Why We Need Legal Philosophy

Do we need legal philosophy? Legal philosophy or jurisprudence, like many other areas of philosophy, is of intrinsic interest to many people. But this does not tell us whether or why we need it. The answer suggested by Lon Fuller is that legal philosophy has - or should have - implications for lawyers, judges, legislators and law professors. And yet in 1952 Fuller concluded that: Judged by this standard I don\u27t think we can claim that the last quarter of a century has been a fruitful one for legal philosophy in this country - certainly not in terms of immediate yield. Fuller\u27s dour observation, if it was true when made and remained true, leads to two further questions: First, in what manner does legal philosophy affect the practice of law? Second, how is it that some philosophies are useful to legal institutions and others are not? In this essay I shall briefly describe the present state of legal philosophy and, then, sketch the answers to these questions that are suggested by one particular strain of recent jurisprudential thought

Contract Scholarship and the Reemergence of Legal Philosophy

It has been thirty years since Arthur Corbin\u27s eight-volume treatise on contracts appeared in condensed form as a one-volume edition. No scholarly book on contract law of comparable scope has been published since. This void in contract law scholarship has been filled only by the occasional law review article, by books discussing particular aspects of contract law, and by the ongoing revisions of the Restatement of Contracts that culminated in the publication of the Restatement (Second) of Contracts in 1979. The dominant legal climate has not been friendly to any form of literature that attempts to explicate legal doctrine systematically, and this attitude has been particularly prevalent in contract law. That Professor Farnsworth\u27s treatise on contracts should make its appearance now is, therefore, a development worth explaining. It is my contention that the publication of this book at this time may be in part a product of the increased support from legal philosophers in recent years for traditional forms of legal reasoning based on principle and expressed through doctrine

German Legal Philosophy

Annexed as an appendix to the translation of Kohler\u27s Philosophy of Law is an appreciation of the work by Adolf Lasson, 1 who complains that he himself once wrote a philosophy of law which has sunk into oblivion, probably for the reason, as he modestly suggests, that he knew so much of systematic philosophy that he had no time to acquire any special scientific learning either in the law or any other special department of knowledge. 2 This complaint is a confession, child-like and amusing in its vanity, which could be dismissed without comment, were it not something that is wholly German, very German of very German, I hope I mar say without irreverence; for German legal philosophers are plainly separable into two classes, the very large class to which Lasson admits that he belongs, who know nothing of law, and the very small class, who know something of law but are not philosophers. It is not an accident that these wise men who profess law as their special province call themselves mainly either Neo-Hegelians or Neo-Kantians. Neither Kant nor Hegel was a faint skiagraph of a jurist, yet both essayed a philosophy of law,3 based upon a much wider system of metaphysics. And it is generally true that the German philosophy of law is a mere side issue of a pretentious transcendental theory of the Prussian state

International Criminal Law and the Inner Morality of Law

Larry May, W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy and Professor Law Vanderbilt University, investigates what Fuller called “procedural natural law” in contemporary international criminal law. Respondent: Margaret Martin, University of Western Ontari

The Reciprocity Theory of Rights

David Rodin, Co-Director and Senior Research Fellow, ELAC, University of Oxford, provides a theoretical account of a central class of moral rights; their normative grounding, the conditions for their possession and forfeiture, and their moral stringency. He argues that interpersonal rights against harm and rights to assistance are best understood as arising from reciprocity relations between moral agents. This account has significant advantages compared with rivals such as the interest theory of rights. By explaining the differential enforceability of rights against harm and rights to assistance, the reciprocity theory helps to refute an argument made by Cecile Fabre that the poor may have a justification for engaging in war against the affluent to compel them to fulfil their duties of assistance to the poor

Approaches to Global Citizenship

James Tully, University of Virginia, describes two different yet overlapping modes of global citizenship which he calls liberal and democratic global citizenship. More information ... Respondent: Louis-Philippe Hodgson, York University, Dept. of Philosoph

The Great Alliance: History, Reason, and Will in Modern Law

Paulo Barrozo, Associate Professor, Boston College Law School, offers an interpretation of the intellectual and political nineteenth-century origins of modern law

Emergency Powers and Constitutional Theory

Drawing on the experiences of aspiring constitutional orders in Southeast Asia (East Timor, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand) with emergency powers, Victor V. Ramraj, National University of Singapore, seeks to shift the attention of constitutional theorists away from parochial debates, towards an understanding of constitutional theory and emergency powers that extends beyond the familiar domain of liberal democracies. respondent: François Tanguay-Renaud Osgood

From outside of ethics: Moss, Sarah. Probabilistic Knowledge

Book Review published in the From Outside of Ethics section of Ethics: An International Journal of Social, Political, and Legal Philosophy. Moss, Sarah. Probabilistic Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. 288. $54.00 (cloth)