New ebooks purchased in January

A selection of law ebooks purchased in January, in association with the ebooks@cambridge team. These are all available through iDiscover, and include:

Constitutions and Religion, edited by Susanna Mancini (Edward Elgar, 2020)

Constitutions and Religion is the first major reference work in the emerging field of comparative constitutional law and religion. It offers a nuanced array of perspectives on various models for the treatment of religion in domestic and supranational legal orders.

EU Energy Law, Volume III: Renewable Energy in the Member States of the EU (2nd edition), edited by Dörte Fouquet (Claeys & Casteels, 2018)

This new book, EU Energy Law Volume III, focuses from a broad perspective on the latest development in the EU Member States in the renewable energy sector as well as on energy efficiency. It also describes energy market legislation with a special focus on market design and system integration including support mechanisms, grid access, licensing, planning, auto production, interconnection, network planning and security of supply. It also elaborates on structural fund use within this sector.

Family Law in a Changing America, by Douglas NeJaime, Richard Banks, Joanna Grossman, Suzanne Kim (Wolters Kluwer, 2021)

Family Law in a Changing America is a new casebook that highlights law and family patterns as they are now, not as they were decades ago. By focusing on key changes in family life, the casebook attends to rising equality and inequality within and among families. The law, formally at least, accords more equality and autonomy than ever before, having repudiated hierarchies based on race, gender, and sexuality. Yet, as our society has grown more economically unequal, so too have family patterns diverged—with marriage and marital child-rearing becoming a mark of privilege. A number of developments—mass incarceration, the privatization of care, and reproductive technologies—have also contributed to disparities based on race, class, and gender. The casebook reflects the law’s continuing emphasis on marriage, but also treats nonmarital families as central. Rather than privilege the marital heterosexual family, the casebook organizes the presentation of the law around 1) adult relationships and 2) parent-child relationships.

Gender and Justice in Family Law Disputes: Women, Mediation, and Religious Arbitration, edited by Samia Bano (Brandeis University Press, 2017)

Gender and Justice in Family Law Disputes offers insights into how women’s autonomy and personal decision-making capabilities are expressed via multiple formal and nonformal dispute-resolution mechanisms, and as part of their social and legal lived realities. It analyzes the specific ways in which both mediation and religious arbitration take shape in contemporary and comparative family law across jurisdictions. Demarcating lines between contemporary family mediation and new forms of religious arbitration, Bano illuminates the complexities of these processes across multiple national contexts.

Human Dignity, Human Rights, and Social Justice: A Chinese Interdisciplinary Dialogue with Global Perspective, edited by Zhibin Xie, Pauline Kollontai, Sebastian Kim (Springer, 2020)

This book explores human dignity, human rights and social justice based on a Chinese interdisciplinary dialogue and global perspectives. This volume consists of two main sections. The first section examines Chinese perspectives on human rights and social justice, in which both from Confucianism and Christianity are considered and the issues such as patriotism, religious freedom, petition, social protest, the rights of marginalized people, and sexual violence are studied.  The second section presents the perspectives of Christian public theologians in the global contexts. They examine the influence of Christian thought and practice in the issues of human rights and social justice descriptively and prescriptively and address issues such as religious laws and rights, diaconia, majoritarianism, general equality, social-economic disparities, and climate justice from global perspectives including in the contexts of America, Australia, Israel and Europe. 

Living Lawfully: Love in Law and Law in Love, by Zenon Bańkowski (Springer, 2001)

The aim of this book is to explore what it means to live a life under the law. Does a life of law preclude love and does a life of love preclude law? Part of the theme of the book is that social questions also raise individual moral and ethical questions; that to live lawfully implies both a question of how I should live in my relations with my fellows and how society should be organised. These questions must be looked at together. The book explores these questions and in looking at the articulation of law and love touches upon debates in personal morality, aesthetics, epistemology, social and political organisation, institutional design and the form and substance of law. It raises questions that are of interest to students and those working in law, theology, and social and political theory.

