The text makes the case for a revival of general jurisprudence in response to globalisation.

The third in a series of three volumes on Contemporary Legal Theory, this volume deals with four topics: 1) the role of legal theory in the legal curriculum; 2) the teaching of legal theory; 3) the relationship of legal theory to legal scholarship; and 4) the relationship of legal theory to comparative law. The focus of the first two topics is on the common law world, where the debates over the aims and proper place of legal theory in the study of law have traversed a good deal of ground since John Austin's 1828 lecture, 'The Uses and the Study of Jurisprudence.' These first two parts offer a selection of the most important papers, including surveys, as well as pedagogical viewpoints and particular course descriptions from analytical, critical, feminist, law-and-literature and global perspectives. The last three decades have seen just as many changes for legal scholarship and comparative law. These changes (such as the rise of empirical legal scholarship) have often attracted the attention of legal theorists. Within comparative law, the last thirty years have witnessed intense methodological reflection within the discipline; the results of these reflections are themselves properly recognised as legal theoretical contributions. The volume collects the key papers, including those by Neil MacCormick, Mark Van Hoecke, Andrew Halpin, William Ewald and Geoffrey Samuel.

Globalisation and the Rule of Law reassesses the idea of the 'rule of law' within the present complex and increasingly internationalized environment. There have been many books studying the phenomenon of globalization and its economic, social or cultural consequences. This book, however, is the first to relate globalization exclusively to law. It examines the impact of globalization upon the rule of law, a fundamental value within liberal democratic sovereign states. The book opens with three chapters discussing the theory of the rule of law and its necessary reconceptualization in a global environment. Then, in three sections considering global trade, security and human rights, it proposes new ways of thinking about global law and its application in new and existing institutions of global governance. Contributors include top-flight academics, politicians and judges, making this book significant and relevant in both jurisprudential theory and political practice.

The last decade has witnessed a particularly intensive debate over methodological issues in legal theory. The publication of Julie Dickson's Evaluation and Legal Theory (2001) was significant, as were collective returns to H.L.A. Hart's 'Postscript' to The Concept of Law. While influential articles have been written in disparate journals, no single collection of the most important papers exists. This volume - the first in a three volume series - aims not only to fill that gap but also propose a systematic agenda for future work. The editors have selected articles written by leading legal theorists, including, among others, Leslie Green, Brian Leiter, Joseph Raz, Ronald Dworkin, and William Twining, and organized under four broad categories: 1) problems and purposes of legal theory; 2) the role of epistemology and semantics in theorising about the nature of law; 3) the relation between morality and legal theory; and 4) the scope of phenomena a general jurisprudence ought to address.

What can 'globalisation' teach us about law in the Western tradition? This important new work seeks to explore that question by analysing key ideas and events in the Western legal tradition, including the Papal Revolution, the Protestant Reformations and the Enlightenment. Addressing the role of law, morality and politics, it looks at the creation of orders which offer the possibility for global harmony, in particular the United Nations and the European Union. It also considers the unification of international commercial laws in the attempt to understand Western law in a time of accelerating cultural interconnections. The title will appeal to scholars of legal history and globalisation as well as students of jurisprudence and all those trying to understand globalisation and the Western dynamic of law and authority.

This Advanced Introduction offers a fresh critical analysis of various dimensions of law and globalisation, drawing on historical, normative, theoretical, and linguistic methodologies. Its comprehensive and multidisciplinary approach spans the fields of global legal pluralism, comparative legal studies, and international law.

