Postema on An "Almost Sacred Responsibility": The Rule of Law in Times of Peril @UNCPhilDept @DukeJudicature

Gerald J. Postema, University of North Carolina Department of Philosophy, has published An 'Almost Sacred Responsibility': The Rule of Law in Times of Peril at 107 Judicature 41 (2024). Here is the abstract.

“An ‘Almost Sacred Responsibility’: The Rule of Law in Times of Peril.” Published in Judicature (107 no. 3—2024) Judicature - Vol. 107 No. 3 (2024). The material in this short article was first presented in a lecture for the Bolch Judicial Institute, Duke University Law School, June 16, 2023. The essay sketches key ideas that are set out in detail in Gerald J. Postema, Law’s Rule: The Nature, Value, and Viability of the Rule of Law (Oxford, 2022). It briefly articulates the core principles of the rule-of-law ideal, its moral foundations, key institutions in which it is typically realized, and signal threats to which it is vulnerable.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Call For Papers: How To Do Things With Law: Prefiguration, Performativity, and Alternative Legalities, Law and Society Association, May 22-25, Chicago @law_soc Ben Golder @SteveIsInOtago

 

Call for Papers

How to do things with Law: Prefiguration, Performativity, and Alternative Legalities

Law and Society Association, May 22-25, 2025, in Chicago 

We - Amy Cohen (Temple University), Stephen Young (University of Otago) and Ben Golder (UNSW) - are organising a mini-conference on the above theme to take place within the 2025 annual meeting of the Law and Society Association in Chicago, to be held May 22-25th. 

Theme:

What happens when everyday actors take the law into their own hands and seek to create, or recreate, the legal worlds they inhabit? There is a long, venerable and fascinating tradition of non-legal actors seizing the means of legal imagination. These individuals and groups (sometimes even quasi-institutions) are not formally authorized to make law but they act as if they are, adopting a consciously fictive jurisdiction. 

Think, for example, of the work of peoples’ tribunals in international law - starting with the Russell Tribunal on the United State’s crimes in Vietnam in the late 1960s and through to the World Tribunal on Iraq in 2005 - that mobilise a certain (popular) understanding of international law to produce verdicts, raise popular consciousness, and critique (or maybe even redeem) international law.

Think also of the Feminist Judgments Projects (FJPs) or related exercises in critical or imaginative judgment-writing, in which legal scholars and feminist activists assume the position of judges and rewrite important appellate judicial decisions. In so doing, they seek to expose both law’s patriarchal structure but also its contingency, its hidden margin of freedom. Law, in the hands of would-be feminist judges, could always be otherwise.

Or think, in a very different political register, of those litigants (be they sovereign citizens or other individuals) who today - gathered under the sign of what mainstream legal actors pejoratively call ‘pseudolaw’ - mobilise a certain understanding of the common law and of its ancient history in order to assert a particular legal subjectivity and claim their rights. Indeed, sometimes these individuals  fashion an entire normative universe. 

These examples are neither exhaustive nor privileged instances of the phenomenon - we could add many others, from exercises of corporate self-governance (the so-called ‘Facebook Supreme Court,’ for example) to heterodox gestures of self-determination (the sovereign claims of micronations, for example).

This conference within a conference presents an opportunity to explore these phenomena, and continues discussions about ‘prefigurative legality’ (Cohen and Morgan, 2023), or other related topics. Without wishing to circumscribe those discussions, we are interested in paper proposals (which we will organise into panels) or fully-formed panels (with 3/4 papers) that address the following indicative list of topics and questions:

1.      How do we best think about this phenomenon of informal legality - as an instance of prefiguration, or performativity, or parody, or maybe through the lens of legal pluralism?

2.      What is the relationship between the informal or everyday legal claim (to rights, jurisdiction, statehood, even) and the formal structures of state or international law?

3.      Do these claims complete, compete with, or critique authorized law, or do they sit outside, beyond or underneath it?

4.      What are the political possibilities and limitations of these exercises or practices?

5.      What are historical examples of this phenomenon and what might those histories indicate about similar actions or actors today?

6.      What understanding of legal form and legal method do these practices disclose?

7.      What are the similarities and differences between supposedly left-wing invocations of law, and conservative mobilisations of law?

