The first history of ecclesiastical jurisdiction in England that covers the period up to the removal of principal subjects inherited from the Middle Ages. Probate, marriage and divorce, tithes, defamation, and disciplinary prosecutions involving the laity are all covered. All disappeared from the church's courts during the mid-nineteenth century, and were taken over by the royal courts. The book traces the steps and reasons - large and small - by which this occurred.
Downloaded 1st 10 pgs Ch 1 via Air
1. The ecclesiastical courts: structures and procedures
2. The business of the courts, 1500–1640
3. Tithe causes
4. Wills and testamentary causes
5. Defamation
6. Matrimonial litigation and marriage licenses
7. Office causes
8. The roots of expansion and critical voices
9. Charting decline, 1640–1830
10. Explaining decline
11. The Bills of 1733–1734
12. Snips and repairs: small steps to reform, 1753–1813
13. Royal commissions and early fruits, 1815–1832
14. Reform frustrated
15. Reforms thick and fast, 1854–1860.

How Hume and Kant Reconstruct Natural Law: Justifying Strict Objectivity  without Debating Moral Realism, Clarendon Press (2016)
Front matter including both overview TOC and very detailed TOC plus introductory chapter -- He explains in the intro how both Hume and Kant (via Rousseau) pursued "moral constructivist" approaches using a (modified) "natural law" framework - after Hume had successfully attacked weaknesses in traditional approach to natural law. Notes that "justice" traditionally one of the 2 branches of moral philosophy (the other ethics). He's especially concerned with failure of "business ethics " as cause of financial crisis and Great Recession - but "business ethics" meaningless without a framework of "Justice." His target audience includes lawyers and legal/jurisprudence students and scholars - he thinks legal positivism and legal realism has run out of steam. He returns to accountancy standards in final chapter. -- pdf is the same material as kindle sample -- downloaded via iPhone to DBOX

“We are all realists now,” it is frequently said, yet what legal realism was about remains vigorously debated by legal theorists and historians. The debate continues because the jurists we think of as core legal realists were not members of a group. Karl Llewellyn said this multiple times in his famous essay detailing realism. (..) Contemporary scholars who make assertions about what the legal realists stood for often fail to account for these passages. Legal realism.. is best understood ... in terms of 3 overlapping complexes of ideas that emerged in the late 19thC and had become widespread by the time of Llewellyn’s article. [(1)] that society was changing rapidly while law, understood as a means to achieve social ends, lagged badly behind, producing an urgent need for legal reform. [(2)] the growing refrain among legal academics that newly developing social sciences should be applied to enhance an understanding of the actual facts surrounding law. [(3)] a vocal backlash against judges for impeding reform, including charges that they were importing class bias into their legal decisions, prompting a broader acknowledgement that the background social attitudes of judges play a role in their decisions. These three themes were interpenetrating: the popular dissatisfaction with the failings of law was manifested in criticism of courts, and resort to social science was the favored academic solution. (..) Realism characterized the new modern age of thinking about law, and it ran much earlier and more broadly than is now commonly recognized. -- PDF File: 47 -- Keywords: Legal history, Jurisprudence, law and the humanities, law and the social sciences

Jurisprudence is generally thought to consist of two main classical rival branches — natural law and legal positivism — followed by a bunch of modern schools — legal realism, law and economics, critical theory, legal pragmatism, etc. In this essay I argue that three main branches of jurisprudence have existed, and battled, for centuries, not two, but the third goes unrecognized as such because it has traveled under different labels and the underlying connections have been clouded by various confusions. The core insights and focus of this third branch, what I call “Social Legal Theory,” trace in a continuous thread from Montesquieu, through historical jurisprudence, sociological jurisprudence, and legal realism, up to the present. This third branch, I argue, provides a contrasting/complementary perspective, in conjunction with natural law and legal positivism, which rounds out the full range of theoretical angles on law: natural law is normative; legal positivism is analytical/conceptual; and social legal theory is empirical. (Among a number of clarifications, I answer the common objection that empirically-grounded theories are not sufficiently theoretical.) The conventional jurisprudential narrative is redrawn in this essay in a way that exposes unseen connections among theoretical schools and brings into focus critical issues about the nature of law that currently are marginalized by natural law and legal positivism. -- Pages in PDF File: 44 -- Keywords: Jurisprudence, legal philosophy, law and society, legal realism, legal development, legal history

Michael Sevel, University of Sydney - Faculty of Law -- A brief and general introduction to the philosophy of law. The article includes a history of the philosophy of law from Ancient Greece to the present, and a discussion of the primary questions and arguments of the field.-- Pages in PDF File: 29 -- Keywords: Jurisprudence, philosophy of law, legal positivism, natural law theory, legal realism -- downloaded pdf to Note

