Bøker i European Academy of Legal Theo-serien

This book takes an interdisciplinary approach to the relationship between law, time, and new technologies to explain the emergence and transformation of global law, with a special focus on platform economy. It describes the 'metamorphoses of global law' on the basis of an experimental understanding of legal theory that looks beyond the systematisation of dogmatic categories, the reproduction of prefabricated theories. It offers a novel and sound theoretical approach to the formation of society within a highly digitalised and platform-oriented world, conjugating the work of several relevant authors, such as Niklas Luhmann, Gunther Teubner, Carl Schmitt, Jürgen Habermas, and Lawrence Lessing, among others. The book answers the myriad questions that the platform economy poses for law, shedding light on the possibility of a hybrid regulation, i.e., the mixture of political-constitutional external regulation and a self-regulation by the digital code, in an attempt to overcome simplistic notions of platform governance. It provides a comprehensive exploratory analysis on the phenomena of digitalisation, platformisation, big data, algorithms, and their relevance to law in global society.

Over 2 billion people (61% of the world's employed population) work in the informal economy. Due to its pervasiveness, informality plays a major role in understanding a wide swath of ideas, such as development, work, employment, governance, and growth. Its scope, nonetheless, goes far beyond economic definitions and political agendas. As the book argues, at the root of informality lies another comprehensive, yet generally unnoticed-or at best improperly treated-phenomenon: that of noncompliance with the law. Whilst it is true that much attention has been paid to the economic aspect over the past 5 decades, the same cannot be said about the legal aspect, which is one of its constitutive features. This book takes the first steps in this direction. The book provides an account of the phenomenon's legal nature through the lens of a case study on street vendors in Brazil, focusing on what can be conceived as noncompliance and by which forms noncompliant behaviour can be assessed. It goes on to set out the most striking impacts of noncompliance; specifically, what happens with the legal system when noncompliance becomes pervasive.The Nature and Impacts of Noncompliance was awarded The European Award for Legal Theory 2022 from the European Academy of Legal Theory (EALT) and Prêmio Abrafi de Teses 2022 from the Brazilian Association for Philosophy of Law and Sociology of Law (Abrafi).

How does law possess the normative force it requires to direct our actions?This book argues that this seemingly innocuous question is of central importance to the philosophy of law and, by extension, of the very concept of law itself. It advances a position grounded in the secular natural law tradition, and in doing so addresses the two success criteria for this position head on: Firstly, that commitment to the existence of a supreme moral principle is required; Secondly, that any supreme moral principle must be identifiable through human reason.The book argues that these conditions are met by Alan Gewirth's Principle of Generic Consistency (PGC), which - through a dialectically necessary argument - locates the existence of universally applicable moral norms in the concept of agency. Given the very purpose of law is to guide action, legal norms must be located in a unified hierarchy of practical reason. It follows that, if law is to succeed in claiming to be capable of guiding our action, moral permissibility with reference to the PGC is a necessary condition of a rule's legal validity. This strong theory of natural law is defended throughout, both against moral sceptics and positions within contemporary legal positivism.