Process:

We invite paper (or panel) proposals for a series of interlinked panels on the above theme at the Law and Society Association 2025 Conference in Chicago, May 22-25. Our intention is to collate a series of paper (and panel) proposals into a mini-conference, crafting a conference within the wider conference setting of the LSA that sustains an intimate and intellectual conversation across the related panels. Below is the set of steps and deadlines leading up to the LSA in 2025 and what you need to do in order to participate. After the LSA, our intention is to work with participants to publish our papers as a collection in either a special edition of a scholarly journal or in the form of an edited book with a leading academic or trade publisher. Once we have the final conference-within-a-conference program we will commence initial discussions with participants (that is, well before the LSA itself) and gauge interest and ideas in future publications.

Timeline:

8.      Send abstracts, panel proposals or thoughts to stephen.young@otago.ac.nz by 15 September 2024

9.      We will notify people of acceptance or non-acceptance by 1 October 2024

10. Participants confirm participation by 7 October 2024

11. Participants/Organisers submit panels to LSA by 15 October 2024*

12. *Please note that participation in this mini-conference will “count” towards your participation limits for LSA

13. LSA: 22-25 May 2025

What to Submit?:

We are interested in receiving either paper abstracts on the above or related topics or fully-formed panels. If you wish to submit a paper abstract please include a 200 word abstract, with a title and also your institutional affiliation. If you wish to submit a fully-formed panel or series of panels, please ensure that the submission contains 3 or 4 abstracts of 200 words, with a title and institutional affiliation for each paper plus a 200 word explanation of the panel’s theme itself. We are open to receiving questions about different formats of panels (roundtables, Author-Meets-Reader sessions, etc) but we encourage people to contact us as soon as possible about this to facilitate organisation.

Please direct your questions to any of the 3 organisers at the following email addresses: b.golder@unsw.edu.au, ajcohen@temple.edu, stephen.young@otago.ac.nz. But final submission of proposals should be directed to stephen.young@otago.ac.nz

We do not have funding for this project so each participant needs to ensure their own travel to, registration at, and attendance at the LSA Chicago annual meeting. 

Mootz and Hannah on The Strange Persistence of Originalism

Francis Joseph Mootz, III, McGeorge School of Law, and Mark Hannah, Arizona State University, have published The Strange Persistence of Originalism. Here is the abstract.

Originalism has positioned itself as the au courant doctrine of legal interpretation. Proponents argue that originalism is a core element of our democratic identity and should be adopted by every judge. The originalist tenet -- that the meaning of a legal text is the ordinary meaning the text had at the time of its enactment -- purportedly provides an objective basis for judging with integrity. Despite originalists’ grandiose claims, critics have lodged many well-reasoned objections that problematize originalists’ goals and methods. Why, then, has originalism gained such widespread prominence? In this article, we offer a rhetorical analysis that explains its ascendance and strange persistence. Our thesis is that originalists do not prevail primarily by persuading others through logic or dialectical reasoning (logos) or by promoting their audience’s disposition to hear their argument (pathos). Instead, originalists bring force to their claims by establishing and projecting an ethos. They draw on ethos when claiming to be principled legal advocates who are persons of good character and wisdom. However, ethos has a broader scope than the speaker’s reputation or character exhibited in an effort to persuade. Only by acknowledging this dimension of ethos can we explain how originalists have dominated recent jurisprudential debates.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Call For Applications, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies @IALS_law @anat_rosenberg

The Institute of Advanced Legal Studies is pleased to announce a call for Academic Visitors and Visiting Artists for the 2024-25 academic year. This is part of an exciting new initiative to develop the field of Law and the Humanities at IALS under the leadership of its new Professor, Dr Anat Rosenberg.

The deadline for applications is 8th September and further particulars can be found here: 

Call for Visitors 2024-25- early-mid career 

Call for Visitors 2024-25- PhD & Postdoc

Call for Visitors 2024-25- visiting artist
 

Waldon, Condoravdi, Pustejovsky, Schneider, and Tobia on Reading Law With Linguistics: How Linguistic Theory and Data Inform Statutory Interpretation of Artifact Nouns @kevin_tobia

Brandon Waldon, Georgetown University, Cleo Condoravdi, Stanford University, James Pustejovsky, Brandeis University, Nathan Schneider, Georgetown University, and Kevin Tobia, Georgetown University Law Center; Georgetown University, Department of Philosophy, have published Reading Law with Linguistics: How Linguistic Theory and Data Inform Statutory Interpretation of Artifact Nouns. Here is the abstract.