In 2010, Samuel Moyn published The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, which offered an alternative historical explanation for the origins of human rights. He rejected narratives that viewed human rights as a long-term historical product of the Judeo-Christian tradition, The French Revolution, or Enlightenment rationalism, arguing that human rights as it is now understood began to emerge only during the 1970s. Prior to this, according to Moyn, rights were connected to the nation-state and had nothing to do with an international standard of morality or justice. In addressing critiques of The Last Utopia, Moyn has given considerable attention to the relationship between human rights and religion, conceding that there is, undoubtedly, a relationship between Christianity—Catholicism in particular—and human rights, but arguing that the “death of Christian Europe” by the 1960s “forced a complete reinvention of the meaning of human rights embedded in European identity both formally and really since the war”. Contributors offer their thoughts on Moyn’s article “Personalism, Community, and the Origins of Human Rights,” which became a central focus (see excerpt) in his forthcoming book, Christian Human Rights (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). Contributors also respond to “Christian Human Rights,” the introductory essay written for this series. -- downloaded pdfs but their footnotes and links don't work, so collected them in Evernote them

Andrew S. Gold, DePaul University, College of Law and Paul B. Miller, McGill University Faculty of Law -- This Introduction outlines core questions of fiduciary law theory and provides thematic discussion of the contributions to the volume. The volume includes chapters by Richard Brooks, Hanoch Dagan, Evan Criddle, Deborah DeMott, Avihay Dorfman, Justice James Edelman, Evan Fox-Decent, Tamar Frankel, Joshua Getzler, Andrew Gold, Michele Graziadei, Sharon Hannes, Genevieve Helleringer, Ethan Leib, Daniel Markovits, Paul Miller, Irit Samet, Robert Sitkoff, Henry Smith, and Lionel Smith. -- PDF File: 17 -- Keywords: Philosophy of Law, Legal Theory, Philosophy of Private Law, Private Law Theory, Fiduciary Law, Fiduciary Relationships, Fiduciary Duties, Fiduciary Remedies, Duty of Loyalty, Duty of Care, Duty of Candour -- downloaded pdf to Note

David Millon, Washington and Lee University - School of Law -- Research in Law and Economics, 2007 -- Washington & Lee Legal Studies Paper No. 2007-01 -- The essay points out an interesting parallel in law-and-economics business law scholarship. Working largely independently of each other, economically oriented scholars working in different areas have argued that the law should focus on the interests of a single constituency - shareholders in corporate law, creditors in bankruptcy law, and consumers in antitrust law. Economic analysts thus have rejected arguments advanced by progressive scholars working in each of these areas that the law should instead concern itself with the full range of constituencies affected by business activity. The law-and-economics single constituency claim rests in part on skepticism about judicial competence but the underlying objection is to the use of law for redistributive purposes. The primary value is efficiency, defined in terms of market-generated outcomes. In this essay, I question this political commitment, suggesting that it implies a strong tendency toward maintenance of the existing distribution of wealth. Even more importantly, the single constituency claim may actually have redistributive implications. In each of these areas of business law, however, it is a regressive program that favors owners of capital against those who are generally less well of, such as workers and small business owners. -- Number of Pages in PDF File: 31 -- saved to briefcase

Harvard Law -- In consequence of this common economic structure [agency problem], there is a common doctrinal structure that cuts across the application of fiduciary principles in different contexts. However, (..) the particulars of fiduciary obligation vary in accordance with the particulars of the agency problem in the fiduciary relationship at issue. This explains (1) the purported elusiveness of fiduciary doctrine and (2) why courts apply fiduciary law both categorically, such as to trustees and (legal) agents, as well as ad hoc to relationships involving a position of trust and confidence that gives rise to an agency problem. (...) a functional distinction between primary and subsidiary fiduciary rules. In all fiduciary relationships we find general duties of loyalty and care, typically phrased as standards, (..) we also find specific subsidiary fiduciary duties, often phrased as rules, that elaborate on the application of loyalty and care to commonly recurring circumstances in the particular form of fiduciary relationship. (..) the puzzle of why fiduciary law includes mandatory rules that cannot be waived in a relationship deemed fiduciary. Committed economic contractarians, such as Easterbrook and Fischel, have had difficulty in explaining why the parties to a fiduciary relationship do not have complete freedom of contract. The answer is that the mandatory core of fiduciary law serves a cautionary and protective function within the fiduciary relationship as well as an external categorization function that clarifies rights for third parties. -- PDF File: 14 -- Keywords: fiduciary, agency, trust, loyalty, care, prudence, agency costs, duty

