Some legal rules are not laid down by a legislator but grow instead from informal social practices. In contract law, for example, the customs of merchants are used by courts to interpret the provisions of business contracts; in tort law, customs of best practice are used by courts to define professional responsibility. Nowhere are customary rules of law more prominent than in international law. The customs defining the obligations of each State to other States and, to some extent, to its own citizens, are often treated as legally binding. However, unlike natural law and positive law,...

This book concerns the dignity and the degradation of labor. Because our work has considerable power either to foster or to undermine our happiness and well-being, the degradation of labor is a profound obstacle to human flourishing. Yet the moral dimension of labor has been neglected in our political theory and practice. In this book, James Bernard Murphy aims to restore productive labor to its rightful place in moral and political debate.
Ever since Aristotle, there have been many theories of distributive justice but very little in the way of a theory of justice in production. Through a...

In this first book-length study of positive law, James Bernard Murphy rewrites central chapters in the history of jurisprudence by uncovering a fundamental continuity among four great legal philosophers: Plato, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Hobbes, and John Austin. In their theories of positive law, Murphy argues, these thinkers represent successive chapters in a single fascinating story. That story revolves around a fundamental ambiguity: is law positive because it is deliberately imposed (as opposed to customary law) or because it lacks moral necessity (as opposed to natural law)? These two senses...

Although many modern philosophers of law describe custom as merely a minor source of law, formal law is actually only one source of the legal customs that govern us. Many laws grow out of custom, and one measure of a law's success is by its creation of an enduring legal custom. Yet custom and customary law have long been neglected topics in unsettled jurisprudential debate. Smaller concerns, such as whether customs can be legitimized by practice or by stipulation, stipulated by an authority or by general consent, or dictated by law or vice versa, lead to broader questions of law and custom as...