Legal Realism Revisited presents a comparison between two schools of American Legal theory - American Legal Realism and Critical Legal Studies - and argues that Legal Realism still holds the most promise for understanding and reforming law.
This is the first of two volumes announcing the emergence of the new legal realism as a field of study. At a time when the legal academy is turning to social science for new approaches, these volumes chart a new course for interdisciplinary research by synthesizing law on the ground, empirical research, and theory. Volume 1 lays the groundwork for this novel and comprehensive approach with an innovative mix of theoretical, historical, pedagogical, and empirical perspectives. Their empirical work covers such wide-ranging topics as the financial crisis, intellectual property battles, the legal disenfranchisement of African-American landowners, and gender and racial prejudice on law school faculties. The methodological blueprint offered here will be essential for anyone interested in the future of law-and-society.
In this wide-ranging philosophical work, Koons takes on two powerful dogmas--anti-realism and materialism. In doing so, Koons develops an elegant metaphysical system that accounts for such phenomena as information, mental representation, our knowledge of logic, mathematics and science, the structure of spacetime, the identity of physical objects, and the objectivity of values and moral norms.
This book proposes a rather novel legal-philosophical approach to understanding the intersection between law and morality. It does so by analyzing the conditions for the existence of a juridical domain of natural law from the perspective of the tradition of Thomistic juridical realism. In order to highlight the need to reconnect with this tradition in the context of contemporary legal philosophy, the book presents various other recent jurisprudential positions regarding the overlap between law and morality. While most authors either exclude a conceptual necessity for the inclusion of moral principles in the nature of law or refer to the purely moral status of natural law at the foundations of the legal phenomenon, the book seeks to elucidate the essential properties of the juridical status of natural law. In order to establish the juridicity of natural law, the book explores the relevant arguments of Thomas Aquinas and some of his main commentators on this issue, above all Michel Villey and Javier Hervada. It establishes that Thomistic juridical realism observes the juridical phenomenon not only from the perspective of legal norms or subjective individual rights, but also from the perspective of the primary meaning of the concept of right (ius), namely, the just thing itself as the object of justice. In this perspective, natural rights already possess a fully juridical status and can be described as natural juridical goods. In addition, from the viewpoint of Thomistic juridical realism, we can identify certain natural norms or principles of justice as the juridical title of these rights or goods. The book includes an assessment of the prospective points of dialogue with the other trends in Thomistic legal philosophy as well as with various accounts of the nature of law in contemporary legal theory.
A Book about Books discusses what nonfiction books and subjects the author believes are important to know about. This book is volume I of III. Only the first volume is available at this time. The second volume is forthcoming and will be available in 2020. E.H. Bernstein is a former librarian turned author. The subtitle of the book describes the author’s objective: “A handbook in 3 parts to a choice of essential books, writers and subjects in order to understand the world we live in, about ‘big questions’ and possible answers, about books and writers that may improve people’s lives, about neglected writers, and other books and subjects.” A Book about Books attempts to share what the author has learned from nearly 50 years of nonfiction reading and to provide the reader with samples of the most important authors and subjects from that reading. While the book is based on research, it is intended to be a handbook or guide by trying to make that research understandable to the general reader and to students, and for teachers--by pointing to what the author believes is missing from today’s education. Note about how the volumes are related: each chapter is on a separate subject. So the chapters can be read individually, but the full message requires reading all the volumes. Volume I is important, but preliminary to the more important Volumes II and III. A future website, bookaboutbooks.com. is planned for later in 2019 and will include additional material not in the books. Note also that the book is not just about books, since other sources are also mentioned. This book tries to point to problems in how we live and to see if books have any answers. A contemporary writer once said that one of the purposes of writing is that books should be useful. I hope that my book will be of use.
