The analysis of justice between generations proposed in this book is based first of all on a critical reading of Rawls' theory of justice, but it also pays attention to the existential and cultural context of our intuitions about intergenerational equity. Although the desire for justice supplies an independent reason for action, the unprecedented character of the context in which that reason must operate necessarily raises the question of its psychological support: we want justice for future people, but what interest do we have in their welfare in the first place? I have tried to capture this...

In this age of collections that is ours, many volumes of collections are published. They contain contributions of several well-known authors, and their aim is to present a selective overview of a relevant field of study.
This book has the same purpose. 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. The large number of publications, both books and articles, that have been produced over recent decades makes it quite difficult, however, for those who are making...

A focus on reasons for action and practical reason is the perspective chosen by many contemporary legal philosophers for the analysis of some central questions of their discipline. This book offers a critical evaluation of that approach, by carefully examining the empirical, logical and normative problems hidden behind the concepts of reason for action' and practical reasoning'. Unlike most other works in this field, it is a meta-theoretical study which analyses and compares how different theories use the notion of reason in their reconstruction of problems concerning issues such as...

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...

In semigroup theory there are certain kinds of band decompositions, which are very useful in the study of the structure semigroups. There are a number of special semigroup classes in which these decompositions can be used very successfully. The book focuses attention on such classes of semigroups. Some of them are partially discussed in earlier books, but in the last thirty years new semigroup classes have appeared and a fairly large body of material has been published on them. The book provides a systematic review on this subject. The first chapter is an introduction. The remaining chapters...

Conklin's thesis is that the tradition of modern legal positivism, beginning with Thomas Hobbes, postulated different senses of the invisible as the authorising origin of humanly posited laws. Conklin re-reads the tradition by privileging how the canons share a particular understanding of legal language as written. Leading philosophers who have espoused the tenets of the tradition have assumed that legal language is written and that the authorising origin of humanly posited rules/norms is inaccessible to the written legal language. Conklin's re-reading of the tradition teases out how each of...

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. It is the conscience of judges that takes the central place in the research. Conscience is understood in the meaning developed in the theory of Thomas Aquinas as the complex capacity of the human being to make moral judgements which represent acts of reason on the question of what is right or wrong in a particular situation. The reason why we need a theory of...

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. To that end, the initial theoretical approach, which mainly concentrated on problems connected with legal powers and legal acts (acts-in-law), is widened to allow for the development of a theory of legal judgements capable of accounting not only for enacted but also unwritten law (legal principles and customary law). With the use of the concept of institutional legal facts, the...

It is not unusual that formal and informal discussions about the political system, its virtues, and its many defects, conclude in a discussion about impartiality. In fact, we all discuss impartiality when we talk about the best way to equally consider all viewpoints. We show our concerns with impartiality when, facing a particular problem, we try to figure out the best solution for all of us, given our conflicting interests. Thus, the quest for impartiality tends to be a common objective for most of us, although we normally disagree on its particular contents. Generally, these formal and...

This book is a revised version of my dissertation 'DiaLaw - on legal th justification and dialog games' that I defended on June 5 1998 at the Universiteit Maastricht. The chapters 1, 4 & 5 (now: 1, 5 & 6) of my dissertation have remained largely unaltered. In chapter 2 I added explicitly the distinction between constructing legal justification and reconstructing it, and tried to elucidate the differences (and similarities) between the product and process of justification. Chapter 3 is divided into two chapters: one on the general characteristics of DiaLaw (now: chapter 3), and the other on...