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This article discusses the author's supersession thesis and responds to several critical reflections on supersession by authors Gordon Christie, Burke Hendrix, Julio Montero, Esme Murdock, Seunghyun Song, Jeff Spinner-Halev, and Santiago Truccone-Borgogno. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relation between modern liberalism and the religious foundations of public life. It is intended to complement Cecile Laborde's book, Liberalism's Religion, by showing that religious idea are capable of generating and sustaining liberal principles in their own way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What role do courts play in advancing or upholding the political ideal that we call 'the rule of law'? Does the rule of law require that courts should have authority over all other branches of government, including the legislature? And does it impose constraints on the sort of reasoning and decision-making that courts engage in? This article explores an array of possible answers to these questions, and considers the possibility that the ascendancy of courts in a constitution may represent a form of judicial supremacy that looks remarkably like the uncontrolled rule of men, which the rule of law is supposed to prevent. To preclude that possibility, it is particularly important for courts to recognize that their authority is limited in scope and that they should not be guided by any overall political program other than the program of seeing that constitutional constraints on government are upheld. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 30 years of writing about the rule of law, Martin Krygier has not reached a final understanding of this most important legal and political ideal, any more than anyone else has. Krygier's question is a good one: "[W]hat if the problem is less that the rule of law was installed but failed to do much good than that what was installed was not yet the rule of law but only bits of legal apparatus not on their own up to the job?" 1 Philip Selznick, "Legal Cultures and the Rule of Law" in Martin Krygier and Adam Czarnota (ed), I The Rule of Law after Communism i (Dartmouth, 1999) 21, cited in Clarence Ling, "Martin Krygier's Contribution to the Rule of Law", I Western Australian Jurist i 4 (2013) 211, at p. 215. [Extracted from the article]

There are all sorts of ways in which one can dirty one's hands in politics. The classic problem is that of the political leader who finds he has to act immorally for the sake of the greater good. But some dirty-hands problems are more mundane. They arise out of the fact that one acts in politics alongside others, particularly in a democracy, and so one is not always in control of the values and principles that are being put into play. This happens sometimes because of the need for compromise; or through procedures like majority decision. Some of these cases have an interesting historical dimension. They reflect the fact that politicians have to act against the background of decisions made by their predecessors. Laws routinely remain in force, for example, despite the demise of the political factions that enacted them: so a politician may have to keep faith with and faithfully administer a legal decision he condemns. I argue that this is best understood not as the balancing of disparate personal convictions, but of his having to act in the name of the whole society (understood as an entity existing over time). The sense of "dirty hands" arises from the juxtaposition of the politician's own convictions with the requirements of his particular role as speaking for an entity larger than himself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article examines the legal aspects of the practice of heckling, particularly whether heckling is protected free speech under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, a violation of free speech or both. It also examines the philosophical background of heckling in the works of philosopher John Stuart Mill and the U.S. Supreme Court case In re Kay. The concepts of liberty and political choreography are also discussed.

The article discusses issues related to target killing, which is officially authorized and premeditated killing by military or intelligence officials of named and identified individuals without the benefit of any judicial process. Topics discussed include effect of targeted killing on innocent civilians, issues related to target killings and adoption of a new practice of individualized killing.

An essay is presented which reviews the book "Religion Without God" by the late legal philosopher and author Ronald Dworkin, focusing on Dworkin's views about values and religious experience. The relationship between law and religion is mentioned, along with American jurisprudence and Islamic law. A series of lectures that Dworkin delivered at the University of Bern in 2011 are assessed, as well as religious faith and the U.S. Constitution’s Freedom of Religion Clause.

In this article, the author responses to the comments of Professors Lucia Zedner, Adil Ahmad Haque, and Susan Mendus for his book "Torture, Terror, and Trade-Offs: Philosophy for the White House". He expresses his gratitude and accepts the critisisms and correction to his articles in the book which provides more accuracy. He also discusses the views of Professor Mendus on his opposition to torture.

The article explores the political theory of Scottish philosopher David Hume. G. A. Cohen, Chichele Chair of Social and Political Theory, examines whether the possibility of changes to the society's institutional structure should be considered when talking about a just society. Cohen addressed the questions on justice and social states of affair in a paper entitled "How to Do Political Philosophy?" Particular focus is given to Hume's two-fold choice between an emphasis on virtue and an emphasis on institutions. Isaiah Berlin, another Chichele predecessor, examines the tasks of political philosophy. Berlin claims that social situations includes political organization and the relations of the individual to the community.

