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Assistant Professor, University of Warwick, School of Law. I thank Stephen Perry and Joseph Raz, as well as participants in the Oxford Jurisprudence Discussion Group, for their comments on an earlier draft.
This paper has taken a lot of time from writing until publication. In the interim many of Brian Leiter’s essays discussed below have been collected in his recently published book Naturalizing Jurisprudence: Essays on American Legal Realism and Naturalism in Legal Philosophy (2007). I have not changed the references, so the citations are still to the articles as originally published. These essays (and now the book) touch on many important issues about the role and method of jurisprudence, which are not discussed here. In fact, even with regard to those issues discussed here, the passing of time has made me realize the importance of the underlying methodological presuppositions to understanding the issues at stake. A partial discussion of these issues, which contains a specific discussion of Leiter’s views, is found in Danny Priel, ‘Jurisprudence Between Science and the Humanities’ (unpublished manuscript).
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Priel, D. Were the Legal Realists Legal Positivists?. Law and Philos 27, 309–350 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10982-008-9021-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10982-008-9021-2