The story of how the UK Parliament came to use the Internet from the 1960s onwards has never been told. Electrified Democracy places the impact of technology on parliamentary workings in its longer term historical context. The author identifies repeating patterns of perception and analysis, and cultural tendencies in the perception of inventions dating back over centuries that have reasserted themselves in connection with the parliamentary response to networked computers. He uncovers evidence and makes new connections, while situating all this within the wider global debates on connections...

Can the concept of law be indiscriminately extended to times and places in which it did simply not exist? Such an extension is at best useless and at worst misleading. Producing an intelligible jurisprudence of the concept of law means keeping it within the reasonable boundaries of its contemporary common-sense understanding: positive law. Parallel to Western societies in which it firstly emerged, the concept of positive law developed in many places, including countries characterized as Muslim. There, it faced other existing normativities, like customs and the Sharia. This book aims, from the...

English contract law provides the invisible framework that underpins and enables much contracting activity in society, yet the role of the law in policing many of our contracts now approaches vanishing point. The methods by which contracts come into existence, and notionally create binding obligations, have transformed over the past forty years. Consumers now enter into contracts through remote and automated processes on standard terms over which they have little control. This book explores the substantive weakening of the institution of contract law in a society heavily dependent on...