Bücher der Reihe Law and Philosophy Library

This book brings together twelve of the most important legal philosophers in the Anglo-American and Civil Law traditions. It studies the different approaches to theorizing about the nature or concept of law, the role of conceptual analysis and the essential features of law.

Talk about law often includes reference to ideals of justice, equality or freedom. This book explores the concept of ideals by combining an investigation of different theories of ideals with a discussion of the role of ideals in law.

How can the power of constitutional judges to overturn parliamentary choices on the basis of their own reading of the constitution, be reconciled with fundamental democratic principles which assign the supreme role in the political system to parliaments?

This book describes the rule of law as the reign of persuasion rather than the reign of force, and democracy as the reign by persuasion rather than the reign by force. The book is the first systematic elaboration on law as a symbolic form and it sheds new light on a still dark area of intellectual and jurisprudential thought.

Authors Costa and Zolo share the conviction that a proper understanding of the rule of law today requires reference to a global problematic horizon.

Methods of Legal Reasoning describes and criticizes four methods used in legal practice, legal dogmatics and legal theory: logic, analysis, argumentation and hermeneutics.

This book explores the trail-blazing Theory of Constitutional Rights of Robert Alexy. The authors combine critical analysis of the structural elements of Alexy's theory with an assessment of its applied relevance, paying special attention to the UK Human Rights Act and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.

That strategy is apparent both in Rawls' claim that reasons concerning the right are systematically prior to reasons concerning the good and in Raz's claim that pre-emptive reasons are systematically prior to first-order reasons.

Moral Dilemmas in Real Life purports to supply ways of thinking of, perhaps even dealing with, the ins and outs of ethical argument.

Previous answers to this question fall into two groups: interest/benefit theories of rights and choice/will theories. This book proposes an alternative to these traditional views: the justified-constraint theory of rights, which avoids the pitfalls of earlier theories, and solves the puzzle of the relational nature of rights.

Ought fetuses to be given legal rights requiring pregnant women to submit to medical treatment without their consent? Thus, these essays test the usefulness of the theory of rights explained and defended in An Approach to Rights and elsewhere.

The emphasis is on analysis, not on logical technicalities.Studies in Legal Logic contains chapters about the nature of norms, the role of coherence in the law, the nature of defeasibility, the role of dialectics in law and artificial intelligence, the statics and dynamics of the law, and the consistency of rules.

Knowledge Discovery from Legal Databases is the first text to describe data mining techniques as they apply to law.

Certainly, to that minority of scholars whose conceptions of politics do include 'power' as an indispensable basic concept, the approaches of the vast majority of their colleagues for whom, as their answers in the survey reveal, 'power' does not play an eminent role must appear, in an 3 important sense, mistaken or perhaps even incomprehensible.

This book suggests answers, or at least presents conceptual tools for finding answers, to questions such as: What is an action, and what is an omission? What is the role of intention for the identification of actions? Written in a very accessible style, the book is of interest to lawyers, legal scientists and philosophers.

This work thematises such yardsticks, in that it demonstrates the existence, content and factual significance of a relatively well-delimited set of proposition types and proposition patterns, with their accompanying tenability criteria and motivating interests.

For the author freedom is not a fixed measure. It is not the container of powers and rights defining an individual's role and identity. It is rather the outcome of a process whereby individuals continuously re-define the shape of their individuality.

The intertwinement of EC law and national law may create unforeseeability in situations where EC law invades the national cases. What is the relationship between legal certainty, rule of law, various general principles and human rights?

Building on his contributions to institutional legal theory in Institutional Legal Facts of 1993 (Law and Philosophy Library, volume 18), the author presents a comprehensive theory of legal institutions.

THE CONSCIENCE OF JUDGES AND APPLICA nON OF LEGAL RULES The book is devoted to the problem of the influence of moral judgements on the result of judicial decision-making in the process of application of the established (positive) law.

Justifying Taxes offers readers some of the elements of a democratic tax law, considered within its political and philosophical context in order to determine the extent of legitimate tax obligations.

In response to ETA's 1997 kidnappings and murders thousands of Spaniards attended mass demonstrations to express their contempt for violence as a means of political pressure. While from the latter viewpoint citizens wish for the creation of new legal norms, from the former they are just calling for the application of the law.

As I explain in the introduction, this is the third in aseries of collections of my previously published essays in legal theory. All of the essays here but three have been revised for this volume. I now wish to record my gratitude and indebtedness to various persons. I am most indebted and grateful to my wife, Dorothy Kopp Summers, to whom I dedicate this book. I also wish to re cord my gratitude for his interest and patience to Hendrik-Jan van Leusen of Kluwer Academic Publishers. He strongly encouraged me to put this collection together, and without his efforts, it certainly would not have appeared in this timely fashion. I also wish to thank his successor, Sabine Wesseldijk, for assistance. In the course of my academic career, I have benefitted greatly from the many Comell Law School students serving as my research assistants. I have also been privileged to have the fine aid of many Comell Law School secretaries and administrative assistants. Foremost here is Mrs. Pamela Finnigan who has so ably seen this collection put together from start to finish.

Since Professor Perelman's sudden and untimely death in January 1984, shortly after he had been singularly honored by being made a baron by King Baudouin, I have benefited greatly from my participation in the programs of the Perelman Foundation which was established through the generosity and efforts ofBaronne Fela Perelman;

The papers in this book have been collected in celebration of Carl Wellman, who, after forty-five years, is retiring from teaching. (His mother once told me that there were times when the doctors put Carl in his own hospital room because, while he was too young to be housed with adult men, they did not want the other children to see hirn die.

Its aim is to introduce students, scholars and all those interested in current problems of legal theory and legal philosophy to the work of the leading scholars in this field.