Eugenio Bulygin is a distinguished representative of legal science and legal philosophy as they are known on the European continent - no accident, given the role of the civil law tradition in his home country, Argentina. Over the past half-century, Bulygin has engaged virtually all major legal philosophers in the English-speaking countries, including H.L.A. Hart, Ronald Dworkin, and Joseph Raz. Bulygin's essays, several written together with his eminent colleague and close friend Carlos E. Alchourrón, reflect the genre familiar from Alf Ross's On Law and Justice, Hans Kelsen's Pure Theory of Law, and Georg Henrik von Wright's Norm and Action. Bulygin's wide-ranging interests include most of the topics found under the rubric of analytical jurisprudence - interpretation and judicial reasoning, validity and efficacy of law, legal positivism and the problem of normativity, completeness and consistency of the legal system, the nature of legal norms, and the role of deontic logic in the law. The reader will take delight in the often agreeably unorthodox character of Bulygin's views and in his hard-hitting arguments in defence of them. He challenges the received opinion on gaps in the law, on legal efficacy, on permissory norms, and on the criteria for legal validity. Bulygin's essays have been wellnigh inaccessible in the past, appearing in specialized journals, often in Spanish or German. They are now available for the first time in an English-language collection.

In his choice of texts, the Editor has been faced with the difficult task of selecting, from among the author's more than 600 publications, those of the greatest philosophical interest. It is chiefly the topics of value-rela tivism and the logic of norms that have been kept in view. The selection has also been guided by the endeavour to reprint, so far as possible, texts which have not hitherto appeared in English. At times, however, this aim has had to be discarded, in order to include works of key im portance and also the latest expressions of Kelsen's view. In addition to the two topics already mentioned, the Editor has con sidered Kelsen's discussions of the causal principle to be so far worthy of philosophical attention, that some writings on causality and account ability have been included in this collection of philosophical studies. OTA WEINBERGER Hans Kelsen died on April 19th, 1973. Only his work now lives, for the inspiration of future generations of jurists and philosophers. Graz, 25th April, 1973 OT A WEINBERGER TRANSLATOR'S NOTE I am obliged to the Editor for his careful scrutiny of the translation, which has led to a number of corrections and improvements in the text.

For the first time, the essays of Eugenio Bulygin, a distinguished representative of legal science and legal philosophy, are available in an English-language collection.

Interest in interpretation has emerged in recent years as one of the main intellectual paradigms of legal scholarship. This collection of new essays in law and interpretation provides the reader with an overview of this important topic, written by some of the most distinguished scholars in the field. The book begins with interpretation as a general method of legal theorizing, and thus provides critical assessment of the recent "interpretative turn" in jurisprudence. Further chapters include essays on the nature of interpretation, its objectivity, the possible determinacy of legal standards, and their nature. Concluding with a series of articles on the role of legislative intent in the interpretation of statutes, this work offers new and refreshing insights into this old controversy.

Dooyeweerd would be the first to disclaim originality, or that his is a final system, but rather declares that his is a development of Christian philosophy on the biblical foundations of John Calvin and Abraham Kuyper. As such, his philosophy is of major importance and of far-reaching implications. Dooyeweerd discusses in this work the pretended autonomy of theoretical thought ; the sense of history and the historicistic world- and life-view ; the relationship between philosophy and theology and concludes it with a chapter on the question: What is a human person?

"Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada."

Conklin's thesis is that the tradition of modern legal positivism, beginning with Thomas Hobbes, postulated different senses of the invisible as the authorising origin of humanly posited laws. Conklin re-reads the tradition by privileging how the canons share a particular understanding of legal language as written. Leading philosophers who have espoused the tenets of the tradition have assumed that legal language is written and that the authorising origin of humanly posited rules/norms is inaccessible to the written legal language. Conklin's re-reading of the tradition teases out how each of these leading philosophers has postulated that the authorising origin of humanly posited laws is an unanalysable externality to the written language of the legal structure. As such, the authorising origin of posited rules/norms is inaccessible or invisible to their written language. What is this authorising origin? Different forms include an originary author, an a priori concept, and an immediacy of bonding between person and laws. In each case the origin is unwritten in the sense of being inaccessible to the authoritative texts written by the officials of civil institutions of the sovereign state. Conklin sets his thesis in the context of the legal theory of the polis and the pre-polis of Greek tribes. The author claims that the problem is that the tradition of legal positivism of a modern sovereign state excises the experiential, or bodily, meanings from the written language of the posited rules/norms, thereby forgetting the very pre-legal authorising origin of the posited norms that each philosopher admits as offering the finality that legal reasoning demands if it is to be authoritative.