A cri de coeur for putting legal theory and history back together with social theory and empirical social sciences,. -- In the early part of my career, legal history and the history of legal ideas were closed books to me, as I made my way in a field of criminal law scholarship dominated by doctrinal scholarship and by concept-focused philosophical analysis of the foundations of criminal law. These 2 very different paradigms have 1 big thing in common: They tend to proceed as if the main intellectual task is to unearth the deep logic of existing legal doctrines, not infrequently going so far as to read them back onto history, as if things could never have been other than they are. (..)I have increasingly found myself turning to historical resources (1) [to examine] the contingency of particular legal arrangements, and (2) ...to develop causal and other theses about the dynamics which shape them and hence about the role and quality of criminal law as a form of power in modern societies. So, in a sense, I have been using history in support of an analysis driven primarily by the social sciences. (..) it is no accident that all of the great social theorists, from Marx to Foucault via Weber, Durkheim, and Elias, ..have incorporated significant historical elements into their interpretations .... Indeed, without the diachronic perspective provided by history (or the perspective offered by comparative study) we could have no critical purchase on social theory’s characterizations of or causal hypotheses about the dynamics of social systems. Hence, (...) my boundless gratitude to the historians whose meticulous research makes this sort of interpretive social theory possible). -- Lacey is not over-dramatizing -- see the "commentary" from a "legal philosopher" who believes the normative basis of criminal responsibility can be investigated as timeless "moral truths". -- downloaded pdf to Note

Lacey's article (..) criticizes the scholarship on criminal responsibility for being too concerned with “its conceptual contours and moral foundations,” “rather than with what it is for[:] its social roles, meaning, and functions.” Here is what she is arguing against. There are theorists, myself included, who think of questions of responsibility in philosophical terms. These moral truths are not socially or historically contingent; they are constant questions to which we seek answers. (..) In some ways, this is a (boring) methodological debate. What I care about as responsibility is not what she cares about as responsibility. -- YIKES -- Apart from the travesty of equating legal norms with "moral truths," this looks like moral realism run amok -- the questions may be "constant" but who gets to frame the Qs, what values are doing the framing (blood money, retribution, restitution, prevention, hierarchy reinforcement, group purification), what anthropology and epistemology implicitly govern the framing (universal depravity, trial by ordeal, women's testimony is unreliable?), the defined criteria (lower orders don't have honor they can defend, husbands can't commit rape), how criteria are to be applied, by whom (civil vs religious authority, manor courts vs king's law, lie detector operators, NSA algorithms?) -- "Philosophical" inquiry is limited to *a priori* concerns, and "philosophical" answers are limited to eternal Platonic "moral truths". But if normative Qs & As are by definition not contingent on changing institutions and social assumptions re behavior, what's's the foundation for her inquiry process? Armchair "fine-grained" intuitions re "mental states"? So do we get new "moral truths" along with the each new neuroscience study? "Proof there's no free will!"="moral truth" (let everybody out of jail?) and next month "Latest study finds the free will spot"=oops, new eternal "moral truth" (can we test it like DNA?) -- Analytic philosophy rediscovering Aristotelian categories is bad enough, but analytic neo-Platonic anthropology gets me actively hostile, and it's even more absurd if we're talking about criminal law -- didn't download

My aim in this Article is to focus on the history of thinking about law in the context of 3 topics (..) to show that the continuous development of the theory of legal positivism, however useful it may have been or may still be, has possibly caused us to ignore other aspects of what was originally part of the positivist picture. (..)The first of these dimensions is the relationship between legal theory and legal reform. (..) that an account of the nature of law might be developed not simply as an aid to understanding or accurate description, but instead as a way of facilitating reform of law itself or reform of how a society understands the idea of law. Second, legal positivism, at the time of its late 19thC (or perhaps even earlier) origins, was focused on the importance of coercion, force, and sanctions as central components of law. But as with the creation of legal theories for the purpose of legal reform, this emphasis on the coercive side of law has also been banished to a kind of jurisprudential purgatory, for reasons and with consequences that deserve further examination. The third lost element of earlier versions of legal positivism is its focus on judicial decision making and the role of judges. Modern legal positivists, for whom 1961 is all too often the beginning of useful thought about the nature of law, do not, with few exceptions, consider theories of judicial decision making to be a necessary or even important part of the positivist perspective. But it was not always so. -- downloaded pdf to Note

