This textbook reviews both traditional and radical approaches to legal theory, with emphasis on the accounts which legal theorists have given of law as a particular form of meaning. Suitable for undergraduate courses, either as the primary text or as supplementary reading, it compares claims made by legal theorists about the construction of the sense of law with those derived from linguistics, psychology and semiotics.
It may be used either in tandem with Jackson’s Making Sense in Law, or independently.
Contents:
Introduction
Law, Biology and Development
The Command Theory
Historical Jurisprudence
Pure Normativism: Kelsen
Scandinavian Realism
American Realism
Hart's "Soft Positivism"
Law, Morality and Society
The Semiotics of Adjudication and the Justification of Legal Decisions
Some Radical Forms of Jurisprudential Critique (CLS, Deconstructionism, Psychoanalysis, Feminism)