The Supreme Court will soon decide Garland v. VanDerStok, a case concerning whether a “gun parts kit” or “ghost gun” is a “firearm” subject to regulation under the 1968 Gun Control Act. These “kits,” firearm parts that with additional finishing or combination become an operable firearm, have been used in several mass shootings. For the textualist Supreme Court the case turns on the statute’s meaning, and the briefs and lower court opinions emphasize traditional tools. This article proposes that the Court complement familiar interpretive tools like dictionaries with new ones. We apply insights from linguistic theory, report new data from ordinary language usage, and present an original survey study of ordinary Americans. This evidence supports that the gun parts kits identified by the government fit within the meaning of “firearm.” This analysis has important practical implications for VanDerStok and the regulation of unassembled and unfinished firearms. The article’s case study in the legal interpretation of artifact nouns also carries broader implications. We develop lessons for statutory interpretation theory and legal philosophy.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Boyd on Storied Pleadings: The Power of Narrative Introductions @LadyLegalWriter @GeorgiaStateLaw

Megan Boyd, Georgia State University College of Law, is publishing Storied Pleadings: The Power of Narrative Introductions as a Georgia State University College of Law Legal Studies Research Paper. Here is the abstract.

This article sits at the intersection of civil procedure, professional responsibility, and legal writing. Narratives, or stories, are essential to the human experience and thus essential to law. While storytelling has typically been reserved for motions practice and trial, lawyers are now beginning to include narrative techniques in complaints and, specifically, in complaint introductions. Narrative Introductions, which employ multiple narrative techniques to paint a more complete and persuasive picture of the plaintiff’s factual or legal contentions, seek to persuade the reader from the outset that the plaintiff’s claims are worth paying attention to. Part I of this article outlines the importance of first impressions in legal writing. Strong first impressions are created through a concept known as priming in which the writer uses narrative techniques to present a particular view of the plaintiff’s case through which all subsequent information will be filtered. Part II of this article considers Narrative Introductions in 12 complaints filed in federal and state courts across the country and demonstrates the ways the complaint drafters use narrative techniques to frame the facts and legal claims that follow. Part III of this article outlines the requirements of Rules 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and considers whether the use of Narrative Introductions is consistent with or violates those rules, using the Narrative Introductions studied as examples. Part III also considers certain Model Rules of Professional Conduct and addresses ethical issues that may arise in the use of Narrative Introductions. This article concludes by explaining why lawyers should not be concerned that well-researched and carefully written Narrative Introductions violate any procedural or ethical rules and advocating for their use more widely. Funder Statement This article was made possible by a grant from the Legal Writing Institute, the Association of Legal Writing Directors, and LexisNexis.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Turner on Resistance to Tyranny versus the Public Good: John Locke and Counter-Terror Law in the United Kingdom

Ian Turner, University of Central Lancashire Law School, has published Resistance to Tyranny versus the Public Good: John Locke and Counter-Terror Law in the United Kingdom. Here is the abstract.

John Locke was a social contract theorist. He envisaged that individuals had domiciled in a state of nature, enjoying natural rights. But because of the insecurities of the natural state, individuals transitioned to the stability of civil society, guaranteed by a sovereign. There were fetters on the sovereign, however, such as passing laws for the public good. Is modern legislation to counter terrorism for the public good? Locke also expressly granted a right of resistance on the people. But is this right terrorism? Reflecting on these principles, this study examines counter-terror statutes and determines whether Locke would support them.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Amann on Inge Viermetz, Woman Acquitted at Nuremberg @MDianeAmann @UGASchoolofLaw

Diane Marie Amann, University of Georgia School of Law, has published Inge Viermetz, Woman Acquitted at Nuremberg as University of Georgia School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2024-4. Here is the abstract.

Conventional narratives tend to represent the post-World War II international criminal proceedings as a men’s project, thus obscuring the many women who participated, as lawyers, journalists, analysts, interpreters, witnesses, and defendants. Indeed, two women stood trial before Nuremberg Military Tribunals. This article examines the case of the only woman found not-guilty: Inge Viermetz, who had been an administrator at Lebensborn, the Nazi SS adoption and placement agency. The article outlines the prosecution’s child-taking case against Viermetz, as well as her successful gendered self-portrayal as a conventionally feminine caregiver. With references to Professor Megan A. Fairlie, at whose memorial symposium it was presented, the article concludes by considering contemporary implications of this acquittal at Nuremberg.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Call For Submissions: American University Law Review, Spring 2025 Symposium, Law and Popular Culture @AmULRev

The American University Law Review has issued a Call For Papers for its annual symposium. Here is the call.

