We are delighted to announce the third issue of the LSE Law Department’s Legal Studies Working Paper Series for 2020.
In this issue, Thomas Poole (WPS 13/2020) turns to Bernard Williams to contour the notion of moral peoplehood, the image of a constitutive ‘we’ oscillating between time and timelessness, material fact and normative aspiration, which grounds the jural community and the rules we give ourselves; Richard Ekins and Grégoire Webber (WPS 14/2020) explore the relevance of Jurisprudence on Legislated Rights: Securing Human Rights through Legislation (CUP, 2018) for modern constitutional government, in reply to the careful, constructive and critical challenges of Timothy Endicott, Dimitris Tsarapatsanis, and Lael Weis; Peter Ramsay (WPS 15/2020) argues that the presumption of innocence, as articulated in the burden and standard of proof in criminal proceedings, institutionalises the sovereign’s political authority, and that this offers a more compelling explanation of the presumption’s high standing than that provided by its undoubted role in protecting the interests of the law’s individual subjects; Grégoire Webber (WPS 16/2020) explores the idea of political opposition, its different modalities – being directed either at specific measures or those who author them – and its implications for constitutional design, concluding not only that opposition is indispensable to the pursuit of the public good but, for that same reason, is to be separated from the office of government; Chaloka Beyani (WPS 17/2020), having led the drafting and negotiation of the Kampala Convention for the Protection and Assistance of Internally Displaced Persons in Africa, argues that the Convention has modernised a hitherto soft static international legal framework by establishing obligations for non-state actors, such as armed opposition groups, international organisations, and by broadening obligations to tackle the effects of disasters and climate change, or development, on displacement; Thomas Poole (WPS 18/2020) excavates Locke’s idea of the ‘federative’ and its Ciceronian foundations to reimagine the foreign relations power of the state in distinctly juridical terms, thereby aligning the internal and external dimensions of the constitution in both function and form; Siva Thambisetty (WPS 19/2020) articulates the psychoactive effect of intellectual property rights on creators and users, and outlines a metamodern revival of intellectual property law by using the metaphor of a broken bucket to explain the flawed design and relationship-engendering nature of these property rights; Eduardo Baistrocchi (WPS 20/2020) offers the first analysis of the impact of geopolitics in international taxation since its emergence in the early 20th century.