Statutory Political Successions

"The problem of leadership succession is perennial; the death of the ruler poses a significant threat to the stability of any polity. Arranging for a peaceful and orderly succession has been a formidable challenge in most historical societies, and it continues to be a test that modern authoritarian regimes regularly face and often fail. There is in practice no optimal solution to the problem of who should succeed the ruler, at least not when power is vested in one person. The absence of a successor causes uncertainty and plotting; the existence of one creates another centre of power, with dangerous implications. This book documents how successions have historically been moments of violence and insecurity: The succession wars known from European history are simply the tip of the iceberg. But the book also shows that the development and spread of primogeniture--the eldest-son-taking-the-throne--mitigated the problem of succession in Europe in the period after AD 1000. Primogeniture presented a reasonable compromise that in 'normal' circumstances allowed for an orderly transfer of power while minimizing threats to the incumbent ruler. In a long-term historical perspective, father-to-son successions--in the context of hereditary monarchy--therefore created political stability and facilitated state-formation. Today, representative democracy does the same, but in a very different way where frequent rotations in power and guarantees against the misuse of power are used to lessen the stakes of leadership succession" --

The current line of presidential succession is no safer than playing presidential roulette. It imprudently privileges politics and tradition over competence and leadership. We should rethink the rules that currently govern succession to the Presidency - legal and constitutional rules that, in my view, serve the wrong institutional and political interests. The task I have given myself in these pages is to propose and defend an alternative to the current presidential succession regime: revising the order of succession to insert former living presidents - in reverse chronological order of service beginning with former presidents of the same party as the unavailable president - into the line of succession and concurrently removing the House Speaker and the Senate President pro tempore from the line of succession. Temporary presidential succession is a promising alternative to the current succession regime for several reasons that I endeavor to justify. Yet even if readers disagree with my proposed alternative to the current line of presidential succession, the larger purpose of my project nevertheless remains achievable: to probe the values that currently shape presidential succession and to invite reflection about whether they are the right ones for our time.

The study of law and politics is one of the foundation stones of the discipline of political science, and it has been one of the most productive areas of cross-fertilization between the various subfields of political science and between political science and other cognate disciplines. This Handbook provides a comprehensive survey of the field of law and politics in all its diversity, ranging from such traditional subjects as theories of jurisprudence, constitutionalism, judicial politics and law-and-society to such re-emerging subjects as comparative judicial politics, international law, and democratization. The Oxford Handbook of Law and Politics gathers together leading scholars in the field to assess key literatures shaping the discipline today and to help set the direction of research in the decade ahead.

The Model Rules of Professional Conduct provides an up-to-date resource for information on legal ethics. Federal, state and local courts in all jurisdictions look to the Rules for guidance in solving lawyer malpractice cases, disciplinary actions, disqualification issues, sanctions questions and much more. In this volume, black-letter Rules of Professional Conduct are followed by numbered Comments that explain each Rule's purpose and provide suggestions for its practical application. The Rules will help you identify proper conduct in a variety of given situations, review those instances where discretionary action is possible, and define the nature of the relationship between you and your clients, colleagues and the courts.

First published in 1956, this book presents an account regarding the legal principles governing the consequences of changes of sovereignty, focusing particularly on British practice during the preceding 150 years. The legal principles governing British practice are compared with those of other states in order to record the main points of doctrinal agreement or divergence.

Benjamin Constant (1767-1830) was born in Switzerland and became one of France's leading writers, as well as a journalist, philosopher, and politician. His colourful life included a formative stay at the University of Edinburgh; service at the court of Brunswick, Germany; election to the French Tribunate; and initial opposition and subsequent support for Napoleon, even the drafting of a constitution for the Hundred Days. Constant wrote many books, essays, and pamphlets. His deepest conviction was that reform is hugely superior to revolution, both morally and politically. While Constant's fluid, dynamic style and lofty eloquence do not always make for easy reading, his text forms a coherent whole, and in his translation Dennis O'Keeffe has focused on retaining the 'general elegance and subtle rhetoric' of the original. Sir Isaiah Berlin called Constant 'the most eloquent of all defenders of freedom and privacy' and believed to him we owe the notion of 'negative liberty', that is, what Biancamaria Fontana describes as "the protection of individual experience and choices from external interferences and constraints." To Constant it was relatively unimportant whether liberty was ultimately grounded in religion or metaphysics -- what mattered were the practical guarantees of practical freedom -- "autonomy in all those aspects of life that could cause no harm to others or to society as a whole." This translation is based on Etienne Hofmann's critical edition of Principes de politique (1980), complete with Constant's additions to the original work.