Law as a Social Institution

Law as a Social Institution

Author: Hamish Ross

Publisher: Hart Publishing

Published: 2001-05

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 1841132306

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Bringing a sociological perspective to state law and legal theory, this book uses Weber's work as the foundation for a critical reassessment of Hart's theory of law. It presents three central problems in the theory of law--the problem of perspective, the problem of reductionism, and the tendency to obscure relativity. These are addressed from the standpoint of a critical legal positivism. Ross teaches law at the Napier University School of Law in Edinburgh. Distributed by ISBS. c. Book News Inc.


Law as a Social System

Law as a Social System

Author: Niklas Luhmann

Publisher: Oxford Socio-Legal Studies

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 524

ISBN-13: 9780198262381

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However, unlike conventional legal theory, this volume seeks to provide an answer in terms of a general social theory: a methodology that answers this question in a manner applicable not only to law, but also to all the other complex and highly differentiated systems within modern society, such as politics, the economy, religion, the media, and education. This truly sociological approach offers profound insights into the relationships between law and all of these other social systems.


Tort Law and Social Morality

Tort Law and Social Morality

Author: Peter M. Gerhart

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2010-04-19

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1139489216

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This book develops a theory of tort law that integrates deontic and consequential approaches by applying justificational analysis to identify the factors, circumstances, and values that shape tort law. Drawing on Kantian and Rawlsian philosophy, and on the insights of game theorist Ken Binmore, this book refocuses tort law on a single theory of responsibility that explains and justifies the broad range of tort doctrine and concepts. Under this theory, tort law asks people to appropriately incorporate the well-being of others into the decisions they make, explains when that duty applies, and explains the scope and limits of that duty. The theory also incorporates a theory of the evolutionary development of social values that people use, and ought to use, in meeting that duty and explains how decision-making from behind the veil of ignorance allows us to evaluate the is in light of the ought.


Law as Institution

Law as Institution

Author: Massimo La Torre

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2010-08-13

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 1402066074

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This book – which is the result of several years of research, discussion, writing and re-writing – consists of three parts and eight chapters. The rst part is given by the two rst chapters introducing the issue of validity and facticity in law. The second part (Chapters 3, 4 and 5) is the core of this study and tries to present a theory based on a speci c view about language and social practice. The third part deal with the issue of value judgments and views about morality and consists of Chapters 6 and 7. Chapter 8 should nally serve as epilogue. In the rst chapter a discussion is started about the relationship between law and power, seen as a presupposition for an assessment of the nature of law. As a matter of fact, as has been remarked, “general theories of law struggle to do justice to the 1 multiple dualities of the law”. Indeed, law has a “dual nature”: it is a fact, but it also a norm, a sort of ideal entity. Law is sanction, but it is also discourse. It is effectivity, or facticity, but it is also a vehicle of principles among which the central one is justice. But this duality is not only a phenomenological, or a matter of justi cation and implementation as two separate moments.


Legal Institutions

Legal Institutions

Author: D.W. Ruiter

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2001-11-30

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 9781402001864

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Building on his contributions to institutional legal theory in Institutional Legal Facts of 1993 (Law and Philosophy Library, volume 18), the author presents a comprehensive theory of legal institutions. To that end, the initial theoretical approach, which mainly concentrated on problems connected with legal powers and legal acts (acts-in-law), is widened to allow for the development of a theory of legal judgements capable of accounting not only for enacted but also unwritten law (legal principles and customary law). With the use of the concept of institutional legal facts, the structure of legal institutions is analyzed in detail. In addition to that, a classification of legal institutions is provided. Extensive attention is given to logical, as well as doctrinal problems connected with a conception of legal validity as the mode of existence of legal conditions rather than as a value of legal norms similar to the truth of propositions. The study results in an elaborate conceptual framework for institutional analysis of positive law. In a final chapter the analytical potential of the framework is put to the test by applying it to the branch of public international law known as the `law of treaties'. Readership: Specialists in legal theory and lawyers interested in theoretical issues, particularly in linguistic approaches and questions related to the institutional nature of law.


Law and Social Change

Law and Social Change

Author: Sharyn L Roach Anleu

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Published: 2009-11-25

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 1412945607

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This is a timely new edition of Sharyn L Roach Anleu's invaluable introduction to the sociology of law and its role as a social institution and social process. Discussing current theory and key empirical research from a diverse range of perspectives Law and Social Change gives relevant examples, from various cultures and societies, to provide a sociological view which goes beyond more jurisprudential approaches to law and society. The book: * provides coverage of major classic and contemporary social theories of law * is informed by empirical research drawn from several countries/societies * includes up to date and relevant examples This thoroughly updated edition engages with modern scholarship, and recent research, on globalization whilst also looking at related issues such as the internationalization of law and human rights. It explores recent reforms at local and national levels, including issues of migration and refugees, the regulation of 'anti-social' behaviour, and specialist or problem solving courts and also provides a clear, accessible introduction to research methods used in the socio-legal field. Direct and wide-ranging this text will be essential reading for students and researchers on social science and law courses and in particular, those taking sociology, legal theory, criminology and criminal justice studies.


Law, Institution and Legal Politics

Law, Institution and Legal Politics

Author: Ota Weinberger

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 1991-03-31

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 9780792311430

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It gives me great pleasure to offer this foreword to the present work of my admired friend and respected colleague Ota Weinberger. Apart from the essays of his which were published in our joint work An Institutional Theory of Law: New Approaches to Legal Positivism in 1986, relatively little of Wein berger's work is available in English. This is the more to be regretted, since his is work of particular interest to jurists of the English-speaking world both in view of its origins and in respect of its content As to its origins, Weinberger war reared as a student of the Pure Theory of Law, a theory which in its Kelsenian form has aroused very great interest and has had considerable influence among anglophoone scholars -perhaps even more than in the Germanic countries. Less well known is the fact that the Pure Theory itself divided into two schools, that of Vienna and that of Brno. It was in the Brno school of Frantisek Weyr that Weinberger's legal theory found its early formation, and perhaps from that early influence one can trace his continuing insistence on the dual character of legal norms -both as genuinely normative and yet at the same time having real social existence.


Law in Modern Society

Law in Modern Society

Author: Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 1977-07

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 0029328802

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"Law in Modern Society" is a comparative study of the place of law in societies as well as a criticism of social theory. Under what conditions do different kinds of law emerge? What are the bases of the rule of law ideal that marks advanced liberal, capitalist societies? What can the study of law teach us about social hierarchy and moral vision in these societies, and, indeed, about the specificity of Western civilization? Why do we find it necessary to struggle for the rule of law and impossible to achieve it? What political possibilities are closed or opened by present-day changes in the established styles of legality and legal thought? Unger deals with these questions in a broad range of historical settings. But he also relates them to the central issues of social theory: the method of explanation, the conditions of social order, and the nature of 'modern' society. the book argues that to resolve its own internal dilemmas the science of society must once again become both metaphysical and political.