Modern German Non-Positivism: From Radbruch to Alexy, edited by Martin Borowski (Mohr Siebeck, 2020)

The relation between law and morality has been at the heart of legal philosophy for millennia. This book is devoted to the two most influential German natural law approaches, Gustav Radbruch's neo-Kantian non-positivism from the 1930s and 1940s and Robert Alexy's contemporary analytical non-positivism. The Radbruch Formula, so vital to the attempt to surmount the consequences of the regime of the National Socialists and of the socialist regime of the 'German Democratic Republic', has attracted significant international attention. Robert Alexy has analyzed the problem of law and morality with his distinct analytical approach over the last three decades and comes to a conclusion that echoes the Radbruch Formula: 'Extreme injustice is no law.' The contributions compare and contrast these two much discussed German approaches to the issue of a necessary connection between law and morality.

The European Union's Trade Defence Modernisation Package: A Missed Opportunity at Reconciling Trade and Competition?, by Patricia Trapp (Springer, 2022)

Anti-dumping and anti-subsidy measures are the most important elements of the European Union's trade defence instruments. Since the beginning of the European integration process, they have been used to combat trade practices which are considered "unfair" and their distortive effects on competition in the internal market. However, while the imposition of trade defence measures aims to level the playing field between EU producers and their foreign competitors, it also produces negative effects on competition itself. Based on the role attributed to competition and trade defence policy respectively throughout the European integration process, this book argues that the trading bloc's trade defence instruments should not be designed or applied with the objective of granting maximum protection to EU producers, but that their use should be limited to what is necessary to ensure fairness in competition between EU producers and exporting producers.

The Interface Between Intellectual Property and Investment Law: An Intertextual Analysis, by Emmanuel K. Oke (Edward Elgar, 2021)

This original book presents a critical analysis of the interface between international intellectual property law and international investment law through the lens of intertextuality. It argues that a structuralist approach to intertextuality can be useful in the context of legal interpretation, especially in relation to the interpretation of treaties.

The Rule of Law and Emergency in Colonial India: Judicial Politics in the Early Nineteenth Century, by Haruki Inagaki (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021)

This book takes a closer look at colonial despotism in early nineteenth-century India and argues that it resulted from Indians’ ‘forum shopping,’ the legal practice which resulted in jurisdictional jockeying between an executive, the East India Company, and a judiciary, the King’s Court. Focusing on the collisions that took place in Bombay during the 1820s, the book analyses how Indians of various descriptions—peasants, revenue defaulters, government employees, merchants, chiefs, and princes—used the court to challenge the government (and vice versa) and demonstrates the mechanism through which the lawcourt hindered the government’s indirect rule, which relied on local Indian rulers in newly conquered territories. The author concludes that existing political anxiety justified the East India Company’s attempt to curtail the power of the court and strengthen their own power to intervene in emergencies through the renewal of the company’s charter in 1834. An insightful read for those researching Indian history and judicial politics, this book engages with an understudied period of British rule in India, where the royal courts emerged as sites of conflict between the East India Company and a variety of Indian powers.

Theories of Co-perpetration in International Criminal Law, by Lachezar D. Yanev (Brill Nijhoff, 2018)

The proper construction of co-perpetration responsibility in international criminal law has become one of the most enduring controversies in this field, with the UN Tribunals endorsing the theory of joint criminal enterprise, and the International Criminal Court adopting the alternative joint control over the crime theory to define this mode of liability. This book seeks to reconcile the ICTY/R’s and ICC’s jurisprudence by providing a definition of co-perpetration that could be uniformly applied in the two justice models that these institutions represent: the ad hoc- and the treaty-based model. An evaluation framework is adopted, pursuant to which the origins, merits and deficiencies of the said competing theories are critically assessed, and a refined legal framework of co-perpetration responsibility is proposed.

All of these ebooks are available to current University of Cambridge staff and students with a Raven password. A full list of ebook platforms can be viewed via the ebooks@cambridge LibGuide