This book discusses one of the central problems in the philosophy of law--the question of legal determinacy. Is the law a seamless web or are there gaps? Bix argues that the major re-thinking of the common and "common sense" views about law that have been proposed by various recent legal theories is unnecessary. He offers a reconsideration of the role of language in the law, and the way ideas about language have been used and misused in recent legal theory. He explores in depth the relationship to legal theory of Hart's influential idea of "open texture," Dworkin's interpretative approach to...

Analyzing Law offers an important selection of the most influential and challenging work now being done in legal theory. A central focus of the essays in this work is the contribution of the well-known philosopher Jules Coleman to the various topics which are covered by the contributors.

Edited by a leading scholar in the field, Philosophy of Law is a new title in the Routledge Major Works series Critical Concepts in Philosophy. It is a four-volume collection of canonical and cutting-edge research and covers a significant range of topics in the field.

The first two volumes of the collection are devoted primarily to analytical legal theory in particular, theories about the nature of law. This is the idea of legal philosophy most familiar to jurisprudential students in the English-speaking world, and many of the civil-law...

Law and the Modern Mind first appeared in 1930 when, in the words of Judge Charles E. Clark, it "fell like a bomb on the legal world." In the generations since, its influence has grown-today it is accepted as a classic of general jurisprudence.The work is a bold and persuasive attack on the delusion that the law is a bastion of predictable and logical action. Jerome Frank's controversial thesis is that the decisions made by judge and jury are determined to an enormous extent by powerful, concealed, and highly idiosyncratic psychological prejudices that these decision-makers bring to the...

Rights: Concepts and Contexts contains the central works of recent scholarship on the nature of rights, with contributions by some of the most prominent contemporary theorists in moral, legal, and political philosophy, including Joseph Raz, Robert Alexy, Jeremy Waldron, Morton Horwitz, Stephen Darwall, Margaret Gilbert, David Lyons, and Aharon Barak. With approaches ranging from the political to the historical, and from the analytical to the critical, this collection touches on the major conceptual and practical questions of this important field: what is the nature and grounding of human...

A book about family law is necessarily a book both about family life and the role law can and should take in regulating family life. Individually and together, these are vast topics. American family law is ever-changing and affects every facet of our lives. The Oxford Introductions to U.S. Law: Family Law provides a critical introduction to the enduring topics in the field, including not only an overview of the basic rules, but also the history and principles underlying them.

In this short and accessible volume, Brian Bix gives the necessary legal background for...