Walt's response (at least the abstract) appears to prove Schauer's point quite nicely, as if logic and argument by legal theorists takes place in an abstract world where "how did we get here" is universally ignored, despite its possible relevance for "why are we here", "what are we doing here" and "where does it look like we might be headed" -- but Walt devoted 10 pages to his response, so one hopes he has more to justify his position than what comes across as a mix of arrogance (we don't need to learn from history because our theoretical grounding and argumentative methods are self-contained and self-sufficient) and cynicism (history might be interesting, but no way will anybody change what gets them published and tenure) -- out of curiosity as to whether it's really as bad as the abstract makes it sound, downloaded pdf to Note

I have two major aims: (1) set the historical record straight(...) Hobbes’s and Bentham’s work that seeks to understand their views on law not by isolating it from the rest of their wide-ranging body of work, but by understanding their jurisprudential work as part of a broader project. (2) My main aim is to contribute to contemporary jurisprudential debates and to suggest that the largely neglected approach of earlier positivists is superior to the view held by most contemporary legal positivists. (...) to what extent it is useful for us to call Hobbes and Bentham “legal positivists.” My answer to this question consists of three interrelated points. The first is that we draw an explicit link between their ideas and the view that (some time later) would come to be known as “positivism,” roughly the view that the methods of the “human sciences” are essentially the same as those of the natural sciences. The second point is that the classical legal positivists’ decisive break with natural law ideas prevalent in their day is to be found exactly here, in their views about metaphysics and nature. The third point is that this aspect of their work has been, in my view regrettably, abandoned by contemporary legal positivists. Though all three points are related, in this Article I will say relatively little about the first point, as I discussed it in greater detail elsewhere. -- downloaded pdf to Note

Anglo-American jurisprudence, before it insulated itself in conceptual analysis and defined itself in opposition to broader questions, was properly a “sociable science,” to use Professor Postema’s phrase from his symposium article. And, in part due to the exemplars of history, so it may become again. By drawing on Bentham and Hobbes, Professor Dan Priel’s Toward Classical Positivism points forward toward more fruitful methods of jurisprudence while illuminating the recent history and current state of inquiry. His article demonstrates the virtues and promise of a more catholic approach to jurisprudence. It also raises challenging questions about the direction to take this rediscovered path, and I am not sure I always agree with his suggested answers. Any misgivings I have about Priel’s particular approach, however, do not diminish my appreciation; I find even the points of disagreement to be live and meaningful, and that itself is refreshing. -- downloaded pdf to Note

Hobbes’s account of law, like his account of punishment, does not fit well into our existing scholarly categories. (..). He was neither a legal positivist nor a natural law theorist, at least not as we usually use these labels. He adopted neither a retributive nor a consequentialist justification of punishment. Yet his account of human interaction, particularly with respect to law and punishment, captures actual experience better than the more familiar alternatives. Moreover, the space for subversion in Hobbes’s theory may make his account more normatively appealing than it has seemed to modern liberals. (...) 3 questions about Hobbesian theory: What is law? What is its relationship to punishment? And what are the implications of Hobbes’s theory for contemporary efforts to describe law or the relationship of law to punishment? The first (..) Hobbes’s legal theory is still so widely mischaracterized, sometimes even by Hobbes scholars, that it is worth returning to his claims. The second question has received much less attention, perhaps because a right to resist punishment seems so discordant with the authoritarian Hobbes we know, or think we know. And the third question has received still less attention, for contemporary jurisprudence scholarship rarely cites anyone who wrote before Jeremy Bentham and John Austin. I hope to show that, in many instances, Hobbes has been misread; even more importantly, I hope to persuade scholars of jurisprudence that what Hobbes actually said is worthy of their engagement. -- downloaded pdf to Note

She is correct in rejecting the assimilation of Hobbes’s legal theory to Austin’s, and in noting the strands of Hobbes’s view that disqualify him from counting as any sort of legal positivist. And I agree, on the whole, with her characterization of Hobbes’s account of justified punishment, and that this account has its attractions yet produces some puzzles which Hobbes does not fully resolve. My disagreements are with her second-order characterization of Hobbes’s legal theory. I want to discuss two related areas of disagreement. The first disagreement concerns whether we should assess Hobbes’s account of law in terms of the standards of general descriptive jurisprudence: Ristroph denies that it should be; I disagree. The second concerns whether we should take Hobbes’s treatment of the political as explanatorily prior to the legal to show that Hobbes was in some way apart from the natural law tradition in jurisprudence: Ristroph affirms this; I disagree. -- downloaded pdf to Note

