Understanding the Nature of Law

Understanding the Nature of Law
Author: Michael Giudice
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2015-06-29
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1784718815

Understanding the Nature of Law explores methodological questions about how best to explain law. Among these questions, one is central: is there something about law which determines how it should be theorized? This novel book explains the importance of

A Treatise of Legal Philosophy and General Jurisprudence

A Treatise of Legal Philosophy and General Jurisprudence
Author: Gerald J. Postema
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 633
Release: 2011-08-05
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9048189608

Volume 11, the sixth of the historical volumes of A Treatise of Legal Philosophy and General Jurisprudence, offers a fresh, philosophically engaged, critical interpretation of the main currents of jurisprudential thought in the English-speaking world of the 20th century. It tells the tale of two lectures and their legacies: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s “The Path of Law” (1897) and H.L.A. Hart’s Holmes Lecture, “Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals” (1958). Holmes’s radical challenge to late 19th century legal science gave birth to a rich variety of competing approaches to understanding law and legal reasoning from realism to economic jurisprudence to legal pragmatism, from recovery of key elements of common law jurisprudence and rule of law doctrine in the work of Llewellyn, Fuller and Hayek to root-and-branch attacks on the ideology of law by the Critical Legal Studies and Feminist movements. Hart, simultaneously building upon and transforming the undations of Austinian analytic jurisprudence laid in the early 20th century, introduced rigorous philosophical method to English-speaking jurisprudence and offered a reinterpretation of legal positivism which set the agenda for analytic legal philosophy to the end of the century and beyond. A wide-ranging debate over the role of moral principles in legal reasoning, sparked by Dworkin’s fundamental challenge to Hart’s theory, generated competing interpretations of and fundamental challenges to core doctrines of Hart’s positivism, including the nature and role of conventions at the foundations of law and the methodology of philosophical jurisprudence.

Philosophical Foundations of the Nature of Law

Philosophical Foundations of the Nature of Law
Author: Wil Waluchow
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 1398
Release: 2013-03-14
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0191665622

In recent years we have witnessed major developments in philosophical inquiry concerning the nature of law and, with the continuing development of international and transnational legal institutions, in the phenomenon of law itself. This volume gathers leading writers in the field to take stock of current debates on the nature of law and the aims and methods of legal philosophy. The volume covers four broad themes. The essays within the first theme address and develop the traditional debates between legal positivism, natural law theory, and Dworkinian interpretivism. Papers within the second theme focus on the power of coercion, often overlooked in contemporary legal philosophy. The third set of papers addresses the aims and methods of legal theory, and the role of conceptual analysis. The final section explores new methods and issues in the subject, and offers fresh starting points for future work in the field. Gathering many leading and up-and-coming writers in the subject, the volume offers a snapshot of the best current work in general jurisprudence.

Readings in the Philosophy of Law

Readings in the Philosophy of Law
Author: John Arthur
Publisher:
Total Pages: 646
Release: 1993
Genre: Law
ISBN:

Designed for a first course in philosophy of law, jurisprudence or legal theory, this revised text contains classical and contemporary readings on a range of key issues in legal theory. Topics range from the nature of law and legal reasoning to specific problems such as entrapment, search and seizure, exclusionary rules, plea bargaining, pre-trial publicity, lawyer's ethics, and the adversary system. Introductions are provided for each topic, and often the first essay provides students with an overvie of the problems that follow.

Law and Morality

Law and Morality
Author: David Dyzenhaus
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 1095
Release: 2007-01-01
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0802094899

Since its first publication in 1996, Law and Morality has filled a long-standing need for a contemporary Canadian textbook in the philosophy of law. Now in its third edition, this anthology has been thoroughly revised and updated, and includes new chapters on equality, judicial review, and terrorism and the rule of law. The volume begins with essays that explore general questions about morality and law, surveying the traditional literature on legal positivism and contemporary debates about the connection between law and morality. These essays explore the tensions between law as a protector of individual liberty and as a tool of democratic self-rule, and introduce debates about adjudication and the contribution of feminist approaches to the philosophy of law. New material on the Chinese Canadian head tax case is also featured. The second part of Law and Morality deals with philosophical questions as they apply to contemporary issues. Excerpts from judicial decisions as well as essays by practicing lawyers are included to provide theoretically informed legal analyses of the issues. Striking a balance between practical and more analytic, philosophical approaches, the volume's treatment of the philosophy of law as a branch of political philosophy enables students to understand law in its function as a social institution. Law and Morality has proved to be an essential text in both departments of philosophy and faculties of law and this latest edition brings the debates fully up to date, filling gaps in the previous editions and adding to the array of contemporary issues previously covered.