Contents P. Capps: Positivism in Law and International Law D. von Daniels: Is Positivism a State Centered Theory? K. E. Himma: Legal Positivism's Conventionality Thesis and the Methodology of Conceptual Analysis R. Nunan: A Modest Rehabilitation of the Separability Thesis A. Oladosu: Choosing Legal Theory on Cultural Grounds: An African Case for Legal Positivism C. Orrego: Hart's Last Legal Positivism: Morality Might Be Objective; Legality Certainly is Not M. Pavcnik: Die (Un)Produktivitat der Positivistischen Jurisprudenz M. Haase: The Hegelianism in Kelsen's Pure Theory of Law S. Papaefthymiou: The House Kelsen Built U. J. Pak: Legal Practitioners' Need of Reflective Application of Legal Philosophy in Korea U. Schmill: Jurisprudence and the Concept of Revolution D. Venema: Judicial Discretion: a Necessary Evil? J. Baker: Rights, Obligations, and Duties, and the Intersection of Law, Conventions and Morals S. Bertea: Legal Systems' Claim to Normativity and the Concept of Law J. Dalberg-Larsen: On the Relevance of Habermas and Theories of Legal Pluralism for the Study of Environmental Law A. Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos: A Connection of No-Connection in Luhmann and Derrida.

Since its first publication in 1996, Law and Morality has filled a long-standing need for a contemporary Canadian textbook in the philosophy of law. Now in its third edition, this anthology has been thoroughly revised and updated, and includes new chapters on equality, judicial review, and terrorism and the rule of law. The volume begins with essays that explore general questions about morality and law, surveying the traditional literature on legal positivism and contemporary debates about the connection between law and morality. These essays explore the tensions between law as a protector of individual liberty and as a tool of democratic self-rule, and introduce debates about adjudication and the contribution of feminist approaches to the philosophy of law. New material on the Chinese Canadian head tax case is also featured. The second part of Law and Morality deals with philosophical questions as they apply to contemporary issues. Excerpts from judicial decisions as well as essays by practicing lawyers are included to provide theoretically informed legal analyses of the issues. Striking a balance between practical and more analytic, philosophical approaches, the volume's treatment of the philosophy of law as a branch of political philosophy enables students to understand law in its function as a social institution. Law and Morality has proved to be an essential text in both departments of philosophy and faculties of law and this latest edition brings the debates fully up to date, filling gaps in the previous editions and adding to the array of contemporary issues previously covered.

This edited volume examines the very essence of the function of judges, building upon developments in the quality of justice research throughout Europe. Distinguished authors address a gap in the literature by considering the standards that individual judgments should meet, presenting both academic and practical perspectives. Readers are invited to consider such questions as: What is expected from judicial reasoning? Is there a general concept of good quality with regard to judicial reasoning? Are there any attempts being made to measure the quality of judicial reasoning? The focus here is on judges meeting the highest standards possible in adjudication and how they may be held to account for the way they reason. The contributions examine theoretical questions surrounding the measurement of the quality of judicial reasoning, practices and legal systems across Europe, and judicial reasoning in various international courts. Six legal systems in Europe are featured: England and Wales, Finland, Italy, the Czech Republic, France and Hungary as well as three non-domestic levels of court jurisdictions, including the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). The depth and breadth of subject matter presented in this volume ensure its relevance for many years to come. All those with an interest in benchmarking the quality of judicial reasoning, including judges themselves, academics, students and legal practitioners, can find something of value in this book.

Reviewing the work of legal philosopher Michael S. Moore, this volume examines how crimes ought to be defined, what justifies punishment, what moral commitments underlie the law, how our understanding of concepts such as causation impact law and morality, and how psychiatry and cognitive neuroscience relate to law.

The concept of practical reason is central to contemporary thought on ethics and the philosophy of law - acting well means acting for good reasons. Explaining this requires several stages. How do reasons relate to actions at all, as incentives and in explanations? What are values, how do they relate to human nature, and how do they enter practical reasoning? How do the concepts of 'right and wrong' fit in, and in what way do they involve questions of mutual trust among human beings? How does our moral freedom - our freedom to form our own moral commitments - relate to our responsibilities to each other? How is this final question transposed into law and legal commitments? This book explores these questions, vital to understanding the nature of law and morality. It presents a clear account of practical reason, valuable to students of moral philosophy and jurisprudence at undergraduate or postgraduate levels. For more advanced scholars it also offers a reinterpretation of Kant's views on moral autonomy and Smith's on self-command, marrying Smith's 'moral sentiments' to Kant's 'categorical imperative' in a novel way. The book concludes and underpins the author's Law, State and Practical Reason series. Taken together the books offer an overarching theory of the nature of law and legal reason, the role of the State, and the nature of moral reason and judgement.

In this book, Cane aims to confront the view that morality stands to law as critical standard to conventional practice.

Are judges morally accountable? Is legal validity value-free? Do animals have rights? These are some of the questions considered in this collection of essays. Moral problems, argues Professor Raymond Wacks, pervade the legal system, and he shows how the judicial function, the sources of legitimacy, and the protection of rights have an inescapable ethical dimension. The second part of the book focuses on the private domain and the legal concept of privacy. The extent to which the law ought to preserve a distinctly private realm is a pressing concern in our surveillance society in which personal information is increasingly collected, transferred, and stored. This controversial and difficult subject is one into which Professor Wacks, a leading expert in this field, is uniquely qualified to offer important insights. Raymond Wacks' analysis will be of interest not only to lawyers, legal philosophers, and students of law, but also to the general reader seeking an understanding of the jurisprudential underpinning of rights and moral values, their legal recognition, and practical application. Raymond Wacks is Professor of Law and Legal Theory at the University of Hong Kong. He is an international authority on the legal protection of privacy, and has also published widely in the field of legal theory.

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.