Postema offers two general programmatic suggestions for jurisprudence besides greater historical consciousness: sociability and synechism. Sociability, has two dimensions. First, it means interdisciplinarity—a continual dialogue with the study of legal phenomena by the sciences, humanities, and even theology. Second, it means embedding jurisprudence in general philosophy, ... [Sellars]: “not only ‘cabbages and kings’, but numbers and duties, possibilities and finger snaps, aesthetic experience and death.” Synechism is a less familiar idea, drawn from the philosophy of C.S. Peirce. It is the commitment to seek continuity among phenomena. Peirce was metaphysically committed to the existence of actual continua everywhere in nature, history, and human psychology. So synechism will impose a certain demand on all systematic studies, namely discerning those continua.(..) a certain kind of historiography: The historian’s job is to unearth continuities between past and present rather than studying ruptures. This, it seems to me, is a contestable commitment that rules out a great deal of important historical work. Peirce understood synechism to imply that ideas are intrinsically temporal and historical phenomena. Although Postema does not endorse this general thesis, he does argue for a special case of it, namely that law is “intrinsically temporal.” This conclusion is central to his argument against the possibility of time-slice legal systems. It, too, is contestable; but, I shall suggest, Postema can reach his conclusion on grounds other than synechism, and I agree with him about law’s intrinsic temporality. -- downloaded pdf to Note

Renaissance jurisprudence strove to be a sociable science. Following Ulpian’s lead, it refused to relegate jurisprudence either to pure speculation or to mere practice. Jurisprudence was a science, a matter of knowledge and of theoretical understanding, not merely an applied art or practice of prudence innocent of theory. It was regarded as the very heart of theoretical studies, drawing to itself all that the traditional sciences of theology, metaphysics, and moral philosophy, as well as the newly emerging humanist sciences of philology and hermeneutics, had to offer. No less resolutely, however, it refused to abandon its foothold in the life of practice. (..) Rather than reject philosophical reflection, (..) Renaissance jurists sought to locate it in concrete human life and experience. (..) Philosophy.., was most true to its vocation, and was most engaged in human life, when its reflections were anchored in the social life acknowledged, comprehended, and informed by and informing law. Jurisprudence, vera philosophia, was ...the point at which the theoretical and the practical intersected (..) at its “sociable” best sought to integrate them. Analytic jurisprudence began as self-consciously, even militantly, “unsociable,” and its matured and much-sophisticated descendant, fin de siècle analytic legal philosophy, remained largely if not exclusively so. (..) It may be time, in this period of self-conscious attention to jurisprudential method, to press beyond the current limits of this debate over method to a reassessment of the ambitions of jurisprudence and of philosophy’s role in it. (..) my aim is not critical but constructive. (..) to recover something of the ideal of jurisprudence as a sociable science, to retrieve as much as our disenchanted age can be challenged to embrace, or at least to entertain, of the ambition of jurisprudence as vera philosophia. -- downloaded pdf to Note

Whereas legal philosophers offer “analyses” that aim to be general, abstract, and timeless, legal historians offer “thick descriptions” of what is particular, concrete, and time-bound. But surface appearances can deceive. Perhaps unlike other areas of philosophy, the subject matter of jurisprudence is at least partially (if not entirely) a social phenomenon. Courts, legislatures, judicial orders, and statutes are the products of human efforts, both collective and individual, and they only exist as legislatures, courts, and the like insofar as they possess the meaning they do in the eyes of at least some social group. For this reason, legal philosophers since at least H.L.A. Hart have recognized their task to be a “hermeneutic” one—one which aims to discern or make explicit the “self-understanding” of legal actors. At the same time, legal historians aim not simply to record legal rules that existed at some given point in history, but to unearth the meaning that actual people—judges, lawyers, politicians, and ordinary citizens—have attached to law. When they do so, they might be seen as uncovering evidence of those same “self-understandings” that philosophers claim constitute law. Perhaps, then, philosophical and historical inquiries about law do not differ so radically from each other after all. -- downloaded pdf to Note

NYU School of Law, Public Law Research Paper No. 08-35 -- General jurisprudence purports to consider law in general. But to break out of the arid abstractions of analytic legal philosophy, it may be worth also giving some jurisprudential consideration to the distinctive features of law in the context of a particular kind of political system. This paper considers the jurisprudence of law in a modern democracy. It explores a suggestion (made by Ronald Dworkin and others) that legal positivism might be a theory particularly apt for a democracy. And it explores the meaning and significance for democratic political theory of ideas like the generality of law, the separation of law and morality, the sources thesis, and law's public orientation. At the very end, the paper also considers Jean-Jacques Rousseau's view that the word "law" should be confined to measures that are applicable to all, made by all, and enacted in the spirit of a general will. -- Pages in PDF File: 5 -- Keywords: analytic legal philosophy, democracy, Hart, jurisprudence, legal positivism, Rousseau, separation of law and morality, sources of law -- downloaded pdf to Note

