The methodology of eunomics -- Means, ends, and the idea of freedom -- The politics of affirmative freedom -- Natural law, sovereignty, and institutional design -- Why pluralism fails a pluralist society -- Obsolescent freedoms.

Olsen and Toddington argue that equivocation on the central issue here - that of obligation - has brought legal theory to the point where leading legal ...

In recent decades, new international courts and other legal bodies have proliferated as international law has broadened beyond the fields of treaty law and diplomatic relations. This development has not only triggered debate about how authority may be held by institutions beyond the state, but has also thrown into question familiar models of authority found in legal and political philosophy. The essays in this book take a philosophical approach to these developments, debates and questions. In doing so, they seek to (...) clarify the relevant issues underpinning, as well as develop possible solutions to the problem of how legal authority may be constructed beyond the state. (shrink)

Since Herbert Hart’s “fresh start” encouraged us to interpret legal and political phenomena from an “internal point of view,” and Lon Fuller pointed out the severe constraints upon a conceptually viable construction of this view, jurisprudence has had little choice but to become, methodologically speaking, genuinely and critically sociological. By this, we mean that in breaking with the common-sensical half-truths which produced the imperative or command theory of law, the conceptual problem of modelling the practical rationale of the legal enterprise (...) for the purposes of a general description of the phenomenon as subject matter, has become central and acute. In the past 20 years or so, the sociological awareness of the need to transcend the flux of empirical subjectivity, as well as important recent reinterpretations of the tradition of Natural Law, does seem to put jurisprudence within striking distance of achieving a mature status of integration with the methodology of the social sciences; not merely as some adjunct to, or opportunity for, empirically oriented “social studies,” but, as the source of a genuine epistemological synthesis in the approach to the problem of conceptualising the very subject matter of social science, namely, social action at the institutional level. In terms of concept formation this has gone some way towards the rehabilitation of the idea of “essential” or “focal” viewpoints in contrast to the enthusiasm for the contingencies and relativity of historical, linguistic and cultural conventionalisms. (shrink)

La théorie du pronostic est un des éléments les plus importants (et les plus discutés) de la théorie de la science du droit d'Alf Ross. Cet article veut montrer que cette théorie du pronostic est incompatible avec les propres fondements théoriques de Ross, et notamment avec sa théorie des sources du droit et de l'interprétation. Elle doit être comprise comme une tentative réductionniste de la validité normative, qui a échoué par son incapacité à fournir à la recherche juridique les concepts (...) qui lui sont nécessaires. (shrink)

Quand, en 1936, le philosophe du droit et professeur de droit danois Alf Ross a publié un hommage à la Théorie pure du droit de Hans Kelsen dans un journal scandinave de science juridique, il s'associait à un mouvement de plus en plus présent dans la philosophie du droit européenne, qui était très critique à l'égard du « droit naturel ». Cependant, en même temps, il élaborait une critique significative de la théorie de Kelsen, qui a permis de conforter la (...) place de Ross lui-même en tant qu'imp.. (shrink)