This book investigates one of the oldest questions of legal philosophy---the relationship between law and legitimacy. It analyses the legal theories of three eminent public lawyers of the Weimar era, Carl Schmitt, Hans Kelsen, and Hermann Heller. Their theories addressed the problems of legal and political order in a crisis-ridden modern society and so they remain highly relevant to contemporary debates about legal order in the age of pluralism. Schmitt, the philosopher of German fascism, has recently received much attention. Kelsen (...) is well-known as one of the main exponents of the philosophy of legal positivism. Heller is virtually unknown outside Germany. Dyzenhaus exposes the dangers of Schmitt's legal philosophy by situating it in the legal context of constitutional crisis to which he responded. He also points out the severs inadequacies of Kelsen's legal positivism. In a wide-ranging account of the predicaments of contemporary legal and political philosophy, Heller's position is argued to be the most promising of the three. (shrink)

At the heart of this book is the age-old question of how law and morality are related. The legal positivist, insisting on the separation of the two, explicates the concept of law independently of morality. The author challenges this view, arguing that there are, first, conceptually necessary connections between law and morality and, second, normative reasons for including moral elements in the concept of law. While the conceptual argument alone is too limited to establish a sufficiently strong connection between law (...) and morality, and the normative argument alone fails to address the nature of law, the two arguments together support a nonpositivistic concept of law, toppling legal positivism qua comprehensive theory of law. (shrink)

I LAW AND NATURE i. The "Pure" Theory The Pure Theory of Law is a theory of positive law. It is a theory of positive law in general, not of a specific legal ...

Reprinted 1999 by The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd. LCCN 98-32334. ISBN 1-886363-74-9. Cloth. $95. * Reprint of the first edition.

Legal Philosophies has been written to provide a clear guide to the main topics in a jurisprudence or legal theory course with the novice in mind. It provides summaries of the pertinent arguments within these topics, and of the views of leading theorists. This new edition takes a look at the emergence of "Critical Legal Studies" and "Feminist Jurisprudence", whilst there are new sections on "Moral Truth" and "Communitarianism" (a revived theoretical approach).

This challenging book on jurisprudence begins by posing questions in the post-modern context,and then seeks to bridge the gap between our traditions and contemporary situation. It offers a narrative encompassing the birth of western philosophy in the Greeks and moves through medieval Christendom, Hobbes, the defence of the common law with David Hume, the beginnings of utilitarianism in Adam Smith, Bentham and John Stuart Mill, the hope for enlightenment with Kant, Rousseau, Hegel and Marx, onto the more pessimistic warnings of (...) Weber and Nietzsche. It defends the work of Austin against the reductionism of HLA Hart, analyses the period of high modernity in the writings of Kelsen, Hart and Fuller, and compares the different approaches to justice of Rawls and Nozick. The liberal defence of legality in Ronald Dworkin is contrasted with the more disillusioned accounts of the critical legal studies movement and the personalised accounts of prominent feminist writers. (shrink)

Seite dualität: Anarchismus 121. Konsequenzen der individualitätszerstörenden Gleichheitstheorie: Stellung der Frau 123; unhistorische Denkweise 123; ...

And, indeed, the third of this trilogy of books, Social Dimensions of Law and Justice (), may also be regarded as similarly complementary to those which ...

Law, Philosophy and National Socialism investigates the nexus between the philosophy and the reality of law in National Socialist Germany. What was the nature of law in Hitler's Germany? Was there a National Socialist jurisprudence? Concentrating upon a particular study of the philosophies of Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt and Gustav Radbruch, the book develops the thesis that the reality of National Socialist law was an expression of a specifically Heideggerian jurisprudence and moreover that the consequences of such a reality represent (...) the potential consequences of any such jurisprudence. (shrink)