Volume 16, Issue 1 -

Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos’s Spatial Justice excavates the spatio-legal through a handful of innovative concepts: body, continuum, space, atmosphere, lawscape and, of course, spatial justice. This review aims to contribute to the debate around what is an admirable scholarly endeavour by offering three sketches. These aim to facilitate a sensory intuition of the leap in spatial awareness that the book encourages in the reader: Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space , M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village and Eduardo De Filippo’s play Filumena Marturano . The three sketches also introduce a reworking of Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos’s spatial thinking through a social constructionist lens, attempting to clarify a few points. How the body is a collective composed in assemblages. How space amounts to the spac ing of bodies in a continuum. And how the difference between space and law collapses into the lawscape, once space is understood as “normed” by bodies moving and staying still. Finally, amidst the call of conflicting emplacements, spatial justice ( ‘a legge d’‘o munno , as it is named by the protagonist of De Filippo’s play) emerges as possibility for reorientation, sparked by the gradual development of appropriate resources for bodies to account for their positionings before one other, and to coordinate their re-norming of space.

States are trying to achieve the best results in the increasingly changing conditions. A creation of sophisticated systems that would be able to display complex situations with the simple initial rules is a challenge for the present and future era. The effectiveness of a legal norm does not depend on its content, but on its form. This paper tries to give an explanation about the effects of legal norms, which emerge through their repetitions and fused with new information without sacrificing legality and regardless of the human cognitive shortcuts. With this goal the paper is based on the atypical physical and biological properties of law that offer a new perspective on the legal norms. On this basis the change of the traditional form of legal norm is presented with the diagram and/or algorithm that could, based on the computerised operations, include more statistic or natural sampling propositions.

This article examines the scope and nature of current global legal transformations as a result of economic globalization. It takes the idea that legal systems are already by nature highly impacted by economical, political, and societal developments as a starting point and continues to discuss in particular the legal consequences of economic global assimilation and the widespread decline of state sovereignty. Following these ideas, the article discusses how the current substantial legal transformations will affect the comparative method of classifying the legal systems of the world and suggests a modern, unbiased, and flexible model of taxonomy that is suitable to display the ongoing economic and legal globalization trends beyond Euro-American centrism. On the basis of this model of taxonomy, this article considers the classification of the United States and Chinese legal system and evaluates the historic factors that have formed them. In particular, special emphasis is directed towards the impact of professional, political, and traditional social norms and the degree of state sovereignty for each that led to the development of their respective legal systems today.

Life Imprisonment, unlike the death penalty, does not attract the attention of the doctrine. There are, however, significant developments in the European Court of Human Rights case law. In this paper, using a comparative methodology, we highlight the standard that, at international level, allows to consider Life Imprisonment compatible with human dignity-that is the right to a substantial judicial review. It is no longer acceptable that the ‘last word’ on the lifers’ early release is still entrusted to political power.

We consider the right to the truth an essential human right that should be recognized and guaranteed by the Law. Allowing all humans access to the truth is a human good permitting the achievement of a higher degree of human perfection and realization and, consequently, there are strong reasons to affirm that the Law should recognize and guarantee as much as possible access to the truth. Considering that it has been the international recognition of the right to the truth which has provided the basis for domestic regulations it is logical that we should focus attention on the international sphere of human rights protection and it is for this reason that we have carried out a case-law method investigation to describe the concept of “the right to the truth”.

Dealing with money laundering has been one of the toughest struggles nations around the world, including Malaysia, have had to face. Prevalent international concerns over such crime have led to the establishment of international policies and standards by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), which aimed at preventing and ultimately criminalising such crime within the national boundary. In accordance with such policies, Malaysia has introduced the Anti-Money Laundering Act in 2001 (AMLA) as a legal modality in governing such crime. It has been amended and renamed the AMLATFA in 2003 to include terrorism financing. Again, recently in late 2013, AMLATFA has been amended to keep up with changing standards and times. Within this legal landscape, this paper will highlight the instrumental and normative problems surrounding the said legislation. The authors contend that despite the adherence to global governance standards, legal deficiencies in the AML/ATF law in Malaysia remained, which merits urgent attention and action from the relevant authorities. This paper employs a doctrinal legal research and secondary data of which the AMLATFA is the primary source. The secondary sources for this article include decided cases, articles in academic journals, books and online databases.