Online research in philosophy

The adversary system and the practice of law -- The rule of law -- The moral force of law -- Statutes -- Precedents -- Constitutional interpretation -- Natural law and legal positivism: classical perspectives -- Formalism and legal realism -- Morality and the law -- International law -- Law and economics -- The justification of punishment -- The rights of defendants -- Sentencing -- Criminal responsibility -- Compensating for private harms: the law of torts -- Private ownership: the law of property -- Private agreements: the law of contract -- Church and state -- Personal liberty and privacy -- Freedom of speech -- Equality.

Legal Realism Judges ascertain and apply the law. This is what almost everyone would suppose, and legal writers as far apart in their views of law as Sir ...

This book frames the development of Llewellyn’s thinking and describes the difference between what rules literally prescribe and what is actually done, with ...

Legal education fails students by not appreciating the rhetorical basis of legal reasoning and argumentation. I draw from Vico's "On the Study Methods of Our Time" and Llewellyn's legal realism; both argued that law and legal reasoning are exemplary sites of rhetoric. I suggest that contemporary cognitive studies of the metaphorical structure of human understanding and the initiatives of the "new legal realism" carry forward the insights of Vico and Llewellyn. This re-orientation corrects the shallow and instrumentalist outlook of most lawyers.

... four most important American legal theorists of the last hundred years. Of the others, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Roscoe Pound, and Karl N. Llewellyn, ...

This short programmatic essay, written for a collection celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of Karl Llewellyn's paper "On Philosophy in American Law," sketches the elements of an adequate philosophy of law today. It argues that an adequate philosophy of law must be empirical, interpretive, and critical. It suggests that the lines between philosophy and both anthropology and rhetorical studies will blur. Llewellyn was right in stressing the relative importance of legal practices in understanding what law is, but the early realists were without the relatively more adequate philosophies of human practice since developed and relatively greater range of social scientific findings on those practices since made. Because of its interpretive and normative aspects, jurisprudence will remain one of the humanities and will never be fully naturalized, but it may come to be better informed.

Karl Llewellyn and the course of philosophy in American law -- Philosophical perspectives on law -- Areas of philosophy and their relationship to law -- Philosophical examinations of legal issues -- Law, rhetoric, and practice theory -- Commentaries-- Questioning the relationship between philosophy and American Law.

This paper was written for a forthcoming Cambridge University Press anthology titled "On Philosophy in American Law" that commemorates the 75th anniversary of Karl Llewellyn's essay of the same name. Karl Llewellyn was a founder of the Legal Realist movement in American jurisprudence, and his essay is most obviously read as a brief for that movement, in which he argues that a Realist focus on underlying social needs better explains the course of American legal history than do the competing natural law, positivist and formalist schools. Without contesting the merits of this conventional reading, I argue that Llewellyn's essay also makes an implicit case for another, quite different point: the need for Continental philosophical approaches to law in contemporary American jurisprudence. In particular, I argue that the conception of philosophy upon which Llewellyn relies is, with one exception, deeply Hegelian. The one exception lies in Llewellyn's residual belief that, at least to a limited extent, philosophy can change the world as well interpret it. This belief places him squarely in the camp of post-Hegelian thinkers, the camp that also includes contemporary Continental political and legal philosophers. I conclude by suggesting how the post-Hegelian tradition responds to some of the deepest conundrums of contemporary American jurisprudence, using the problem of affirmative action as an example.