The American University Law Review is placing a call for submissions of original legal articles and scholarly commentaries for its forthcoming issue dedicated to pop culture and the law. Specifically, the Law Review seeks submissions analyzing the sports, media and entertainment, fashion, and social media industries and their effect on the law. However, other topics related to pop culture will be considered. The target publication date is slated for mid-2025.

Next year, the Law Review’s Spring Symposium will be held on February 7, 2025. This symposium will explore and engage with burgeoning legal issues in pop culture. Selected authors may have the opportunity to present their work as a panelist in the Symposium, but participation is not a requirement for consideration.

    More information and instructions for submission here. 

 

Long on The Gettysburg Address: Lincoln's Model Legal Argument @baldycenter @UBSchoolofLaw

Patrick J. Long, SUNY Buffalo Law School, has published The Gettysburg Address: Lincoln's Model Legal Argument at 72 Buffalo Law Review 383 (2024). Here is the abstract.

The Gettysburg Address does not appear to be a legal argument. One cannot find a rule anywhere in its few words. Nor does there seem to be any application of a rule to the facts of the case. There is a simple reason for this absence: the law in 1863 was wrong. Lincoln knew that, but he was too much the lawyer to advocate law-breaking. Instead, he used all the skills he had learned from his years in the courtroom to urge his listeners to look beyond the law’s flaws to find the truth of the Declaration’s “self-evident truth.”

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Legal Imaginaries Across the Asia-Pacific: Vernacular Laws and Literatures: Workshop, September 5, 2024 @ANU_Law @lawlithum

 From the ANU Network of Law Arts and the Humanities:

 

 

Legal Imaginaries across the Asia-Pacific: Vernacular laws and literatures

Thursday 5^th September

Phillipa Weeks Staff Library, Level 4, ANU College of Law

This event represents the first fruits of a new network that targets a specific geographic constellation and identifies, through the language of ‘the imaginary’ and ‘vernacular’, a specific set of theoretical resources. ‘Laws and literatures’ both frames the endeavour in relation to the rich field of studies in law and literature, and pluralises it in significant ways. Collaborative partners in the broader project include University of Wollongong, Hong Kong University, National University of Singapore, and University of British Columbia.

This one-day workshop would be of interest to academics and HDR students in literature, law and the humanities, legal theory, and postcolonial studies. It features new work from prominent and emerging scholars working in law and literature from right across the region -- from Australia, Aotearoa, the Pacific and Mexico to Hong Kong, Singapore, and Indonesia – showcasing new directions with what we might call a common indicazione geografica tipica, and indicazione teorica tipica.

To find out more about the program and to register, follow the link.

For further information, contact Professor Desmond Manderson,
Australian National University College of Law / College of Arts & Social Sciences

 

Newly published: Mark D. White, The Virtues of Captain America: Modern-Day Lessons on Character from a World War II Superhero (2d ed., Wiley, 2024) @profmdwhite

 New from Wiley:

Mark D. White, The Virtues of Captain America: Modern-Day Lessons on Character from a World War II Superhero (2d. ed., 2024).

Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

Learn how Captain America's timeless ethical code is just as relevant in the twenty-first century as it was during the 1940s

Captain America, or simply “Cap,” provides an example of the virtues that define personal excellence, as well as the ideals and principles upon which the United States of America was founded. In The Virtues of Captain America, philosopher and long-time comics fan Mark D. White shows us that this fictional superhero's “old-fashioned” moral code is exactly what we need today to restore kindness and respect in our personal and civic lives.

Presenting Captain America's personal morality within a virtue ethics framework, the book opens with an introduction to basic concepts in moral and political philosophy and addresses issues surrounding the use of fictional characters as role models. The following chapters examine Captain America in detail, exploring the individual virtues that Cap exemplifies, the qualities that describe his moral character, his particular brand of patriotism, his ongoing battle with fascism, his personal vision of the “American Dream,” his moral integrity and sense of honor, and much more.