NYU School of Law, Public Law Research Paper No. 08-34 -- The relation between the law of nature and the law of nations (ius gnetium) remains unclear. This paper examines Gentili's apparent equation of the two, and it considers more generally how abstract natural law reasoning might be improved by the sort of empirical/comparative law reasoning (as we would call it) that thinkers like Gentili, Grotius and others engaged in when they tried to determine what natural law teaches us about the regulation of war. -- Pages in PDF File: 17 -- Keywords: Gentili, ius gentium, law of nations, laws of war, moral reasoning, natural law, positive law -- downloaded pdf to Note

NYU School of Law, Public Law Research Paper No. 14-59 -- Among analytic philosophers, there is considerable antipathy towards the concept of human dignity. It is not always expressed, but the impression is conveyed that this is a rather disreputable idea and that its trumpeting in legal and political theory is to be deplored. The present paper tries to get to grips with the sources of this antipathy. Is it based on the unclarity of the concept, its religious overtones, its speciesism, or its redundancy as a moral idea. The paper makes a case for dignity as a status-concept -- denoting a particular sort of moral/legal status that all humans have. -- Pages in PDF File: 23 -- Keywords: definition, dignity, foundationalism, human dignity, religion, rights -- downloaded pdf to Note

NYU School of Law, Public Law Research Paper No. 14-57 -- This paper attempts to identify a particular constitutional evil -- namely, judicial supremacy -- and to distinguish the objection to judicial supremacy from the broader case that can be made against judicial review. Even if one supports judicial review, one ought to have misgivings about the prospect of judicial supremacy. The paper associates judicial supremacy with three distinct tendencies in constitutional politics: (1) the temptation of courts to develop and pursue a general program (of policy and principle of their own) rather than just to intervene on a piecemeal basis; (2) the tendency of the highest court to become not only supreme but sovereign, by taking on a position of something like broad sovereignty within the constitutional scheme (thus confirming Thomas Hobbes in his conviction that the rule of law cannot be applied at the highest level of political authority in a state because any attempt to apply it just replicates sovereignty at a higher level)); (3) the tendency of courts to portray themselves as entitled to "speak before all others" for those who made the constitution, to take on the mantle of pouvoir constituant and to amend or change the understanding of the constitution when that is deemed necessary. -- Pages in PDF File: 44 -- Keywords: constitutions, Hobbes, judicial review, judicial supremacy, judges, judiciary, popular constitutionalism, rule of law, Sieyes, sovereignty -- downloaded pdf to Note

NYU School of Law, Public Law Research Paper No. 14-40 -- This paper explores the possibility of a conception of the rule of law that is oriented specifically to public law. It is not a conception of the rule of law that privileges private law rights (like rights of property) nor is it an abstract or anodyne conception that is supposed to apply to all areas of governance indiscriminately. Instead this is an account of the rule of law that takes the mission of public administration seriously and seeks to establish it on a footing of legality rather than managerialism, while at the same time acknowledging that sometimes private interests have to give way to the interests of the public. -- Number of Pages in PDF File: 19 -- Keywords: Dicey, discretion, public law, public administration, rule of law -- downloaded pdf to Note

Inaugural Conference of International Society for Public Law, June 2014 -- NYU School of Law, Public Law Research Paper No. 14-41 -- This paper was delivered as the keynote address at the inaugural conference of the International Society for Public Law, in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, on 26 June, 2014. It develops an understanding of public law that takes seriously both the idea of public governance and the idea of individual parties as members of the public. And it outlines an understanding of the rule of law that matches these public-spirited conceptions. -- Number of Pages in PDF File: 22 -- Keywords: private property, public administration, public law, republicanism, rule of law -- downloaded pdf to Note

