Volume 8, Issue 4

Adam Smith, a leading thinker of the British Enlightenment, is universally known as the author of the ‘Wealth of Nations’ and an economic theorist. He is less well known as the author of ‘The Theory of Moral Sentiments’ and an ethicist. And known almost not at all for his ‘Lectures on Jurisprudence’ or as a legal theorist. This essay looks at Smith’s thought through the lens of his Lectures on Jurisprudence. It highlights the almost paradoxical positions Smith had on self-interest, markets, govern­ment, and economic expansion. Obscured by his reputation and these paradoxes are his views on justice, equality, and power. This essay concludes that Smith’s ‘justice’ is deficient and no substitute for the ‘bread nexus’ of the moral economy.

The re-adoption of trial by jury in Russia in 1993 was heralded as a significant break with the discredited legal system of a crumbling regime. However, in less than twenty years the jury in Russian criminal trials has been significantly undermined; that process is particularly evident in the field of counterterrorism. This article examines the history of trial by jury in Russia, the constitutional and legislative provisions adopted in the 1990s, and the rolling back of these provisions in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Given the adoption of jury trial in a number of democracies in the early 1990s the underlying causes of the rapid Russian retrenchment are of significance beyond the Rus­sian Federation. The jury was not a legal transplant in Russia and it was hoped that conditions were fertile for the jury to flourish. This has not proven to be the case: Russian jury trial may have a long history but it has shallow roots.

2014 marks the 50th anniversary of the US Supreme Court decisions in Times v Sullivan and 40th anniversary of Gertz v Welch. These two decisions by the US Supreme Court had an important legal impact in the United States on federal law pertaining to libel, specifically proving actual malice and who is defined as a public figure or public official. This article analyzes both Supreme Court decisions within the context of present day online social media libel controversies. It also analyzes three recent federal court rulings where judges had to issue decisions based on Sullivan and Gertz’s actual malice and public figure legal principles. The article concludes that both Sullivan and Gertz are still relevant to how other federal, American courts decide issues related to defamation published in social media.

CoCoA Summer School, which has been initially run for four seasons (2006- 2009) by the Faculty of Law of the University of Trento under the European Marie Curie Programme, has been offered again in 2014 furthering the previous profitable experiences and keeping the same main features and purposes like providing an opportunity for senior (guest speakers) and junior scholars (tutors), legal advisors to Constitutional Court judges as well as younger researchers, post-doc students and PhD candidates (participants) to meet, interact, train and being trained and plan future research in comparative constitu­tional adjudication. The Summer School aims at comparing judicial decisions from national and European (ECtHR, ECJ) jurisdictions on selected constitutional issues. This year the topic was ‘Constitutional Adjudication in Education Law: A Comparative Approach within the Council of Europe’.