The book explores a variety of problems connected to philosophy and philosophy of law. It discusses the problem of monism-pluralism in philosophy and philosophy of law, criticizes philosophy of post-positivism and postmodernism, and investigates dialectics as a universal global methodological basis of scientific cognition and philosophy of law. The volume also pays particular attention to contemporary legal education, offering potential solutions to problems in this field. The book is the result of a range of sociological studies conducted both in Russia and abroad concerning the legal process and legal consciousness.

In a series of new essays the authors attempt to answer important questions about the nature of jurisprudential thinking.

No detailed description available for "Legal science, philosophy".

This book presents a set of related studies aimed at showing key points of intersection and common interest between jurisprudence and socio-legal studies, which are otherwise typically considered distinct fields. It reflects and draws on the author’s work in these areas over more than four decades. The first half of the book explores theoretical issues surrounding the enterprise of socio-legal research, its current scope, and its historical traditions. Some chapters directly compare juristic theory and socio-legal inquiry. Chapters in Part II profile a selection of European jurists whose work offers important insights for socio-legal inquiry. Other chapters frame these studies, explore the history of interactions between jurisprudence and socio-legal research, and show points of convergence between these fields that are increasingly important today. A main aim of the book is to show the current urgency of linking and broadening juristic and social scientific interests in law. Internationally oriented, the book will be of interest to students and researchers in the areas of jurisprudence, legal philosophy, sociology of law, socio-legal studies, and comparative law. It is suitable as supplementary reading for courses in any of these subjects.

This work examines the intellectual motivations behind the concept of “legal science”—the first coherent American jurisprudential movement after Independence. Drawing mainly upon public, but also private, sources, this book considers the goals of the bar’s professional leaders who were most adamant and deliberate in setting out their visions of legal science. It argues that these legal scientists viewed the realm of law as the means through which they could express their hopes and fears associated with the social and cultural promises and perils of the early republic. Law, perhaps more so than literature or even the natural sciences, provided the surest path to both national stability and international acclaim. While legal science yielded the methodological tools needed to achieve these lofty goals, its naturalistic foundations, more importantly, were at least partly responsible for the grand impulses in the first place. This book first considers the content of legal science and then explores its application by several of the most articulate legal scientists working and writing in the early republic.

This book defines the characteristics of a new discipline that is both legal and scientific: user-friendly legal science.Focusing on how legal tools and practices can be used to achieve objectives in different contexts, it offers an alternative to doctrinal research, law-and-something disciplines, and the traditional interdisciplinary approach.The book not only defines the new discipline’s research approach, point of view, theory-building, and research methods, it also shows how it relates to other scientific disciplines and how existing doctrinal legal disciplines can be upgraded into scientific disciplines.

Socio-legal studies have had an ambivalent relationship with the 'legal' – one of its defining aspects, but at the same time one that the discipline has sought to transcend or even leave behind. While socio-legal studies benefit hugely from the insights, methods and theories of other social science and humanity disciplines, the contributions to Exploring the 'Legal' in Socio-Legal Studies illustrate the value of a focus on the 'legal'. The chapters in this book combine traditional legal materials and analyses with other ways of engaging empirically with the 'legal'. They illustrate the rich potential of the 'legal' as a site both for theoretical and methodological reflection and for case study analysis. Taken as a whole, this volume demonstrates that methodological discussion is most helpful when rooted in empirical cases, and that the best case studies also help us to develop our methodologies. Bringing methodology and empirical analysis together offers an opportunity to reflect on socio-legal studies and develop the discipline in productive new directions.

Legal theorists consider their discipline as an objective endeavour in line with other fields of science. Objectivity in science is generally regarded as a fundamental condition, informing how science should be practised and how truths may be found. Objective scientists venture to uncover empirical truths about the world and ought to eliminate personal biases, prior commitments and emotional involvement. However, legal theorists are inevitably bound up with a given legal culture. Consequently, their scholarly work derives at least in part from this environment and their subtle interaction with it. This book questions critically, in novel ways and from various perspectives, the possibilities of objectivity of legal theory in the twenty-first century. It transpires that legal theory is unavoidably confronted with varying conceptions of law, underlying ideologies, approaches to legal method, argumentation and discourse etc, which limit the possibilities of 'objectivity' in law and in legal reasoning. The authors of this book reveal some of these underlying notions and discuss their consequences for legal theory.

"Historical Comparative Law and Comparative Legal History Legal history and comparative law overlap in important respects. This is more apparent with the use of some methods for comparison, such as legal transplant, natural law, or nation building. M.N.S. Sellers nicely portrayed the relationship. The past is a foreign country, its people strangers and its laws obscure.... No one can really understand her or his own legal system without leaving it first, and looking back from the outside. The comparative study of law makes one's own legal system more comprehensible, by revealing its idiosyncrasies. Legal history is comparative law without travel. Legal historians, perhaps especially in the United States, have been skeptical about the possibility of a fruitful comparative legal history, preferring in general to investigate the distinctiveness of their national experience. Comparatists, however, content with revealing or promoting similarities or differences between legal systems, by their nature strive toward comparison. Some American historians, especially since World War II, see the value in this"--

This book reconstructs and classifies, according to ideal-typical models, the different positions taken by the major contemporary legal theories as to whether and how law relates to politics. It presents a possible explanation as to why different legal theories, though often reaching diametric results, somehow must still begin from common basic points.