Many legal experts no longer share an unbounded trust in the potential of law to govern society efficiently and responsibly. They often experience the 'limits of the law', as they are confronted with striking inadequacies in their legal toolbox, with inner inconsistencies of the law, with problems of enforcement and obedience, and with undesired side-effects, and so on.
The contributors to this book engage in the challenging task of making sense of this experience. Against the background of broader cultural transformations (such as globalisation, new technologies, individualism and cultural diversity), they revisit a wide range of areas of the law and map different types of limits in relation to some basic functions and characteristics of the law. Additionally, they offer a set of strategies to manage justifiably law's limits, such as dedramatising law's limits, conceptual refinement ('constructivism'), striking the right balance between different functions of the law, seeking for complementarity between law and other social practices.
Facing the Limits of the Law
Erik Claes · Wouter Devroe Bert Keirsbilck (Eds.)
Facing the Limits of the Law
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Professor Erik Claes Professor Wouter Devroe Bert Keirsbilck Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Faculty of Law Tiensestraat 41 3000 Leuven Belgium
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected]
ISBN 978-3-540-79855-2
e-ISBN 978-3-540-79856-9
DOI 10.1007/978-3-540-79856-9 Library of Congress Control Number: 2008942778 c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilm or in any other way, and storage in data banks. Duplication of this publication or parts thereof is permitted only under the provisions of the German Copyright Law of September 9, 1965, in its current version, and permission for use must always be obtained from Springer. Violations are liable to prosecution under the German Copyright Law. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. Printed on acid-free paper 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 springer.com
Preface Facing the Limits of the Law is the outcome of a research project that we launched in Spring 2005 at the Faculty of Law of the University of Leuven. We invited legal researchers and criminologists, trained in a diversity of (legal) disciplines, to share their respective research interests, to discuss their research topics, hypotheses, and results. Time, openness, and a change towards a more discursive research culture was needed, in order to break down the disciplinary walls that often separate legal researchers from each other and from criminologists. Because common research involving a variety of legal fields and disciplines requires a common language and a common lens from which legal reality in all its diversity can be interpreted, we first developed a substantial working paper, subsequently commented on by the different contributors during a number of research seminars held in Leuven in 2005, and ul