The Problems of JurisprudenceIn this book, one of our country’s most distinguished scholar-judges shares with us his vision of the law. For the past two thousand years, the philosophy of law has been dominated by two rival doctrines. One contends that law is more than politics and yields, in the hands of skillful judges, correct answers to even the most difficult legal questions; the other contends that law is politics through and through and that judges wield essentially arbitrary powers. Rejecting these doctrines as too metaphysical in the first instance and too nihilistic in the second, Richard Posner argues for a pragmatic jurisprudence, one that eschews formalism in favor of the factual and the empirical. Laws, he argues, are not abstract, sacred entities, but socially determined goads for shaping behavior to conform with society’s values. |
Contents
The Birth of Law and the Rise | 1 |
A Short History of Jurisprudence | 9 |
A Preview of the Book | 24 |
Law as Logic Rules and Science 337 | 37 |
Legal Reasoning as Practical Reasoning | 71 |
Other Illustrations of Practical Reasoning in Law | 101 |
Legitimacy in Adjudication | 124 |
Ontological Skepticism | 161 |
Objectivity in Statutory Interpretation | 262 |
How to Decide Statutory and Constitutional Cases | 286 |
Corrective Retributive Procedural | 313 |
A Note on Retributive Justiceand on Rights | 330 |
What Has Moral Philosophy to Offer Law? | 348 |
Literary Feminist and Communitarian Perspectives | 393 |
JURISPRUDENCE WITHOUT | 421 |
A Pragmatist Manifesto | 454 |