What is to be understood by 'rational legal argument'? To what extent can legal reasoning be rational? Is the demand for rationality in legal affairs justified? And what are the criteria of rationality in legal reasoning? The answer to these questions is not only of interest to legal theorists and philosophers of law. They are pressing issues for practising lawyers, and a matte...(展开全部)

Modern legal theory contains a wide range of approaches and topics: from economic analysis of law to feminist legal theory to traditional analytical legal philosophy to a range of theories about justice. This healthy variety of jurisprudential work has created a problem: students and theorists working in one tradition may have difficulty understanding the concepts and terminolo...(展开全部)

The most exciting development in legal thinking since World War II has been the growth of interdisciplinary legal studies--the application of the social sciences and the humanities to law in the hope of making law less formalistic, more practical, better grounded empirically, bettered tailored to social goals. Judge Richard A. Posner has been a leader in this movement, a...(展开全部)

Ambitious legal thinkers have become mesmerized by moral philosophy, believing that great figures in the philosophical tradition hold the keys to understanding and improving law and justice and even to resolving the most contentious issues of constitutional law. Richard Posner argues that they are wrong. He characterizes the current preoccupation with moral and constitutional t...(展开全部)

Ambitious legal thinkers have become mesmerized by moral philosophy, believing that great figures in the philosophical tradition hold the keys to understanding and improving law and justice and even to resolving the most contentious issues of constitutional law. Richard Posner argues that they are wrong. He characterizes the current preoccupation with moral and constitutional t...(展开全部)

Is legal reasoning rationally persuasive, working within a discernible structure and using recognisable kinds of arguments? Does it belong to rhetoric in this sense, or to the domain of the merely 'rhetorical' in an adversative sense? Is there any reasonable certainty about legal outcomes in dispute-situations? If not, what becomes of the Rule of Law? Neil MacCormick's book...(展开全部)

When cases come before courts can we predict the outcome? Is legal reasoning rationally persuasive, working within a formal structure and using recognisable forms of arguments to produce predictable results? Or is legal reasoning mere 'rhetoric'in the pejorative sense, open to use, and abuse, to achieve whatever ends unscrupulous politicians, lawyers and judges desire? If the l...(展开全部)

What makes an argument in a law case good or bad? Can legal decisions be justified by purely rational argument or are they ultimately determined by more subjective influences? These questions are central to the study of jurisprudence, and are thoroughly and critically examined in Legal Reasoning and Legal Theory, now with a new and up-to-date foreword. Its clarity of explanatio...(展开全部)

What is law? The usual answer is that the law is a system of norms. But this answer gives us at best half of the story. The law is a way of relating to one another. We do not do this as lovers or friends and not as people who are interested in obtaining guidance from moral insight. In a legal context, we are cast as 'character masks' (Marx), for example, as 'buyer' and 'seller'...(展开全部)

Combining philosophical pargmatism with a methodological foundation, Tamanaha formulates a framework for a realistic approach to socio-legal theory. The strengths of this approach are contrasted with that of the major schools of socio-legal theory by application to core issues in this area. Thus Tamanaha explores the problematic state of socio-legal studies, the relationship b...(展开全部)