Jeremy Bentham (..) was a seminal figure in the history of modern political thought. This lively monograph presents the numerous French connections of an emblematic British thinker. (..) Placing Bentham's thought in the context of the French-language Enlightenment through to the post-Revolutionary era, (..) the case for a historical study of 'Global Bentham'. Examining previously unpublished sources, she traces the circulation of Bentham's letters, friends, manuscripts, and books in the French-speaking world. (..) transnational intellectual history reveals how utilitarianism, as a doctrine, was both the product of, and a contribution to, French-language political thought at a key time(..). The debates (re) utilitarianism in France cast new light on the making of modern Liberalism. **--** Intro **--** Part I. An Englishman in the Republic of Letters: 1. Languages of Enlightenment *-* 2. Satire and polemics *-* 3. Defining utilitarianism: private connections and correspondence **--** Part II. 'Projet d'un corps de loix complet' and the Reform of Jurisprudence in Europe: 4. The Genesis of Projet *-* 5. Projet in Enlightenment legal thought *-* 6. The politics of legal reform **--** Part III. Reflections for the Revolution in France: 7. Frenchmen and Francophiles: Lord Lansdowne's network *-* 8. British expertise for French legislators *-* 9. Utility, rights and revolution: missed encounters? **--** Part IV. Utile Dulcis? Bentham in Paris, 1802: 10. Dumont's editorship: from the Bibliothèque Britannique to Traités de législation civile et pénale *-* 11. A mixed reception *-* 12. Autumn 1802: Bentham in Paris **--** Part V. Liberty, Utility and Rights (1815–1832): 13. 'For one disciple in this country, I have 50 at least in France' *-* 14. Utilitarian arguments in French politics *-* 15. A Utilitarian moment? French liberals and utilitarianism *-* Epilogue: Bentham in the July Revolution *-* Conclusion -- marketing materials not yet available

Brian Z. Tamanaha -- Washington University in St. Louis Legal Studies Research Paper No. 15-01-01 -- Theorists who tackle “What is law?” usually acknowledge the difficulty of the question, then, with hardly a pause, launch into their proposed answer. Instead, focusing on three main categories of concepts of law, I examine in detail why previous attempts have failed to achieve a consensus. Several factors have contributed. One source of disagreement involves clashes among intuitions about law. Further problems are created by the narrowness of functional analysis, on which nearly all concepts of law are based. Confusion also arises because law shares basic characteristics with many social institutions, as I show drawing on insights from the philosophy of society. Theorists also typically fail to recognize two distinct orientations of law, and multiple forms of law, which singular concepts of law cannot accommodate. Finally, variability and change owing to the social-historical nature of law defeats efforts of legal philosophers to identify essential features and universally true concepts of law. At the conclusion I present a way of understanding law that emerges out of the lessons learned from past unsuccessful efforts. -- topic headings in the essay: Three Categories of the Concept of Law; Pivotal Role of Intuitions About Law; Over-Inclusiveness of Functionalism; Under-Inclusiveness of Functionalism; Why Functionalism Cannot Answer ‘What is Law?’; Error of Conflating ‘Rule System’ and ‘Legal System’; Law as Part of the Institutional Substrate of Society; State Law’s Two Orientations; Coexisting Multiple Legal Forms; Necessary and Essential Features Or Typical Features; Universal Application Versus Universal Truth; What is Law -- No. Pages: 49 -- Keywords: jurisprudence, philosophy of law, law and society, legal anthropology, legal sociology, legal history, and comparative law -- downloaded pdf to Note

Via Brian Tamanaha -- Scott Hershovitz, University of Michigan Law School -- Yale Law Journal, Forthcoming -- For more than forty years, jurisprudence has been dominated by the Hart-Dworkin debate. The debate starts from the premise that our legal practices generate rights and obligations that are distinctively legal, and the question at issue is how their content is determined. Positivists say that their content is determined ultimately or exclusively by social facts. Anti-positivists say that moral facts must play a part in determining their content. In this Essay, I argue that the debate rests on a mistake. Our legal practices do not generate rights and obligations that are distinctively legal. At best, they generate moral rights and obligations, some of which we label legal. I defend this view by drawing analogies with other normative practices, like making promises, posting rules, and playing games. And I try to explain why it looks like legal practices generate distinctively legal rights and obligations even though they do not. I conclude with some thoughts about the questions jurisprudence should pursue in the wake of the Hart-Dworkin debate. -- Number of Pages: 63 -- Keywords: jurisprudence, H.L.A. Hart, Ronald Dworkin, Hart-Dworkin Debate, legal positivism, anti-positivism, philosophy of law

William A. Edmundson, Georgia State University College of Law -- 51 San Diego L. Rev. (December 2014, Forthcoming). -- Georgia State University College of Law, Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2014-15 -- Legal discourse centrally involves a family of normative expressions – “obligation,” “right,” “permission,” and so on – whose surface grammar parallels that of moral discourse. Is the normativity of legal discourse then a moral normativity? Or is it a distinct type of normativity altogether? (..) Custom is among the sources of law. That much is agreed. But custom can also be law, independently of promulgation, or so many believe. (..) Insofar as a customary norm is (or becomes) a legal norm, does it manifest (or acquire) a different kind of normativity? Or does its original normativity contribute to the normativity of law? Another set of questions has to do with custom as a condition of legal validity. [Different positions of Kelsen and Hart] I will explore the hypothesis that every legally normative utterance resolves into one expressing (a) custom-implicating moral normativity, (b) custom-extending moral normativity, or (c) normativity “in the manifesto sense” (to enlist a phrase of Joel Feinberg’s). If this is correct, there is no such thing as a distinctively legal brand of normativity. -- No. Pages: 30 -- Keywords: legal theory, legal philosophy, philosophy of law, normativity, norm, custom, validity, moral, desuetudo, moral philosophy -- downloaded pdf to Note

