This collection focuses on how troubled times impact upon the law, the body politic, and the complex interrelationship among them. It centres on how they engage in a dialogue with the imagination and literature, thus triggering an emergent (but thus far underdeveloped) field concerning the 'legal imagination'. Legal change necessitates a close examination of the historical, cultural, social, and economic variables that promote and affect such change. This requires us to attend to the variety of non-legal variables that percolate throughout (...) the legal system. The collection probes 'the transatlantic constitution' and focuses attention on imagination in a common law context that seems to foster imagination as a cultural capability. The book is divided into four parts. The first part begins with a set of insights into the historical development of legal education in England and concludes with a reflection on the historical transition of England from an absolute monarchy to a republic. The second part of the volume examines the role that imagination plays in the functioning of the courts. The third part focuses on patterns of thought in legal scholarship and detects how legal imagination contributes to the process of producing new legal categories and terminology. The fourth part focuses on patterns of thought in legal scholarship, and looks to the impact of the imagination on legal thinking in the future. (shrink)

Herbert Hart and the positivists influenced by him have, according to Nigel Simmonds, deflected attention from the question that has always been at the heart of philosophical reflection on law. This question concerns the relationship between law and morality and how we should understand it. Simmonds argues that law and morality are necessarily related and seeks to explain their relationship by reference to an archetype that actually existing legal institutions approximate more or less adequately. He identifies this archetype as providing (...) the basis for an analysis of law that is free from metaphysics and universally applicable. This review article raises doubts concerning Simmonds’ claims to offer a metaphysics-free and universal analysis. It also offers an argument in support of the conclusion that he has failed to point up the complexity of the positivist tradition he criticizes. While Simmonds is vulnerable to these criticisms, he throws light on an egalitarian philosophy of government that informs legal institutions in the West and is relevant to positivist analyses of law. (shrink)

Much mainstream legal comment on human rights law presents an unhelpfully crude picture of disagreement concerning the significance that should be attached to human rights in particular cultural co...