An important part of the legal domain has to do with rule-governed conduct, and is expressed by the use of notions such as norm, obligation, duty and right. These require us to acknowledge the normative dimension of law. Normativity is, accordingly, to be regarded as a central feature of law lying at the heart of any comprehensive legal-theoretical project. The essays collected in this book are meant to further our understanding of the normativity of law. More specifically, the book stages a thorough discussion of legal normativity as approached from three strands of legal thought that are particularly influential and which play a key role in shaping debates on the normative dimension of law: the theory of planning agency, legal conventionalism and the constitutivist approach. While the essays presented here do not aspire to give an exhaustive picture of these debates - an aspiration that would be, by its very nature, unrealistic - they do provide the reader with some authoritative statements of some widely discussed families of views of legal normativity. In pursuing this objective, these essays also encourage a dialogue between different traditions of study of legal normativity, stimulating those who would not otherwise look outside their tradition of thought to engage with new ideas and, ultimately, to arrive at a more comprehensive account of the normativity of law.

Constitutional Rights after Globalization juxtaposes the globalization of the economy and the worldwide spread of constitutional charters of rights. The shift of political authority to powerful economic actors entailed by neo-liberal globalization challenges the traditional state-centred focus of constitutional law. Contemporary debate has responded to this challenge in normative terms, whether by reinterpreting rights or redirecting their ends, e.g. to reach private actors. However, globalization undermines the liberal legalist epistemology on which these approaches rest, by positing the existence of multiple sites of legal production, (e.g. multinational corporations) beyond the state. This dynamic, between globalization and legal pluralism on one side, and rights constitutionalism on the other, provides the context for addressing the question of rights constitutionalism's counterhegemonic potential. This shows first that the interpretive and instrumental assumptions underlying constitutional adjudication are empirically suspect: constitutional law tends more to disorder than coherence, and frequently is an ineffective tool for social change. Instead, legal pluralism contends that constitutionalism's importance lies in symbolic terms as a legitimating discourse. The competing liberal and 'new' politics of definition (the latter highlighting how neoliberal values and institutions constrain political action) are contrasted to show how each advances different agenda. A comparative survey of constitutionalism's engagement with private power shows that conceiving of constitutions in the predominant liberal, legalist mode has broadly favoured hegemonic interests. It is concluded that counterhegemonic forms of constitutional discourse cannot be effected within, but only by unthinking, the dominant liberal legalist paradigm, in a manner that takes seriously all exercises of political power.

The reader is invited to follow a route that visits Fish's view of theory and practice,Raz's legal reasoning thesis, theoretical models of judicial review, Dworkin's right answer thesis, the law of the excluded middle and Lukasiewicz's development of three-valued logic, Wittgenstein's language games, and Moore's metaphysical realism. The destination is the practice at the heart of legal reasoning. It is suggested that this manifests the way in which the limitations of language and the incompleteness of human experience allow the opportunity for coherent development of the law and at the same time produce an inherent incoherence within the law. The central part of the book seeks to demonstrate how the problems of understanding legal reasoning replicate difficulties encountered in the philosophy of language, but challenges the attempts that have been made to harness approaches from within that discipline to illuminate legal reasoning. Instead it is argued that law provides an unrivalled test-bed for examining the limits of the capacity of our words, and that the study of law may be used to confront in a robust and illuminating manner the limitations of that discipline. The final chapter considers some of the implications of recognising the incoherence at the heart of legal reasoning, commenting on an institutional approach to law, the legitimacy of law, legal definitions, different approaches to legal reasoning, the role of appellate courts, the general possibility of providing a theoretical model of law, the use of legal rules, and the nature of law's critical aperture. The book should be of interest to advanced undergraduate students (particularly on jurisprudence courses), postgraduate students, academics, and practitioners concerned to reflect on the nature of the discipline they practice.

This book brings together the fruits of different traditions in legal philosophy and draws on them to develop a systematic thesis on the concept of law. The work uses a legal model to explore the underlying question of how the current phenomena of transnational law are best understood, in combination with an examination of the traditions of Jürgen Habermas's critical theory and H.L.A. Hart's analytic jurisprudence. This leads the author to conclude that the key to a fruitful dialogue and comprehensive understanding is to appreciate that the concept of law is not state-cantered and must reflect relationships to other legal systems.