have passed heartbeat laws that will probably be taken all the way to the supreme court, these cases will ask the supreme court to affirm fetal personhood, giving fetuses a constitutionally recognized right to due process and making abortion illegal. In this thesis, I will defend an expansion of protections for pregnant peoples through a socialized right to abortion.

This thesis claims that if law has a distinctive and genuine normative force, then it is thanks to the fact that law’s authority originates from a particular institutional layout that allows for a division of moral labour between legislation and adjudication. After establishing what the moral dimension of authority is a matter of, and how law’s normative force can be justified by reference to it, this thesis defends a comprehensive-moral account of law’s authority. In this respect, the thesis argues that the moral dimension of law’s authority can be highlighted well if we consider it as emerging through a morally meaningful institutional distinction between legislation and adjudication: the institutional profile of legislative authority and that of adjudicative authority differ from each other, in that each can be said to be underlain by its own evaluative standards. On the one hand, the particularity of legislative authority is a matter of its community-driven, forward-looking character and of its consensual structure; as well as of the declaratory nature and the agent-relative status of reasons issued by legislative provisions. On the other hand, adjudicative authority is distinctive because it has a litigant-driven, remedial character and employs an adversarial structure so that it accomplishes its impartial investigatory task through the issuance of agent-neutral reasons. So understood, the institutional profile of legislative authority is considered to be morally meaningful in the sense that it incorporates a rule-consequentialist and value-pluralist rationale; while that of adjudicative authority is taken to owe its own moral meaningfulness to the fact that it fosters reciprocity between litigants.

The cultural defense is an informal term that describes the use of cultural information to mitigate criminal responsibility, often used in conjunction with traditional defense strategies such as provocation or insanity. Arguments for the cultural defense include respecting cultural practices under the liberal narrative that frames the United States as a multicultural and pluralistic society. Advocates of the cultural defense recognize the harmful effects of the false universalism of the law. However, the cultural defense has been criticized as essentialist and harmful as it has been used in high profile cases to justify violence against women of color. The cultural defense superficially prioritizes the needs of marginalized communities by acknowledging the importance of culture in the administration of the criminal law. The rationale behind the cultural defense is politically appealing, but the impacts of the defense are incompatible with the goals of antisubordination, which will be further described by Critical Race Theory. Because the debate surrounding the cultural defense has yet to make significant advances, I argue that Critical Race Theory offers an essential starting point in intervening in the debate, ultimately transforming the realm of legal jurisprudence through its explicit race consciousness and examination of racialized power. In particular, I will examine the concepts of intersectionality and interest convergence which will offer valuable perspective into the cultural defense debate.

v anglickém jazyce Feminist Legal Theory The master's thesis deals with the feminist legal theory, a young and dynamic legal field which is one of the challenges of current law. This theory is a combination of law and gender studies. Its focus lies in Anglo-American system of law, in which it has a dignified place among legal theories. In the Czech legal system, the feminist legal theory is not well known, but for those interested, the Faculty of Law of Charles University opens a compulsory subject Gender and Law regularly in the summer semester. The thesis is based mainly on sources in English, which were made available to the students participating in this subject. In the Czech language, no comprehensive publication has yet been published on the topic of feminist legal theory. The objective of this thesis was to elaborate this extensive legal field and present it to potential Czech readers. The structure of the thesis consists of an introduction, three main content parts and a conclusion. The parts are further divided into chapters, paragraphs, and sections. The first part deals with the concepts of feminism and gender, which represent the basic theoretical basis for the study of feminist legal theory. A separate chapter is reserved for each of the concepts, classifying them in the historical...

This thesis is a socio-legal study of the politics of international law (i.e. the relationship between international law and international politics). There is not necessarily an accepted scope, or even direction, of this relationship but it is widely perceived to be important in international, as well as national, affairs. Still, this relationship needs to be better understood and articulated. This thesis offers a theoretical and empirical account of the phenomenon of the politics of international law, and its implications for the Chechen conflict by exploring how and to what extent one's understanding of the phenomenon is determined by culture, history, political and social context. Part One is an overview of the literature and theoretical approaches to studying the relationship between (international) law and (international) politics, as well as an analysis of sixteen face-to-face semi-structured interviews with practitioners of international law and international politics from different backgrounds and cultures. That leads to a theoretical model which is applied and verified in Part Two, a case study of the Chechen conflict. This focuses specifically on a socio-historical understanding of international law, the humanitarian and human rights movement in Russia, and the relationship between human rights law and international humanitarian law in the judgements of the European Court of Human Rights in the so-called Chechen cases. The findings of this study indicate that international politics is highly influenced by international law just as international law is affected by international politics. They both are integral parts of the international system, nevertheless, remain distinct from each other. It is therefore the politics of international law that allows international relations to take place, where politics provides the means by which the negotiations can take place and law creates specific language and provides a framework within which the debates can take place. It demonstrates that the challenges of modern times make that the two become increasingly influential on one another.

