Bücher der Reihe Cambridge Introductions to Philosophy and Law

The law is a way of relating to one another. In a legal context, we expect to have our claims respected simply because we have a legal right. This book offers a conceptual reconstruction of the legal relation on the basis of a critique of legal positivism.

This book surveys the leading modern theories of property - Lockean, libertarian, utilitarian/law-and-economics, personhood, Kantian and human flourishing - and then applies those theories to concrete contexts in which property issues have been especially controversial. These include redistribution, the right to exclude, regulatory takings, eminent domain and intellectual property. The book highlights the Aristotelian human flourishing theory of property, providing the most comprehensive and accessible introduction to that theory to date. The book's goal is neither to cover every conceivable theory nor to discuss every possible facet of the theories covered. Instead, it aims to make the major property theories comprehensible to beginners, without sacrificing accuracy or sophistication. The book will be of particular interest to students seeking an accessible introduction to contemporary theories of property, but even specialists will benefit from the book's lucid descriptions of contemporary debates.

Demystifying Legal Reasoning defends the proposition that there are no special forms of reasoning peculiar to law. Legal decision makers engage in the same modes of reasoning that all actors use in deciding what to do: open-ended moral reasoning, empirical reasoning, and deduction from authoritative rules. This book addresses common law reasoning when prior judicial decisions determine the law, and interpretation of texts. In both areas, the popular view that legal decision makers practise special forms of reasoning is false.

As Matthew H. Kramer shows, objectivity and the rule of law are complicated phenomena, each comprising a number of distinct though overlapping dimensions. Although the connections between objectivity and the rule of law are intimate, they are also densely multi-faceted.

This book presents a comprehensive overview of what the criminal law would look like if organised around the principle that those who deserve punishment should receive punishment commensurate with, but no greater than, that which they deserve. Larry Alexander and Kimberly Kessler Ferzan argue that desert is a function of the actor's culpability, and that culpability is a function of the risks of harm to protected interests that the actor believes he is imposing and his reasons for acting in the face of those risks. The authors deny that resultant harms, as well as unperceived risks, affect the actor's desert. They thus reject punishment for inadvertent negligence as well as for intentions or preparatory acts that are not risky. Alexander and Ferzan discuss the reasons for imposing risks that negate or mitigate culpability, the individuation of crimes, and omissions.

This thoroughly updated second edition includes a new preface and expands the discussion of the surprising role that slavery has played in the history of rights. It includes new material on egalitarianism, distributive justice and what the demand for equal rights means.

Normative Jurisprudence aims to reinvigorate normative legal scholarship that both criticizes positive law and suggests reforms for it, on the basis of stated moral values and legalistic ideals. It looks sequentially and in detail at the three major traditions in jurisprudence - natural law, legal positivism and critical legal studies - that have in the past provided philosophical foundations for just such normative scholarship. Over the last fifty years or so, all of these traditions, although for different reasons, have taken a number of different turns - toward empirical analysis, conceptual analysis or Foucaultian critique - and away from straightforward normative criticism. As a result, normative legal scholarship - scholarship that is aimed at criticism and reform - is now lacking a foundation in jurisprudential thought. The book criticizes those developments and suggests a return, albeit with different and in many ways larger challenges, to this traditional understanding of the purpose of legal scholarship.

This book offers an accessible introduction to all aspects of American contract law, useful to both first-year law students and advanced contract scholars. The book takes the reader from contract formation through interpretation and remedies, considering both the practical and theoretical aspects throughout.

This advanced introduction to central questions in legal philosophy attempts to breathe new life into stalled research. It introduces existing views about the nature of law, but rather than survey the existing literature it investigates what might be at stake in these old debates, and what the prospects for progress might be.