Justice or Legitimacy: A Response to Ocko and Gilmartin
Inevitably, comparative law is a twofold project. We start by comparing first order legal rules: What is and is not a crime? What is protected under a property regime? Then, we are interested in how these legal norms figure in the imagin ation of the social order. Why, we ask, do people obey the law? How do they imagine the authority of law? But what is the relationship between these two kinds of inquiry? Does a private property regime, for example, support a broader understanding of the political order as a system of contractual relation ships among autonomous subjects? Can legal reform?for example, a new constitution?create new citizens, or is it the other way around, with a new conception of citizenship leading to new laws? Inevitably, such relationships move in both directions. Because every legal norm is necessarily embedded in a larger narrative, there are no general lessons to be drawn about the nature of legal and political reform. The best we can do is offer detailed case studies such as that presented by Jonathan Ocko and David Gilmartin. They show us some of the ways in which a regime can use law to construct a meaning or set of meanings that will bind citizen to ruler, or society to state?and vice versa. Still, it is possible to say something about the general shape of the problem of the relationship between these two approaches to a legal order. Most importantly, we can clarify the way the two aspects of the legal order are measured against different normative ideals: justice and legitimacy. A legal system must respond to both of these norms.
From the 'Eumenides' to 'Ajax': The tragedy of international criminal law
This article examines mainstream and critical approaches to international criminal law, focusing on not only their metaphorical myth-making regarding the legal legitimacy and jurisdictional origins of the ad hoc bodies, but on a peculiar instance of outright reliance on Greek theater to celebrate the influence of the Nuremberg precedent. The article then traces the evolution of The Eumenides over time in Athenian literature, emphasizing the relation between the early optimism born of the jury trial and the darker undertones that emerge as Athens’ imperial adventures take their toll, as seen in Sophocles’ Ajax and then in Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian wars.
La inseguridad jurídica en normas de contratación estatal
It is established by different studies that the issue of government procurement has been marred by several factors, the test objective to publicize these factors, we take as starting point the constant conflict between the branches of government to try and organize this subject; will collect and analyze diverse regulatory and case material in order to achieve evidence and demonstrate the different concepts of constant change that produces excessive regulation of the subject procurement and is in turn causing rapid changes that result in legal uncertainty for our law on the Contract Status.