By Mark Tebbit
The booklet is split into 3 sections.
Tebbit starts off with a views at the nature of legislations starting from Aristotle via to trendy day theorists like Hart and Dworkin. He follows this by way of a proof of modern theories of legislation that owe their beginning, either in substance as good as identify, to the existing philosophical traditions of typical legislations, felony positivism and felony realism. He makes specific the implications of those views by way of use of criminal precedents. this primary part is properly performed i need to say. It offers a fantastic grounding for either the scholar of legislations and the scholar of philosophy - his together meant audience.
The foundation performed he turns his cognizance partly to an research of the achieve of the legislations. the following he considers the philosophical historical past to difficulties coming up in jurisprudence. even though, his have to foreshorten the philosophical research, lest he loses the legislations scholar, leaves the philosophy scholar short of. That stated, there's sufficient philosophical content material to provide an perception to the competing theories of justice provided via Mill, Rawls and Dworkin.
Also a bit skinny, philosophically talking, is the ultimate part the place Tebbit offers an research of legal accountability and punishment via contrasting consequentialist and retributivist theories of legislation. yet back i suppose we will be able to forgiven him any loss of philosophical rigour given the ebook is an introductory textual content - it passes the sufficiency try. In mitigation Tebbit does supply a gently directed interpreting record on the finish of every bankruptcy for these feeling short-changed philosophically.
Tebbit's transparent and lucid kind is to be recommended, even though his cause of no longer translating the bizarre Latin tag escapes me. This niggle apart, the e-book is a distinct must never just for scholars attracted to legislations, or the philosophy of legislations, yet for a person who ever puzzled what philosophy has to do with daily life.
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Additional info for Philosophy of Law: An Introduction
Sample text
This exaggerated emphasis on the formal was expressed by realists in a number of ways. The central point is that law is interpreted as a formally closed system, governed by strict rules of inference and demonstrative proof. This has two main implications: (1) as the narrowing down of legal reasoning to the form of the deductive syllogism, a formalistic approach is one that is guided by the belief that all legal problems can be resolved by framing them in syllogistic form, whereby major and minor premises yield a demonstrable conclusion; and (2) law is closed off to outside influences, so that its interpretation becomes a purely internal matter, to which other social factors are irrelevant.
What we need to be clear about, then, is what exactly this scepticism amounted to. Did it really threaten to undermine the law? Or was it proposing a viable alternative to law as understood and practised? What does it mean to be sceptical about legal rules? The first question concerns the ontological status of rules. In what sense, if any, can legal rules be said to exist? Such questions have caused much confusion, because if scepticism means the doubting of the very existence of the rules – an attitude attributed to the supposedly extreme realists and dubbed ‘rule-nihilism’ – we have to ask whether such a claim even makes sense.
Austin was the first to give the command theory of law a comprehensive, typically modern treatment within the framework of a positivist rejection of natural law, based on systematic conceptual analysis. By comparison, Bentham’s analysis of the command theory, upon which Austin built, had been no more than a primitive sketch. Whereas for Bentham, the elaboration of a systematic science of law was but one of his many projects for enlightening and reforming the outlook of the educated classes, for Austin it was a single-minded project aimed primarily at the legal profession.