Law and Aesthetics draws on the work of poets as well as philosophers. Taking as its starting point Shelley's assertion that poets are unacknowledged legislators, the book suggests that there is a way of thinking that, as yet, has not been taken up by those who make use of literary aesthetics to understand law. The book tracks this aesthetic thinking through the failures of critical legal studies and stages an encounter with psychoanalysis, before suggesting that an aesthetics of law can be exhumed from Nietzsche's work. The aesthetic is a call to the creative: fashion new law. A review of...

What, precisely, is the relationship between legality and morality? Does legal validity rest upon moral validity? Are legal obligations moral obligations? For some years now schools of jurisprudential Naturalism and Positivism have become increasingly ambiguous in their responses to these questions. Olsen and Toddington argue that equivocation on the central issue here - that of obligation - has brought legal theory to the point where leading legal positivists and natural lawyers no longer retain significant differences. Instead, they allege, we are left with the remnants of what has always...

In almost every field of law, from tort and contract to environmental law and criminal justice, issues about -risk- are increasingly of interest to lawyers. At the same time, there has been little general enquiry into the nature of the contact between law and risks. This book argues that ideas about risk have not traditionally been absent from law, as is sometimes supposed. Lawyers and legal theorists have used and conceptualized risk in particular ways, and ideas of risk have had significant influence in key elements of legal theory including questions of justice and responsibility. This...

If Raz and Dworkin disagree over how law should be characterized, how are we, their jurisprudential public, supposed to go about adjudicating between the rival theories which they offer us? To what considerations would those theorists themselves appeal in order to convince us that their accounts of law are accurate and successful? Moreover, what is it that makes an account of law successful? This book tackles methodological or meta-theoretical issues such as these, and does so by answering the question: to what extent, and in what sense, must a legal theorist make value judgements about his...

This book develops the rudiments of a sociological perspective on state law and legal theory. It outlines a distinctive approach to theoretical enquiry that offers an improved understanding of law as a social and institutional phenomenon. The book draws upon Max Weber's sociological and juristic writings as a context in which to explore themes arising or selectively developed from a critical reassessment of key aspects of H.L.A. Hart's theory of law. The discussion initially centers around three problematical areas or -Gordian Knots- - essentially weaknesses in the analytical nucleus of The...

The perennial question posed by the philosophically-inclined lawyer is -What is law?- or perhaps -What is the nature of law?- This book poses an associated (but no less fundamental) question about law which has received much less attention in the legal literature. This question is: -Who is law for?- Whenever people go to law, they are judged for their suitability as legal persons. They are given or refused rights and duties on the basis of ideas about who matters. These ideas are basic to legal-decision making. They form the intellectual and moral underpinning of legal thought. They help to...