Jeremy Waldron is University Professor and Professor of Law at New York University, a position he has held since 2006. He has recently been elected to the Chichele Chair of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, Oxford, which he will hold jointly with his NYU position beginning in 2011. Professor Waldron was born in New Zealand and educated in law and philosophy first at Otago University and then at Oxford. His career has included academic appointments at Edinburgh, Berkeley, Princeton, and Columbia. His recent books include God, Locke and Equality (Cambridge, 2002), and Torture, Terror and Trade-offs: Philosophy for the White House (Oxford, 2010). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, the author presents his views on the religious ethics required to deal with several issues including torture, gay rights and fetal abortion. He discusses the views of professor David Gushee who is one of the renowned theologians and Christian ethicists. He informs about the role of religious participation in the civil political conversation of a democratic citizenry.

The article focuses on the relation between human dignity, rights, and responsibilities. Topics discussed include analyzing the relationship between rights and responsibilities by thinking beyond civil liberties, green paper titled "Rights and Responsibilities: Developing our Constitutional Framework" issued by the British government, and use of the Human Rights Act for interpreting common law and the right to freedom of religion.

The applicability of the ideal we call ‘the Rule of Law’ (ROL) in international law (IL) is complicated by (1) the fact that there is no overarching world government from whom we need protection (of the sort that the ROL traditionally offers) and it is also complicated by (2) the fact that IL affects states, in the first instance, rather than individuals (for whose sake we usually insist on ROL requirements). The article uses both these ideas as points of entry into a consideration of the applicability of the ROL in IL. It suggests that the ‘true’ subjects of IL are really human individuals (billions of them) and it queries whether the protections that they need are really best secured by giving national sovereigns the benefit of ROL requirements in IL. For example, a national sovereign's insistence that IL norms should not be enforced unless they are clear and determinate may mean that individuals have fewer protections against human rights violations. More radically, it may be appropriate to think of national sovereigns more as ‘officials’ or ‘agencies’ of the IL system than as its subjects. On this account, we should consider the analogous situation of officials and agencies in a municipal legal system: are officials and agencies in need of, or entitled to, the same ROL protections as private individuals? If not, then maybe it is inappropriate to think that sovereign states are entitled to the same ROL protections at the international level as individuals are entitled to at the municipal level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the author's general observations on the insights, criticisms, and suggestions given in his article "Are Sovereigns Entitled to the Rule of Law?." The author mentions his philosophical orientation of the rule of law and the international legal system associated with the understanding of international sovereignty. The author is particular on the relation between law and state and its implication on the international law in sovereigns and jurisprudence.

The article focuses on the relationship between rights and responsibilities for civilians and provides an analysis of relation with inalienable human dignity. It mentions the views of Jeremy Waldron, Professor at New York University School of Law, that some rights are actually responsibilities and he want to concerns on some recent work on human dignity. It informs that way of thinking about freedom is like connecting rights with socially important functions.

The article discusses Ronald Dworkin's lifeboat examples on his argument in the fairness of majority-decision voting in his book "Justice for Hedgehogs." One version of the lifeboat example is choosing the least popular passenger to be drowned to save the rest, instead of drawing lots. The other version shows the unfair inclusion of personal attachments and antagonisms in the selection process.

The article presents a lecture by Jeremy Waldron delivered at the 2010 Natural Law Lecture, in which he discusses positive law and its importance to natural lawyers as well as the view of Thomas Aquinas about the Latin word determinatio that means concretization or positivization within the principles of natural law.

The article discusses the logical arguments about judicial review and the legitimate authorities of legislators who are acting as judges to the legislatures. Accordingly, when a statute restrict the liberties and individual rights of the people, the parliamentary supremacy overrules the rights-violation. It adds that the final arbitration rests with the legislature whether to amend or repeal the law in response to any complaint which effectively judge the legislature as an institution in a dispute.

The article presents a speech delivered by Jeremy Waldron during the symposium titled "The Most Disparaged Branch: The Role of Congress in the Twenty-First Century," held at the Boston University School of Law on November 14 and15, 2008, in which he discussed ways that make legislation an attractive mode of lawmaking.

The question about whether judges are better than legislatures at identifying and addressing the moral issues associated with rights needs to be posed in a more refined way that takes account of the suggestions made by Professors Beaud, Dyzenhaus, and Sadurski. As Professor Sadurski points out, it is not clear that issues about rights differ in their moral salience from other decisions that need to be faced in politics. Professor Dyzenhaus insists, quite rightly, that the question be posed as a question about institutional competence and institutional procedures. In this response, however, I argue that that reformulation does not make the question go away; it just poses it in a more complex setting. Professor Beaud rightly emphasizes that the question is usually raised in this form only in common law systems. Here, however, I argue that the fact that moral reasoning is concealed beneath the esoteric structures of adjudication in civil law systems does not mean that my question has no application there. All it means is that, in order to answer it, we must persuade judges to be a little more candid about what they are doing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]