This collection of contemporary essays by a group of well-known philosophers and legal theorists covers various topics in the philosophy of law, focusing on issues concerning liability in contract, tort, and criminal law. The book is divided into four sections. The first provides a conceptual overview of the issues at stake in a philosophical discussion of liability and responsibility. The second, third, and fourth sections present, in turn, more detailed explorations of the roles of notions of liability and responsibility in contracts, torts, and punishment. The collection not only presents...

This is a book about the role that psychological impairment should play in a theory of criminal liability. Criminal guilt in the Anglo-American legal tradition requires both that the defendant committed some proscribed act and did so with intent, knowledge, or recklessness. The second requirement corresponds to the intuitive idea that people should not be punished for something they did not do "on purpose" or if they "did not realize what they were doing." Although intuitive, this underlying idea can be highly controversial in practice, especially in cases involving the insanity defense. This...

This book is both a work of intellectual history and a contribution to legal philosophy. It represents a serious and philosophically sophisticated guide to modern American legal theory, demonstrating that legal positivism has been a misunderstood and underappreciated perspective through most of twentieth-century American legal thought. The broad scope of this book ensures that it will be read by philosophers of law, historians of law, historians of American intellectual life, and those in political science concerned with public law and administration.

This major study advances an interpretation of criminal justification defenses that views them as an integral component of the structure of the criminal law. The book extends the traditional scope of the legal and philosophical discussion of justification defenses. It integrates philosophical analysis with a consideration of contemporary applications, it shows how these defenses are key components of criminal law, and it explores the relationship between legal and moral justification.

Timothy Macklem argues that the heart of discrimination lies not in unfavorable comparisons with the treatment and opportunities that men enjoy, but rather, in a denial of resources and opportunities that women need to lead successful and meaningful lives. This work promises to be a milestone in the debate about gender equality and will interest students and professionals concerned with legal theory and gender studies.

The seven original essays included in this volume offer a sophisticated perspective on issues about the objectivity of legal interpretation and judicial decision-making. They examine objectivity from both metaphysical and epistemological perspectives and develop a variety of approaches, constructive and critical, to the fundamental problems of objectivity in morality. This is the first volume to consider the intersection between objectivity in ethics and the objectivity in law. It presents a state-of-the-art survey of live issues in metaethics, and examines their relevance to theorizing about...