Now in its second edition, The Virtues of Captain America is updated to include all the new developments in Captain America's saga, including new examples from the last ten years of Captain America's appearances in Marvel Comics. New coverage of the recent “Secret Empire” storyline, in which Captain America was brainwashed by the fascist organization Hydra, features new sections examining the nature of fascism and how Captain America's character and virtues were affected by the change. This edition also offers new material on Sam Wilson—formerly Captain America's partner the Falcon who recently became Captain America himself—and how his interpretation of the role compares to Steve Rogers'.

Showing how we can be better people if we pay attention to the choices made by the Sentinel of Liberty, The Virtues of Captain America:

• Examines the moral and political philosophy behind 80 years of Captain America comics and movies in a light-hearted, often humorous tone
• Demonstrates that the core principles and judgment exhibited by Captain America in the 1940s remain relevant in the twenty-first century
• Describes the basic themes of Captain America's ethics, such as courage, humility, perseverance, honesty, and loyalty
• Illustrates how Captain America stands for the basic ideals of America, not its politics or government

Requiring no background in philosophy or familiarity with the source material, the second edition of The Virtues of Captain America: Modern-Day Lessons on Character from a World War II Superhero remains a must-read for everyone wanting to make ethical decisions in complex real-world situations and tackle the personal and political issues of today with integrity and respect.

Bassok on The Absolutist Judiciary @UniofNottingham

Or Bassok, University of Nottingham, Faculty of Law and Social Sciences, has published The Absolutist Judiciary. Here is the abstract.

The judicial authority to strike down constitutional amendments is not an advanced constitutional technology that merely upgrades judicial review. Rather, this authority is part of a jurisprudence of absolute truths that is antithetical to liberal democracy. Treating this authority as a mere technology stands at the core of the attempt to justify it based on fusing the ideas of two of Weimar’s great legal minds, Hans Kelsen and Carl Schmitt. Fusing Schmitt’s ideas with Kelsen’s enabled the transfer of this authority from the president, as Schmitt envisioned, to the constitutional court that Kelsen designated to serve as the guardian of the constitution. Yet, Kelsen rejected the authority to review constitutional amendments because a liberal democratic system cannot include an institution deciding on absolute truths that cannot be changed by the democratic process. Contrary to Kelsen, Schmitt believed that the constitution anchors the fundamental political core truth of the state. Yet, Schmitt rejected the idea that an inherently political function of defending the state’s fundamental political decision can be endowed to the judiciary. I agree that courts may be justified in exceptional and extreme situations to break constitutional constraints—including striking down constitutional amendments—to save democracy from the people. However, the attempt to juridify the authority of reviewing constitutional amendments under a legal doctrine necessarily leads to corruption either of constitutional law as Kelsen predicted or of the judiciary as Schmitt thought. Normalizing the exception by creating a legal doctrine that endows the judiciary with the final say that cannot be amended by any democratic means is the end of liberal democracy, even if it is the judiciary that hands down absolute truths.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Bottasso, Cerruti, Conti, and Santagata on Sailing Through History: The Legacy of Medieval Sea Trade on Migrant Perception and Extreme Right Voting @UniGenova

Anna Bottasso, Gianluca Cerruti, Maurizio Conti, and Marta Santagata, all of the University of Genoa, have publishing Sailing Through History: The Legacy of Medieval Sea Trade on Migrant Perception and Extreme Right Voting as IZA Discussion Paper No. 16996. Here is the abstract.

In this study we evaluate the role that Mediterranean Medieval trade with Africa and the Middle-East still plays today in Italian politics by shaping the attitudes towards migrants of individuals that live close to Medieval ports. Trade connections between Medieval ports and Muslim Africa and Middle East might have indeed favoured the emergence of cultural traits that helped the interaction with foreigners from different cultures, ethnicity and religion a few centuries before with respect to other areas of the country. We use a representative survey of young individuals (aged 20-35) to show that, conditionally on a rich set of geographic, historic, economic and individual controls, people living close to a Medieval port are less likely to think that migrants make Italy an unsafe place as well as to report right-wing voting attitudes. Moreover, we also find, in those areas, a lower probability of xenophobic attacks during the spike of refugees from Siria of 2015. Interestingly, right-wing parties started to attract less votes near Medieval ports only when immigration had become a very salient issue. Similarly, we find a lower probability of Jewish deportations close to Medieval ports during the Nazi occupation, the only period in Italian contemporary history when a minority group was explicitly targeted by the government. This in turn suggests that some deep-rooted cultural traits, although not observed and not clearly at work in society, can become visible when the right historical and political circumstances take place.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Emojis and the Law

What do emojis mean in text messages and email? See this article by Anna Stolley Persky for more information. 

