Suchergebnisse

Legal change and political philosophy / Maciej Chmielinski -- Standards of law-making as the parts of normative space in the post-modern democratic states : the question of justification and legitimacy of law / Tadeusz Biernat -- Public reason, background culture, and the justification of legal change / Michal Rupniewski -- The moral, the political, and the legal : changing patterns of justification in a world of legal pluralization / Eva Weiler -- Human rights : desiderata of a theory of change / Stephen Riley -- Legal "determinism" or/and legal "creationism"? : conservative-communitarian versus contractarian approaches to legal change / Maciej Chmielinski -- Natural law ethics and the issue of legal change / Michal Rupniewski -- Natural law against natural rights in the thought of Alasdair Macintyre / Kamil Aksiuto -- Kant's conception of legal change / Eduardo Charpenel -- Economism, voluntarism, and materialist historicism : three faces of the Marxist instrumental approach to legal change / Maciej Chmielinski -- Petrifying, disregarding or reforming customs : can customary law be changed in a liberal way? / Marc Goetzmann -- The "codification moment" : an attempt to define factors of effective law reform illustrated with the example of the Swiss Civil Code of 10 December 1907 / Maria Lewandowicz -- Exogenous institutional change as coercion and the ideological neutrality litmus : the case of Polish communism / J. Patrick Higgins -- The coercive control offence : a case study on overcriminalisation / Melissa Hamilton -- Individualism in times of crisis : theorising a shift away from classic liberal attitudes to human rights post 9/11 / Ian Turner -- Is the principle of legal certainty a human right? : the legitimacy of the retroactive application of laws / Jan Tryzna -- Conclusion: the philosophy of legal change as a research method / Michal Rupniewski.

With few exceptions, scholars have generally relied on judges' final votes on the merits as the primary indicator of judicial outcomes. Yet, to fully understand judicial decision making, we think it imperative that research also focus on the interpretation of precedent & legal change. To do so, it is necessary to develop measures of legal change & the treatment of precedent over time. Scholars have begun doing so by using Shepard's Citations, a legal citations index. One of the most important features of Shepard's is its list of all opinions that legally treat a previously decided case, as well as its characterization of the nature of that legal treatment. This article empirically tests the reliability of Shepard's & discusses the validity of its coding protocols. Our analysis demonstrates that Shepard's coding of legal treatment is quite reliable, though there is some notable variance across Shepard's treatment categories. We also point out several features of Shepard's that could potentially affect the validity of a measure derived from it. We conclude that, as long as scholars keep these validity issues in mind, Shepard's can be a highly appropriate data source. 1 Table, 30 References. Adapted from the source document.