The Russian Revolution of October 1917 marked the first large-scale attempt to fundamentally reorganize economic, social and legal life along egalitarian lines. In relation to legal theory and practice, the revolution launched the boldest experiment of the 20th century, accompanied by passionate, free-ranging and scholarly debates. Lenin’s government initially sought to fashion a radically new approach to the state, law and legal theory, with some striking results in the fields such as criminal and family law. Moreover, it attempted to create the conditions for the ultimate fading away (“withering away”) of law and the state. These achievements offer insights for the future, notwithstanding the subsequent degeneration under Stalin.

Our reactions to actual crime-disbelief about the act committed, anger at the hurt caused, a desire to get even, and fear for ourselves and our children-arrive in an indecipherable rush of emotion. We perceive strong, intuitive, and sometimes oppositional reactions at once. So it is little wonder that no single traditional moral justification for punishment is satisfactory. Traditional theories, both retributive and utilitarian, are grounded in a priori truths that ignore the convergence of the theoretical, the practical and the emotional that gives rise to the need to punish. In their stead, we should embrace an advertently pragmatic theoretical approach, which recognize the primary need to protect ourselves against danger, but looks as well to providing reformation wherever possible. Such an approach does not ignore the traditional rationales. To eschew retribution entirely is to deny a deeply-rooted moral intuition and forego efforts to tame it. To jettison utility is to condemn the victim and community to perpetual fear; just to the extent that retributive impulses, by any name, undermine necessary forward-looking concerns about our future's safety, they poorly serve our needs, which include service to the victim, the community and the offender.

The essay explores the question of whether people can have a right to common goods, such as the flourishing of their culture or national heritage. It first explains the concept of a common good and its distinction from other similar concepts, such as collective and public goods. Second, it argues that individuals ought not to have a right to common goods, unless a particular distributive principle applies to the good in question, and then the individual's right is the right to a certain share in that common good. Finally, the essay explores the question of how this analysis applies to group-rights, with respect to other groups and to members of the group itself.

This essay maintains that the question in its title is really three sets of questions: a conceptual inquiry, a moral/political inquiry, and an empirical inquiry. After devoting some attention to the relevant conceptual issues, the essay ponders in detail the moral/political issues. It suggests some answers to the germane moral/political questions, and it takes pains to distinguish those questions from other lines of inquiry with which they might be confused. Although only animals and dead people are mentioned in the title, the essay also considers whether infants, comatose people, lunatics, future generations, groups, trees, and natural phenomena such as rivers should be classified as potential holders of legal rights.

The Faust legend is familiar to us as the story of a man who agrees to sell his soul to the devil in exchange for a moment of absolute spiritual fulfilment. Since its first recorded telling some five hundred years ago, the legend has survived both as an expression of our need for transcendence - for “something more” - and as a cautionary tale about the manner in which we try to achieve it. This paper addresses the Faust legend from a legal perspective by taking its central motif - Faust's pact with the devil - and literally reducing it to writing, that is, by presenting it in the form of a legally binding agreement of purchase and sale. The intent is to explore whether and how doing so can help illuminate key issues at the core of the Faust legend while allowing us to consider the commercial element implicit in the way in which we sometimes conduct our spiritual affairs. To lend perspective, the various provisions of the agreement have been footnoted to reference relevant passages from Goethe’s and Marlowe’s telling of the Faust legend.

Monahan and Walker have proposed that American judges should fundamentally alter the way they receive and assess social science evidence in court, by treating social science research as “law-like” or authoritative when certain professional research criteria are met. Strict application of the stipulated criteria to various kinds of social science research introduced into American and Canadian courts reveals, however, that such research can seldom be considered authoritative in the way Monahan and Walker imagine. Accordingly, as a general rule judges should be reluctant to apply Monahan and Walker’s “social authority” model to the courtroom resolution of difficult questions of social, economic, and cultural or historical facts.

IzhakEnglard argues that Ernest Weinrib's idea of coherence in private law, based solely on corrective justice, must be modified to include distributive justice in order to better fit legal practice. Englard proposes complementarity, a framework accommodating mutually exclusive scientific concepts, as a basis for private law’s coherence, based on an analogy between the concepts of light and justice. This analogy is insufficient as an epistemological basis common to science and law upon which complementarity can be applied as Englard suggests. Despite Englard's failure complementarity may yet be applicable to law, based on an epistemological 'problem of observation' that science and law share.

This paper suggests that Canadian common law doctrine, according to which businesses providing goods and services to the public at large are allowed to refuse service because of a customer’s group-based characteristics such as race, is inconsistent with previous case law as well as with the underlying reason-based structure of the common law. After suggesting that the common law has not been fully displaced by human rights legislation, the paper demonstrates that the common law contains three concrete articulations of a duty to provide equal service. It argues that at the core of the rationale that best fits these bodies of case law is a status-based demand placed on those interacting in their capacity as members of an impersonal profession to refrain from taking into account any personal or group-based characteristics beyond those relevant to the provision of goods and services around which the profession is organized.

Richard Moon’s The Constitutional Protection of Freedom of Expression is an insightful and comprehensive study of the right to freedom of expression in Canadian constitutional law. Moon begins by stressing the importance of the distinction between freedom of expression as a moral or political ideal and as a constitutional right. The former certainly informs the latter. But the general structure of constitutional adjudication will also play an important role in determining how these issues are resolved and this may, in turn, influence our understanding of the right as a moral and political ideal. Moon focuses on the most important Canadian freedom of expression decisions which cover a wide range of topics from the regulation of racist expression and pornography to access to state and private property.

Inclusive Legal Positivism (ILP) is the view that morality may, but need not be part of the criteria for valid law. Joseph Raz has argued against this position by showing that law cannot be authoritative on the ILP view. In this paper I argue that ILP and Razian authority can in fact be made compatible by developing Jules Coleman's distinction between authority and legality. While the rule of recognition is a necessary condition for legality (in order to validate law), it need not be a condition for authority (for citizens to identify law). By elaborating on this distinction and further developing the argument, I conclude that one can be an inclusive positivist about law and a Razianabout authority.

Legal orthodoxy has it that the wrong involved in breaking a promise, like that involved in breaking a contract, depends essentially on the making of a binding promise. It is in this sense sui generis. But philosophers are not so sanguine. T.M. Scanlon is the latest in a long line of moral philosophers who have sought to reduce the wrong of promise-breaking to a wider class of wrongs associated with a duty, variously formulated, not to disappoint the expectations one induces in another. I argue that Scanlon's theory founders on a logical impasse that plages all such reductionist accounts.

This article is a review of Costas Douzinas, The End of Human Rights: Critical Legal Thought at the Turn of the Century, Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2000.

This encyclopedia provides a comprehensive survey of philosophy of law. The articles cover every period of Western philosophy and every part of the globe. Every school and methodology of legal philosophy is detailed. There are ninety articles on individual thinkers in both the Anglo-American and European traditions. Every facet of law as a social institution, of criminal law, and of private law, is covered. Relevant political, moral, and epistemological issues are discussed. The general standard, though uneven, is high. To guide readers a subject list by topic and four indexes are included. The editor deserves congratulations for a remarkable achievement.