Interpretation Catalysts and Executive Branch Legal Decisionmaking

The legal self: executive processes and legal theory.

When laws or legal principles mention mental states such as intentions to form a contract, knowledge of risk, or purposely causing a death, what parts of the brain are they speaking about? We argue here that these principles are tacitly directed at our prefrontal executive processes. Our current best theories of consciousness portray it as a workspace in which executive processes operate, but w...

Interpretation Across Legal Systems

In this paper we extend a formal framework presented in [6] to model reasoning across legal systems. In particular, we propose a logical system that encompasses the various interpretative interactions occurring between legal systems in the context of private international law. This is done by introducing meta-rules to reason with interpretive canons.

Wrong Places: Some Suggestions for Modeling Legal Decisionmaking

Direct Democracy and the Executive Branch

This paper examines the impact of direct democracy on the executive branch. Direct democracy is a mixed blessing for the executive in theory: it weakens the legislature by cutting it out of the lawmaking process, but also allows new laws to avoid the governor’s veto. Empirically, the constitutional initiative is associated with several changes in the organization of the executive branch, includ...

Legal Status of Treaties in Interpretation and Application of Article 7 of the Iranian Civil Code

Nowadays there are many aliens’ populations living in other countries. Forced Migration and Study of Religious Sciences are two main reasons introducing Iran as a host country. This paper Intends to clarify some questions about enforcement of Iranian civil code which determines the applicable law on the personal status of foreigners. There are some disagreements about the law governing personal...