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 ...

"The unexamined life is not worth living." Socrates's ancient words are still true, and the ideas sounded in Plato's Dialogues still form the foundation of a thinking person's education. This superb collection contains excellent contemporary translations selected for their clarity and accessibility to today's reader, as well as an incisive introduction by Erich Segal, which reveals Plato's life and clarifies the philosophical issues examined in each dialogue. The first four dialogues recount the trial execution of Socrates--the extraordinary tragedy that changed (...) Plato's life and so altered the course of Western though. Other dialogues create a rich tableau of intellectual life in Athens in the fourth century B.C., and examine the nature of virtue and love, knowledge and truth, society and the individual. Resounding with the humor and astounding brilliance of Socrates, the immortal iconoclast, these great works remain powerful, probing, and essential. (shrink)

Professor Fletcher challenges the traditional account of the development of tort doctrine as a shift from an unmoral standard of strict liability for directly causing harm to a moral standard based on fault. He then sets out two paradigms of liability to serve as constructs for understanding competing ideological viewpoints about the proper role of tort sanctions. He asserts that the paradigm of reciprocity, which looks only to the degree of risk imposed by the parties to a lawsuit on each (...) other, and to the existence of possible excusing conditions, provides greater protection of individual interests than the paradigm of reasonableness, which assigns liability instrumentally on the basis of a utilitarian calculus. Finally, Professor Fletcher examines stylistic differences between the two paradigms which may explain the modern preference for the paradigm of reasonableness. (shrink)

This paper explores how the widely acknowledged conception of tort law as corrective justice is to be applied to the law of negligence. Corrective justice is an ordering of transactions between two parties which restores them to an antecedent equality. It is thus incompatible with the comprehensive aggregation of utilitarianism, and it stands in easy harmony with Kantian moral notions. This conception of negligence law excludes both maximizing theories, such as Holmes' and Posner's, and Fried's risk pool, which combines Kantianism (...) with distributive rather than corrective justice.Central to the Kantian approach is the impermissibility of self-preference. The two types of self-preference, self-preference in conception and self-preference in action can respectively account for the objective standard and the Learned Hand test, which are the two most characteristic features of negligence and which are generally (and wrongly) considered to be inescapably aggregative. This corrective justice conception of the negligence standard can then be compared to Epstein's corrective justice conception of strict liability, and arguments can be offered in favour of the superiority of the former. (shrink)

This translation of four of Plato's dialogues brings these classic texts alive for modern readers. Allen introduces and comments on the dialogues in an accessible way, inviting the reader to re-examine the issues Plato continually raises.

One approach to legal theory is to provide some sort of rational reconstruction of all or of a large body of the common law. For philosophers of law this has usually meant trying to rationalize a body of law under one or another principle of justice. This paper explores the efforts of the leading tort theorists to provide a moral basis - in the sense of rational reconstruction based on alleged moral principles - for the law of torts. The paper (...) is divided into two parts. In the first part I consider and reject the view that tort law is best understood as falling either within the ambit of the principle of retributive justice, a comprehensive theory of moral responsibility, or an ideal of fairness inherent in the idea that one should impose on others only those risks others impose on one. The second part of the paper distinguishes among various conceptions of corrective or compensatory justice and considers arguments — including previous ones by the author himself — to the effect that tort law is best understood as rooted in principles of corrective justice. This paper argues that although the principles of justice may render defensible many (but by no means all) of the claims to repair and to liability recognized in torts, it cannot explain why we have adopted a tort system as the approach to vindicating those claims. Some other principle — probably not one of justice — is needed to explain why it is that the victim's claim to repair is satisfied by having his losses shifted to his injurer — rather than through some other means of doing so. The paper concludes that the law of torts cannot be understood — in the sense of being given a rational reconstruction — under any one principle of morality. (shrink)

Errata slip inserted. Bibliography: p. 137-140.

In this volume, John R. Catan has gathered together 18 major essays by the well-known aristotelian scholar Joseph Owens that have influenced current opinion on the philosopher.

This volume in the Clarendon Edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes contains A dialogue between a philosopher and a student, of the common laws of England, edited by Alan Cromartie, supplemented by the important fragment "Questions relative to Hereditary Right," discovered and edited by Quentin Skinner. As a critique of common law by a great philosopher, the Dialogue should be essential reading for anybody interested in English political thought or legal theory. Cromartie has established when and why the work (...) was written and has supplied extensive annotation (along with a substantial introduction) to make the work accessible to the non-specialist reader. The additional piece sees Hobbes mounting a robust defense of hereditary right, in the course of which he also makes some important general observations about the concept of a right. It is also of special interest as it constitutes Hobbes's last word on politics. (shrink)