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The question of whether new rules or regulations are required to govern, restrict, or even prohibit the use of autonomous weapons systems has been the subject of debate for the better part of a decade. Despite the claims of advocacy groups, the way ahead remains unclear since the international community has yet to agree on a specific definition of Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems, and the great powers have largely refused to support an effective ban. In this vacuum, the public has been presented with a heavily one-sided view of “Killer Robots.” This volume presents a more nuanced approach to autonomous weapon systems that recognizes the need to progress beyond a discourse framed by the Terminator and HAL 9000. Reshaping the discussion around this emerging military innovation requires a new line of thought and a willingness to challenge the orthodoxy. Lethal Autonomous Weapons: Re-Examining the Law and Ethics of Robotic Warfare therefore focuses on exploring the moral and legal issues associated with the design, development, and deployment of lethal autonomous weapons. In this volume, we bring together some of the most prominent academics and academic-practitioners in the lethal autonomous weapons space and seek to return some balance to the debate. As part of this effort, we recognize that society needs to invest in hard conversations that tackle the ethics, morality, and law of these new digital technologies and understand the human role in their creation and operation.

The United States Supreme Court made a landmark decision in the Pentagon Papers case in 1971, concerning how government should balance its legitimate need to conduct its operations—especially those related to national security—in secret, with the public’s right and responsibility to know what its government is doing. The Pentagon Papers decision, though, left many important questions still unresolved and the circumstances that undergirded the system initiated by the decision have changed fundamentally in recent decades. Difficult problems call for a range of different perspectives. In this book, Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone gather an array of remarkable, wise, and accomplished individuals to share their deep and broad expertise in the national security world, journalism, and academia. Each essay delves into important dimensions of the current system to explain how we should think about them, and to offer as many solutions as possible. A rigorous and serious analysis, this volume examines the incredibly complex and important issues that our nation must continue to address and strive to resolve as we move into the future.

Before the late 19th century, natural law played an important role in the American legal system. Lawyers routinely used it in their arguments, and judges often relied upon it in their opinions. Today, by contrast, natural law plays virtually no role in the legal system. When natural law was part of a lawyer’s toolkit, lawyers thought of judges as finders of the law, but when natural law dropped out of the legal system, lawyers began thinking of judges as makers of the law instead. The Decline of Natural Law explores the causes and consequences of this change. It discusses the ways in which lawyers used natural law and why the concept seemed reasonable to them. It examines several long-term trends in legal thought that weakened the position of natural law, including the use of written constitutions, the gradual separation of the spheres of law and religion, the rapid growth of legal publishing, and the position of natural law in some of the 19th century’s most contested legal issues. It describes the profession’s rejection of natural law in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And it explores the ways in which the legal system responded to the absence of natural law.

Liars are causing devastating problems. They are endangering public health. They are threatening self-government. They are destroying the reputation of good people—and inflating the reputation of people who are not so good. Nonetheless, most falsehoods ought not to be censored or regulated, even if they are lies. In general, free societies allow them. Public officials should not be allowed to act as the truth police. A key reason is that we cannot trust officials to separate truth from falsehood; their own judgments are unreliable, and their own biases get in the way. If officials are licensed to punish falsehoods, they will end up punishing dissent. The best response to falsehoods is usually to correct them, rather than to punish or censor them. But there is an exception to this proposition: governments should have the power to regulate the most harmful lies and falsehoods. False statements are not constitutionally protected if the government can show that they threaten to cause serious harm. Public officials should be able to restrict and punish lies and falsehoods that pose serious threats to public health and safety. To protect the democratic process, public officials should be able to restrict certain lies and falsehoods. They should be able to safeguard people’s reputations. Private institutions, including television networks, magazines, and newspapers, and social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, should be doing much more to slow or stop the spread of lies and falsehoods.

Focusing on India between the early nineteenth century and the First World War, Colonial Terror explores the centrality of the torture of Indian bodies to the law-preserving violence of colonial rule—of some of the ways in which, in other words, extraordinary violence was embedded in the ordinary operation of colonial states. Although enacted largely by Indians on Indian bodies, particularly by subaltern members of the police, the book argues that torture was facilitated, systematized, and ultimately sanctioned by first the East India Company and then the Raj because it benefitted the colonial regime, since rendering the police a source of terror played a key role in the construction and maintenance of state sovereignty. Drawing upon the work of both Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault, Colonial Terror contends, furthermore, that it is only possible to understand the terrorizing nature of the colonial police in India by viewing colonial India as a ‘regime of exception’ in which two different forms, or levels, of exceptionality were in operation, one wrought through the exclusion of particular groups or segments of the Indian population from the law and the other by ‘petty sovereigns’ in their enactment of illegal violence in the operation of the law. It was in such fertile ground, in which colonial subjects were both included within the domain of colonial law while also being abandoned by it, that torture was able to flourish.