Some of the most exciting and innovative legal scholarship has been driven by historical curiosity. Legal history today comes in a fascinating array of shapes and sizes, from microhistory to global intellectual history. Legal history has expanded beyond traditional parochial boundaries to become increasingly international and comparative in scope and orientation. Drawing on scholarship from around the world, and representing a variety of methodological approaches, areas of expertise, and research agendas, this timely compendium takes stock of legal history and methodology and reflects on the various modes of the historical analysis of law, past, present, and future. Part I explores the relationship between legal history and other disciplinary perspectives including economic, philosophical, comparative, literary, and rhetorical analysis of law. Part II considers various approaches to legal history, including legal history as doctrinal, intellectual, or social history. Part III focuses on the interrelation between legal history and jurisprudence by investigating the role and conception of historical inquiry in various models, schools, and movements of legal thought. Part IV traces the place and pursuit of historical analysis in various legal systems and traditions across time, cultures, and space. Finally, Part V narrows the Handbooks focus to explore several examples of legal history in action, including its use in various legal doctrinal contexts.
In the myriad choices of interpretation judges face when confronted with rules and cases, legal realists are concerned with how these doctrinal materials carry over into judicial outcomes. What can explain past judicial behavior and predict its future course? How can law constrain judgments made by unelected judges? How can the distinction between law and politics be maintained despite the collapse of law's autonomy in its positivist rendition? In Reconstructing American Legal Realism & Rethinking Private Law Theory, Hanoch Dagan provides an innovative and useful interpretation of legal realism. He revives the legal realists' rich account of law as a growing institution accommodating three sets of constitutive tensions-power and reason, science and craft, and tradition and progress-and demonstrates how the major claims attributed to legal realism fit into this conception of law. Dagan seeks to rein in realist descendants who have become fixated on one aspect of the big picture, and to dispel the misconceptions that those gone astray represent the tradition accurately or that realism is now merely a historical signpost. He draws upon the realist texts of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Karl Llewellyn, and others to explain how legal realism offers important and unique jurisprudential insights that are not just a part of legal history, but are also relevant and useful for a contemporary understanding of legal theory. Building on this realist conception of law and enriching its texture, Dagan addresses more particular jurisprudential questions. He shows that the realist achievement in capturing law's irreducible complexity is crucial to the reinvigoration of legal theory as a distinct scholarly subject matter, and is also inspiring for a host of other, more specific theoretical topics, such as the rule of law, the autonomy and taxonomy of private law, the relationships between rights and remedies, and the pluralism and perfectionism that typify private law.
Ronald Dworkin is widely accepted as the most important and most controversial Anglo-American jurist of the past forty years. And this same-named volume on his work has become a minor classic in the field, offering the most complete analysis and integration of Dworkin's work to date. This third edition offers a substantial revision of earlier texts and, most importantly, incorporates discussion of Dworkin's recent masterwork Justice for Hedgehogs. Accessibly written for a wide readership, this book captures the complexity and depth of thought of Ronald Dworkin. Displaying a long-standing commitment to Dworkin's work, Stephen Guest clearly highlights the scholar's key theories to illustrate a guiding principle over the course of Dworkin's work: that there are right answers to questions of moral value. In assessing this principle, Guest also expands his analysis of contemporary critiques of Dworkin. The third edition includes an updated and complete bibliography of Dworkin's work.
This book is an innovative contribution to analytical jurisprudence. It is mainly based on the distinct premises of linguistic philosophy and Carnapian semantics, but also addresses the issues of institutional philosophy, social pragmatism, and legal principles as envisioned by Dworkin, among others. Wróblewski ́s three ideologies (bound/free/legal and rational) and Makkonen ́s three situations (isomorphic/semantically vague/normative gap) of judicial decision-making are further developed by means of 10 frames of legal analysis as discerned by the author. With the philosophical theories of truth serving as a reference, the frames of legal analysis include the isomorphic theory of law (Wittgenstein, Makkonen), the coherence theory of law (Alexy, Peczenik, Dworkin), the new rhetoric and legal argumentation theory (Perelman, Aarnio), social consequentialism (Posner), natural law theory (Fuller, Finnis), and the sequential model of legal reasoning by Neil MacCormick and the Bielefelder Kreis. At the end, some key issues of legal metaphysics are addressed, like the notion of legal systematics and the future potential of the analytical approach in jurisprudence.