High profile miscarriages of justice have become focus of much recent writing on criminal justice. Such literature ignores an important paradox: when justice is contested and uncertain, how can we speak meaningfully of miscarriage of justice? This book addresses this question and finds an answer to it in the relationship between the legal construction of criminal justice and the reporting of it in the media.

The term transnational governance designates untraditional types of international and regional collaboration among both public and private actors. These legally-structured or less formal arrangements link economic, scientific and technological spheres with political and legal processes. They are challenging the type of governance which constitutional states were supposed to represent and ensure. They also provoke old questions: Who bears the responsibility for governance without a government? Can accountability be ensured? The term -constitutionalism- is still widely identified with statal...

Is law paradoxical? This book seeks to unravel the riddle of legal paradoxes. It focuses on two main questions: the nature of legal paradoxes, and their social ramifications. In exploring the structure of legal paradoxes, the book focuses both on generic paradoxes, such as those associated with the self-referential character of legal validity and the endemic incoherence of legal discourse, and on paradoxes that permeate more restricted fields of law, such as contract law, euthanasia, and human rights (the prohibition of torture). The discussion of the social effects of legal paradoxes focuses...

Gegenuber der aktuellen sozial- und rechtsphilosophischen Debatte zur Gerechtigkeit, die zwischen den Polen der Universalitat und der Alteritat oszilliert, arbeiten die Autoren des Bandes eine dritte, eine sozialtheoretische, Argumentationslinie heraus. Ausgangspunkt sind die Paradoxien des Rechts, wie sie von Jacques Derrida und Niklas Luhmann formuliert worden sind. In Luhmanns "Kontingenzformel des Rechts" erscheint Gerechtigkeit nicht primar als philosophische Frage, sondern als konkrete Praxis der jeweiligen Selbstbeschreibungen des Rechtssystems, welche die bloe Konsistenz des Recht...

Im Weltrecht ist eine explosionsartige Vervielfltigung unabhngiger, global agierender Gerichte zu beobachten. Untersuchungen kommen auf die beeindruckende Zahl von 125 internationalen Gerichtsinstitutionen, die Letztentscheidung ber globale Konflikte beanspruchen. In sozialtheoretischer und internationalrechtlicher Perspektive gehen die Autoren der Frage nach, wie die Regime-Kollisionen, die durch das chaotische Nebeneinander von globalen Normkomplexen und Konfliktlsungsinstanzen ausgelst werden, zu erklren sind und wie in Politik und Recht mit ihnen umzugehen ist.

Business networks consist of independent businesses that enter into interrelated contracts, conferring on the parties many of the benefits of co-ordination achieved through vertical integration in a single firm, without creating a single integrated business, such as a corporation or partnership. Retail franchises are one such example of a network, but the most common instance is a credit card transaction between a customer, retailer, and the issuer of the card. How should the law analyze this hybrid economic phenomenon? It is neither exactly a market relationship, because that overlooks the...

In recent years a series of scandals have challenged the traditional political reliance on public constitutional law and human rights as a safeguard of human well-being. Multinational corporations have violated human rights; private intermediaries in the internet have threatened freedom of opinion, and the global capital markets unleashed catastrophic risks. All of these phenomena call for a response from traditional constitutionalism. Yet it is outside the limits of the nation-state in transnational politics and outside institutionalized politics, in the 'private' sectors of global society...