This book demonstrates how legal realism offers important and unique jurisprudential insights that are not just a part of legal history, but are also relevant and useful for a contemporary understanding of legal theory.

With incisiveness and lucid style, Dworkin has written a masterful explanation of how the Anglo-American legal system works and on what principles it is grounded. Law’s Empire is a full-length presentation of his theory of law that will be studied and debated for years to come.

This book continues and revises the ideas of justice as fairness that John Rawls presented in _A Theory of Justice_ but changes its philosophical interpretation in a fundamental way. That previous work assumed what Rawls calls a "well-ordered society," one that is stable and relatively homogenous in its basic moral beliefs and in which there is broad agreement about what constitutes the good life. Yet in modern democratic society a plurality of incompatible and irreconcilable doctrines--religious, philosophical, and moral--coexist within the (...) framework of democratic institutions. Recognizing this as a permanent condition of democracy, Rawls asks how a stable and just society of free and equal citizens can live in concord when divided by reasonable but incompatible doctrines? This edition includes the essay "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited," which outlines Rawls ' plans to revise _Political Liberalism,_ which were cut short by his death. "An extraordinary well-reasoned commentary on _A Theory of Justice_...a decisive turn towards political philosophy." --_Times Literary Supplement_. (shrink)

. “The Notebook Corner,” edited by Enrico Pattaro, makes its first appearance here as a new section of Ratio Juris. This new section can be described in a sense as an offshoot of the project for A Treatise of Legal Philosophy and General Jurisprudence, a work still in progress composed of five theoretical volumes and six historical ones. The theoretical volumes receive a brief presentation in the paper immediately below, with a specific focus on Volume 1, entitled The Law and (...) the Right: A Reappraisal of the Reality That Ought to Be. This volume is then discussed as well by Rosaria Conte and Cristiano Castelfronchi in the second paper of this “Notebook Corner”. (shrink)

Public "reason giving" is an essential duty of democracies, said to promote better public decision-making by keeping the government's discretionary powers in check. However, this aim may be compromised if decision-makers cite insincere and misleading justifications as a means of preventing accountability. This Article contributes to rethinking sincerity in legal decision-making by asking both a normative and a descriptive question. The normative question is whether and to what extent should public institutions disclose the reasons for their decisions. The practical question (...) is whether and how the fact that decision-makers have failed to fully disclose their reasons can be established. The generally accepted and most demanding position, which I call "internalist sincerity," is that state actors should candidly reveal all the considerations that motivated them in making a decision. I argue that this conventional view is mistaken and propose instead a novel approach, "externalist sincerity," which requires only that public officials state reasons for their decisions which they believe justify the outcome, even if those reasons where not the considerations that actually motivated them. My approach revisits sincerity by way of introducing an institutional analysis, which has been largely overlooked in existing discussions. The Article claims that what we demand from institutions is a form of sincerity that is different from what we expect from individuals. When analyzing sincerity in an institutional context, our expectations matter more than the supposed intentions of institutions, particularly in cases in which there are multiple decision-makers such that there is no such thing as "the institution's state of mind." The conceptual roadmap generated by this new look at sincerity in the law is important for two reasons. First, by clarifying what we mean when we say that public officials should be sincere about their reasons, this Article explains why disagreements on the topic often run deep, and reorients debate around more productive questions such as how to produce more pragmatic and nuanced sincerity requirements appropriate for different decision-making contexts. Second, it surveys existing models to determine whether they offer a consistent set of answers concerning the contents and contours of the duty to give sincere reasons, if indeed such a duty exists at all. (shrink)