Few contemporary scholars have done more in their work to develop the idea of responsibility than Nicola Lacey. She ranks alongside HLA Hart and Antony Honore in developing approaches to understanding responsibility. Like these scholars, the influence of her work has spread beyond academia to change the perception of responsibility amongst practitioners. During their lifetime both Hart and Honore had volumes dedicated to their work. This book does the same for Nicola Lacey, marking her ongoing influence and accomplishments in the common law world through a collection of essays by leading international scholars reflecting and interrogating her contribution to understanding criminal responsibility. Each author brings a particular challenge and new ideas to bear on her work, touching upon important aspects of responsibility that are current in the scholarship: categorization, frameworks for understanding criminal responsibility and the relationships between them, women in criminal law, the history of criminal law, blameworthiness and ascriptions of responsibility, moral responsibility, the role of politics and political economy.

The Ethics of Architecture offers a short and approachable scholarly introduction to a timely question: In a world of increasing population density, how does one construct habitable spaces that promote social goals like health, happiness, environmental friendliness, and justice? What are the special ethical obligations assumed by architects? Because their work creates the basic material conditions that make all other human activity possible, architects and their associates in building enjoy vast influence on how we all live, work, play, worship, and think. With this influence comes tremendous, and not always examined, responsibility. This book addresses the range of ethical issues that architects face, with a broad understanding of ethics. Beyond strictly professional duties—transparency, technical competence, fair trading—lie more profound issues that move into aesthetic, political, and existential realms. Does an architect have a duty to create art, if not always beautiful art? Should an architect feel obliged to serve a community and not simply the client? Is social justice a possible orientation for architectural practice? Is there such a thing as feeling compelled to “shelter being” in architectural work? By taking these usually abstract questions into the region of physical creation, the book attempts a concrete reformulation of “architectural ethics” as a matter of deep reflection on the architect’s role as both citizen and caretaker. Thinkers and makers discussed include Le Corbusier, Martin Heidegger, Lewis Mumford, Rem Koolhaas, Jane Jacobs, Arthur Danto, and John Rawls. An added preface addresses architectural issues arising during and after the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.

This book is about the role of lawyers in the movement to challenge economic inequality in one of America’s most unequal cities: Los Angeles. Covering a transformative period of city history—from the 1992 riots to the 2008 recession—the book examines how law has been used, and what it has achieved, in the struggle to make Los Angeles a more equal place. The backdrop is the dramatic growth of low-wage work powered by global outsourcing, declining unionism, increasing labor contingency, and surging immigration. The book’s narrative focus is on five pivotal campaigns in which lawyers allied with the city’s dynamic labor, immigrant rights, and environmental movements mobilize law to transform key sectors of the regional economy. These campaigns, analyzed through in-depth case studies, reveal how law has shaped low-wage work in Los Angeles—and at times provided a potent weapon to contest it. Drawing upon archival research, extensive interviews with key actors, and a review of court files, this book explores the role of lawyers in defining the city as a space for redefining work. Challenging critical accounts of lawyers in social movements, its central claim is that by advancing an innovative model of legal mobilization, the L.A. campaigns have achieved meaningful regulatory reform, while strengthening the position of workers in the field of local politics. Through multidimensional advocacy to promote worker organizing, lawyers and activists have succeeded in converting policy change into greater interest group power—forging a new model of progressive city-building for the twenty-first century.

This book analyses the current state of Japanese law after a series of reforms since 1990. In that year, the US–Japan Structural Impediments Initiatives Talk necessitating fundamental changes to the conventional system in Japan was completed. At the same time, the ‘bubble economy’ came to an end and Japan embarked on a long path to economic recovery. As a result, the Japanese legal system has undergone significant changes. Depending on the area of law, not all the reforms were successful, but it is beyond doubt that major changes took place across the board. The core of the book is commercial and business-related laws such as corporate law, securities law, contract law, and competition law. There was a fundamental change in corporate law over past three decades, not the least because of the new Company Law of 2004. The entire system of corporate governance now is very different from the previous insider-dominated system. Major changes took place in securities law after the Japanese ‘Big Bang’. Competition law in Japan, which had once been regarded as ‘dormant’, is now in full operation. The book also considers contract law, which, as part of the Civil Code, has undergone a major change in 2020. In order to understand commercial and business law, accurate understanding of the dispute settlement mechanism and the procedure is needed and this is duly covered. The book addresses these issues by studying the case law as well as legislative history and business practice.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, international politics is increasingly governed by legal rules and institutions. Yet widespread skepticism of its value and transformative potential, and sometimes outright hostility toward it, abound. This book provides a normative justification for international law. Namely, it argues that the same reasons which support the development of law at the domestic level—the promotion of peace; the protection of individual rights; the facilitation of extensive, complex forms of cooperation; and the resolution of collective action problems—also support the development of law at the international level. The book offers moral and legal reasons for states to improve, strengthen, and further institutionalize the capacity of international law. The argument thus engages in institutional moral reasoning. It also shows why it should matter to individuals that their states are part of a rule-governed international order. When states are bound by common rules of behavior, their citizens reap the benefits. International law encourages states to protect individual rights and provides a forum where they can communicate, negotiate, and compromise on their differences in order to protect themselves from outside interference and pursue their domestic policies more effectively, including those directed at enhancing their citizen’s welfare. Thus, international law makes a critical, irreplaceable, and defining contribution to an international order characterized by peace and justice.