This thesis provides a critical application of Robert P. George’s views to English equality law. The research question is what George, with his view of religion as a basic human good, might think about the religious liberty cases taken under the provisions of the Equality Act 2010. In addressing this question, it will be necessary to look at those - to some eyes - irreconcilable tensions which have emerged between laws protecting religious freedom. A number of legal claims have been brought by employees who have been instructed to carry out new legal obligations which they have been unwilling to perform. Questions have arisen regarding the current state of reasonable accommodation and proportionality analysis within indirect discrimination law. To examine these questions, this thesis will be in two parts: first, it will consider Robert George’s distinctive contribution to new natural law theory (NNL) and critically analyse George’s NNL approach that arises from this. To do so the key themes: a) practical reason and b) natural rights, will be considered in George’s work. Second, by reading George’s views on practical reason in line with his approach to natural rights, from this position this thesis will give an applied example of NNL, displaying George’s critique of the relevant equality law and arguing for an innovative understanding and approach to religious equality law. This is in an effort to find whether George’s theory is useful in exploring English religious equality law. By doing so this will reconstruct George’s NNL approach through using religious equality law as an applied example. This thesis argues that at a time when religious liberty often loses out in a balancing of rights, legitimate interests and protected characteristics, a superior way to approach equality law in this area may be through an application of a modified version of George’s NNL thought presenting religion as a public good. This will emphasise the priority of the good in religious conscience over legal rights within law viewed by George as a public morality. Viewing religion not only as a basic human good but also as a public good could provide the basis for future accommodation towards freedom of religious conscience and solve the tensions regarding the protection of religion or belief at work. Religion and religious freedom will be shown to be a form of flourishing within an understanding of the public good.

This thesis draws on the theory and method of social ontology to explore why labour law struggles to provide for wage security and clarity of employment status today. It starts by exploring at a conceptual level the relationship between law and capitalism, before moving on to engage more specifically with the concept of the wage, situating the analysis in a theory of the wage's socio-economic function. The thesis understands the 'wage' as, initially, the market price of the commodity, 'labour power', which is exchanged in the labour market. As with any other 'price', the wage functions to coordinate decision making in the market. At the same time, however, the wage is also the cost of reproducing that commodity, a process which is not confined to the market but takes place in society more generally: this is the function of social reproduction. These two functions are not only conceptually and materially distinct; they are frequently in conflict. The price the market assigns to the labour commodity is not always, and not necessarily, that which is required to cover its costs of (re)production. The thesis shows that these functions of the wage find their expression in the various concepts the legal system uses to describe the payment made by employers to their workers. For example, the legal concept of the 'wage' corresponds closely to the economic idea of the wage as price, and the concept of 'remuneration' to the wage as the cost of social reproduction, shifting some of the social costs of employment onto the employer. How these conceptual tools are deployed, however, and thus how effectively these functions are performed in practice, depends on law's own view of its ontological status: that is, the implicit position that the legal system takes on what constitutes 'social reality' beyond the text of a particular case or statute, and thus its view of whether, and to what extent, legal concepts can shape, as well as respond, to it. The thesis shows that whether the legal system sees its concepts playing an active role in constituting social and economic relations, or whether it sees them as passively reacting to the 'demands' of a 'pre-constituted' economic system makes a difference to the effectiveness of law in practice. Understanding law's implicit ontology in this sense helps us to see why labour law struggles to provide for wage security and clarity of status. Thinking about law's relationship with social reality can thus make an important contribution to our understanding of the problems of low pay and unclear employment status today.

Although the topic of bullying generally leads to discussions of the dynamicsbetween and among children, bullying increasingly involves complex power structuresamong adults in their workplaces. The purpose of this project is to broaden theunderstanding of workplace bullying in the United States through the critical analysis ofpopular media and U.S. legal discourses. The analysis unravels the ways in whichbullying is normalized, individualized, perpetuated and rewarded. It seeks to denaturalizethe phenomenon and situate bullying as a construction that can bedeconstructed and addressed. It interrogates the messages of resistance, agency andblame as productive and disciplinary strategies that permit bullying to operate withdiscursive and material impunity. Legal prohibitions alone will not prove to be thepanacea but, along with reframed discourses, they will help undermine the naturalizationof bullying in the workplace and open new avenues for exploring solutions andalternatives.

When we think of “law” in a popular sense, we think of “rules” or the institutions that make or enforce those rules (legislatures, the police, courts, etc.). But where do these rules come from and what makes them legal rules? Put differently, does a rule’s status as a legal rule mean that it is sealed off from the influence of other systems of human knowledge and inquiry (like the humanities)? There are many possible answers to these questions, but the one that I am concerned to examine in my work arises from narrative, which is one of the most fundamental modes of human expression. By keeping narratives at a distance or delay, law loses (and has indeed lost) some of its essential humanity. My project is, then, an attempt to explain the relationship between law and narrative, and—in the end—to suggest ways to rehumanize law by reconnecting it to its narrative roots and certain cognates in the humanities. To do this, I retell dozens of law-stories within a theoretical framework derived from literary, legal, and political theory.

An examination of Barack Obama's Legal Philosophy and the extent to which that is reflected in the decisions of his judicial appointees.