More about emojis and the law in these articles.

Golriz Chrostowski, Getting Emojis Into Evidence Is No Laughing Matter, Bloomberg Legal Analysis, August 8, 2023.

Marcel Danesi, The Law and Emojis: Emoji Forensics, 34 International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 1117 (2021). 

Eric Goldman, Emojis and the Law, 93 Washington Law Review 1227 (2018). 

Call For Papers: Fourth Annual Symposium on Popular Culture and International Law @opiniojuris

 From OpinioJuris:

It’s that time of the year again! The editorial team at Opinio Juris is pleased to announce the call for papers for our Fourth Annual Symposium on Pop Culture and International Law. 

We welcome abstracts of up to 400 words on any topic relating to international law and popular culture (film, tv, books, video games, or more–get creative!). To be considered, please submit your pitch via email to Alonso Gurmendi and Sarah Zarmsky at s.zarmsky@essex.ac.uk by Friday 1 August 2024 at 17:00 UK time. Decisions will be communicated by 16 August 2024. 

If selected, the deadline for full pieces will be Monday 14 October. The symposium will take place on Opinio Juris the week of 28 October.

We are very much looking forward to reading your submissions! 

Conklin on The Admissiblity of Rap Lyrics in Court: A Review of As We Speak

Michael Conklin, Angelo State University; Texas A&M School of Law, is publishing The Admissibility of Rap Lyrics in Court: A Review of As We Speak in the Journal of Law & Social Deviance. Here is the abstract.

The use of rap lyrics at trial is a timely issue given the current confluence of events, including the Young Thug trial, the Black Lives Matter movement, a growing “tough on crime” sentiment due to rising violent crime, the introduction of the Restoring Artistic Protection (RAP) Act in Congress, and societal debate about separating the artist from the art. This review provides a critical analysis of the 2024 documentary As We Speak: Rap Music on Trial, a film that advocates against the use of rap lyrics as evidence in criminal trials. The cinematography is beautiful, creating an aesthetically pleasing experience. And it is engagingly structured as a road movie with the guide, rapper Kemba, taking the viewer to Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles, New York City, and London to interview rappers and legal experts. This results in a powerful documentary that has received glowing reviews from both film critics and audiences. Unfortunately, while the film’s subject is certainly a legitimate topic of discussion, the film suffers from significant shortcomings. This review will analyze how the leading study regarding rap on trial is deceptively presented, misrepresentations of the topic as a free-speech issue whereby rap lyrics are “criminalized,” ineffective attempts to analogize rappers to Shakespearian actors, and claims regarding race that are contrary to the evidence.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Forthcoming From Routledge Books: Culture, Secularization, and Democracy (Sophie van Bijsterveld and Hans-Martien ten Napel, eds., 2025)

 Forthcoming from Routledge Books:

Culture, Secularization, and Democracy: Lessons from Alexis de Tocqueville (Sophie van Bijsterveld and Hans-Martien ten Napel, eds., 2025). Here is a description of the book's contents from the publisher's website.

Following the approach developed by Alexis de Tocqueville, this volume views democracy as a cultural phenomenon. It starts from the assumption that if we are to adequately address concerns about the current state and future of modern Western democracies, we need first to tackle the cultural preconditions necessary for the functioning of a democracy. Since Tocqueville’s time, the book takes the most crucial change in the West to be ‘double secularisation’. Here, this concerns, first, the diminished influence of organised Christianity. Even though secularity was partly a product of Christianity, secularisation is highly significant in terms of the cultural underpinnings of Western democracy. Second, it involves a decreased interest in and knowledge of classical philosophy. Chapters on secularity, family life, civic life, and public spirit focus on central elements of the changed cultural foundation of democracy, exploring issues such as identity politics, the public space, and the role of human rights and natural law in a pluralistic and resilient democracy. The volume concludes with a closer look at the implications of current presentism, that is, the view that only the present counts for the legitimacy and effectiveness of democratic systems. Finally, it asks if double secularisation can also offer fresh opportunities for promoting the conditions of a viable democracy. The book will be of interest to academics and researchers working in the areas of law and religion, constitutional law, political science, history, and philosophy.