Via Brian Tamanaha -- Roger Cotterrell, Queen Mary University of London, School of Law -- Jurisprudence, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2014, Forthcoming - Queen Mary School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 169/2014 -- The aim of this paper is to describe and defend jurisprudence as an enterprise of theorising about law that is distinct from what is now understood as legal philosophy in the Anglophone world. Jurisprudence must draw on legal philosophy but also from many other resources. It should be an open quest for juristically (rather than philosophically) significant insights about law. Its purpose is to inform and guide the juristic task of making organised social regulation a valuable practice, rooted and effective in the specific contexts and historical conditions in which it exists but also aimed at serving demands for justice and security through regulation, as these perennial values are understood in their time and place, and as they might be further clarified and reconciled as legal ideals. - Number of Pages: 18 -- Keywords: Jurisprudence; legal philosophy; contemporary legal positivism; universalism; legal naturalism; law in context; socio-legal perspectives; bricolage; jurists. -- downloaded pdf to Note

Scott Hershovitz's "The End of Jurisprudence" is a terrific article. [Downloaded from SSRN] For the past four decades, he asserts, "jurisprudence has been dominated by the Hart-Dworkin debate," and it is time to move on. -- "The time has come for jurisprudence to drop the metaphysics and take up morals. The question that jurisprudence should aim to answer is how our legal practices affect our moral rights, obligations, privileges, and powers. The metaphysical question posed in the Hart-Dworkin debate was a distraction; we have no good reason to think that our legal practices generate a distinctively legal domain of normativity, or quasi-normativity, whose metaphysics we must unravel. But the moral question is vital; it is contested everyday, in court and out, with serious consequences for peoples’ lives." (..) Though I agree this deserves attention, I do not agree that jurisprudence has or requires a particular end, whether this one or any other. The field thrives best when jurisprudence scholars pursue many different intellectual projects. In my view, jurisprudence remains vital by focusing on important legal phenomena and by drawing from other disciplines for insights. On that note, I offer my draft essay "What is Law?" [Downloaded from SSRN, as well as 2014 article by Roger Cotterrell]

NYU School of Law, Public Law Research Paper No. 11-29 -- Lecture 1 begins from a specifically Christian point of view, though it also addresses the difficulties of sustaining a viewpoint of this kind in a multi-faith and indeed increasingly secular world. Lecture 2 considers nationhood, sovereignty, and the basis for the division of the world into separate political communities. A religious approach to international order will endorse the position of most modern international jurists that sovereign independence is not to be made into an idol or a fetish, and that the tasks of order and peace in the world are not to be conceived as optional for sovereigns. But sovereigns also have their own mission, ordering particular communities of men and women. Lecture 3 considers the rival claims of natural law and positivism regarding sources of international law. The most telling part of natural law jurisprudence from Aquinas to Finnis has always been its insistence on the specific human need for positive law. This holds true in the international realm as much as in any realm of human order - perhaps more so, because law has to do its work unsupported by the overwhelming power of a particular state. Lecture 3 addresses, from a religious point of view, the sources of law in the international realm: treaty, convention, custom, precedent, and jurisprudence. It will focus particularly on the sanctification of treaties. -- No of Pages : 73 -- Keywords: customary international law, international law, ius cogens, nationalism, natural law, positivism, public reason, religion, self-determination, sovereignty, treaties -- downloaded pdf to Note

Samuel von Pufendorf, The Whole Duty of Man According to the Law of Nature, trans. Andrew Tooke, ed. Ian Hunter and David Saunders, with Two Discourses and a Commentary by Jean Barbeyrac, trans. David Saunders (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2003). 5/5/2014. <http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/888> -- 1717/1735 edition Anglicized political vocabulary from Pufendorf's secular and continental Absolutism even more than Tooke had in 1693. Added some notes from Barbeyrac's 1707 translation to stress religious elements of duties. Original De officiis -- Introduction and Barbeyrac materials extend Hunter's focus on the "civil Enlightenment" that opposed Leibniz's Platonic rationalist metaphysics, the Pufendorf, Thomasius and Huguenot strain erased from intellectual_history by Kant’s metaphysical Enlightenment version of history -- kindle-available -- downloaded pdf to Note