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This long-awaited volume featuring contributions from top African international lawyers and voices from the continent critically explores the notion of international investment law from an African perspective. It does so by confronting some of the very hard questions with regard to the relationship between international investment and development that have either eluded or not been properly addressed in contemporary scholarships. After many years of popularity, investment treaties have recently caused increasing concern among States, most prominently for the unbalanced nature of their content, the often inadequate safeguard of the regulatory powers of the host State and the shortcomings of international investment arbitration. Some States have upgraded their investment treaties, others have revised their investment treaty model, and others have opted for facilitation agreements. This innovative monograph critically explores all these contentious issues from a multidisciplinary perspective.

This book challenges the myths surrounding the Irish Free Constitution by analysing the document in its context, by looking at how the Constitution was drafted and elucidating the true nature of the document. It examines the reasons why the Constitution did not function as anticipated and investigates whether the failures of the document can be attributed to errors of judgment in the drafting process or to subsequent events and treatment of the document. As well as giving a comprehensive account of the drafting stages and an analysis of the three alternative drafts for the first time, the book considers the intellectual influences behind the Constitution and the central themes of the document. This work constitutes a new look at this historic document through a legal lens and the analysis benefits from the advantage of hindsight as well as the archival material now available. Given the fact that the current Constitution substantially reproduces much of the 1922 text, the work will be of interest to modern constitutional scholars as well as legal historians and anyone with an interest in the period surrounding the creation of the Irish State.

Fifty Years of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination is the very first edited collection on ICERD, the oldest of the UN human rights treaties. With a major Introduction and 13 chapters, it provides a unique combination of members of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) and academic and other experts, to discuss the importance of the treaty on its 50^th anniversary.

This collection of chapters provides the most comprehensive study of the theory and practice on the contribution of international organisations and non-State actors to the formation of customary international law. It offers new practical and theoretical perspectives on one of the most complex questions about the making of international law, namely the possibility that actors other than states contribute to the making of customary international law. Notwithstanding the completion by the International Law Commission of its work on the identification of customary international law, the making of customary international law remains riddled with acute practical and theoretical controversies which have been left unresolved and which continue to be intensively debated in both practice and scholarship. Making extensively reference to the case-law of international law courts and tribunals as well as the practice of treaty-monitoring bodies while also engaging with the most recent scholarly work on customary international law, this new volume provides innovative tools and guidance to legal scholars, researchers in law, law students, lecturers in law, practitioners, legal advisers, judges, arbitrators, and counsels as well as tools to address contemporary questions of international law-making.

This volume brings together academic scholars and judges together to consider themes flowing from the often complex relationships between ‘law’ and ‘politics’, ‘adjudication’ and ‘policy-making’, the ‘judicial’ and ‘political’ branches of government. Part I addresses questions concerning the nature and extent of judicial power from a largely theoretical perspective. The chapters engage with abstract work on democracy and legitimacy in the context of the wielding and exercise of public (particularly judicial) power, including judicial interpretation and judicial review of legislative action. Part II addresses the European Court of Human Rights decision in O’Keeffe v Ireland and provides contrasting judicial and academic perspectives on the role of the European Court of Human Rights and the nature of exhausting domestic remedies. Part III comprises chapters that address questions around the process of appointing judges and judicial representation or dialogue between the judicial and executive branch. Comparative and theoretical frameworks inform this discussion. Part IV is devoted to legal history and address historical questions pertaining to judges power and adjudication. The role of specific judges, social and political disputes and case law are examined. Part V comprises three chapters, each of which has a quite specific focus but all engaging questions pertaining to judicial power and political processes. Socio-economic rights, the rule of law and and electoral processes are addressed.

In recent years there has been a significant growth in interest of the so-called “law in context” extending legal studies beyond black letter law. This book looks at the relationship between written law and legal practice. It examines how law is applied in reality and more precisely how law is perceived by the general public in contrast to the legal profession. The authors look at a number of themes that are central to examining ways in which myths about law are formed, and how there is inevitably a constitutive power aspect to this myth making. At the same time they explore to what extent law itself creates and sustains myths. This line of enquiry is taken from a wide range of viewpoints and thus offers a unique approach to the question of relationship between theory and practice. The book critically assesses the public’s level of legal, psychological and social awareness in relation to their knowledge of law and deviant behaviour. This line of enquiry is taken from a wide range of viewpoints and thus offers a unique approach to the question of relationship between theory and practice. The book covers both empirical studies and theoretical engagements in the area of legal understanding and this affords a very comprehensive coverage of the area, and addressing issues of gender and class, as well as considering psychological material. It brings together a range of academics and practitioners and asks questions and address contemporary issues relating to the relationship between law and popular beliefs.

Women before the court: Law and patriarchy in the Anglo-American World, 1600–1800 is a ground-breaking study of women in Britain and British America. Drawing from archival sources from both sides of the Atlantic, it offers an innovative, comparative approach to the study of women’s legal rights during a formative period of Anglo-American law. It traces how colonists transplanted English legal institutions to America, examines the remarkable depth of women’s legal knowledge, and shows how the law increasingly undermined patriarchal relationships between parents and children, masters and servants, and husbands and wives. While in the seventeenth century these relationships had been defined by mutual obligations of authority and submission, the economic and legal developments of the eighteenth century gave women increasing opportunities to break the patriarchal mould. This book will be of interest to scholars of Britain and colonial America, students of legal history and to laypeople interested in how women navigated and negotiated the structures of authority that governed them in the past. It is packed with fascinating (and sometimes shocking) stories that women related to the courts in cases ranging from murder and abuse to debt and estate litigation. This study adds a valuable contribution to our understandings of law, power and gender in the early modern world.