The Cambridge Companion to the Philosophy of Law

Includes index.

Introduction / John Tasioulas -- Methodology / Grant Lamond -- The nature of law / John Finnis -- Legal reasoning / Martha C. Nussbaum -- Law and living well / Timothy Macklem -- Social science and the philosophy of law / Frederick Schauer -- The rule of law / John Tasioulas -- Justice without ethics : a twentieth-century innovation? / Onora O'Neill -- Rights and human rights / Jeremy Waldron -- Equality and discrimination / Sophia Moreau -- Authority and legitimacy / Christoph Kletzer and Massimo Renzo -- The ends and limits of law / John Stanton-Ife -- Causation and responsibility / Richard Holton -- Punishment / Christopher Bennett and Kimberley Brownlee -- Constitutional law / Mitchell N. Berman -- Civil rights and liberties / Sherif Girgis and Robert P. George -- Criminal law / R.A. Duff -- Contract / Daniel Markovits -- Tort law and its theory / John Gardner -- Property law / Larissa Katz -- International law / Guglielmo Verdirame.

"Reflection on the law gives rise to many methodological questions. Some relate to legal doctrines - how best to understand, rationalise and potentially justify areas such as contract law or administrative law or criminal procedure. This chapter, by contrast, will focus on the question of how to understand 'law in general', or the 'nature of law'. Law in this sense is standardly regarded as a particular type of social practice with two dimensions: an institutional dimension involving bodies such as legislatures and courts, and a normative dimension involving the standards and other considerations created and applied by those bodies ('the law'). How should we go about making sense of this social practice? In what way should it be approached? There are three prominent features of our contemporary understanding of law that feed into the methodological debate: (a) the idea that law is a general type of social practice, found in different cultures at different times; (b) the idea that law is a social construction, whose existence depends upon the combined beliefs and actions of a variety of social actors; and (c) the idea that law is a hermeneutic practice, that is, a practice that we self-consciously understand as a distinctive sort of social practice, and in terms of which we understand and structure features of our social world"-- Provided by publisher.