Philosophy of Law
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By Lawrence B. Solum Introduction Normative legal theory is concerned with the ends and justifications for the law as a whole and for particular legal rules. Previous entries in the Lexicon have examined exemplars of the three great traditions in normative theory–consequentialist, deontological, and aretaic (or virtue-centered) perspectives. There are important differences between these three
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By Lawrence B. Solum Introduction What is the nature of law? This question has occupied center stage jurisprudence and philosophy of law in the modern era, and has been the central occupation of contemporary analytic jurisprudence. This entry in the Legal Theory Lexicon aims to give an overview of the “What is Law?” debate. Historically,
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By Lawrence B. Solum Introduction Back in the day (by which I mean the mid-70s through the mid-90s) big normative theories were all the rage in the legal academy. It’s hard to be sure, but one suspects that it started with Rawls: when A Theory of Justice hit the legal academy, it produced a dramatic shift in
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By Lawrence B. Solum Introduction The Legal Theory Lexicon series usually explicates some concept in legal theory, jurisprudence, or philosophy of law. But what are those fields and how do they relate to each other? Is “jurisprudence” a synonym for “philosophy of law” or are these two overlapping but distinct fields? Is “legal theory” broader or narrower
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By Lawrence B. Solum Introduction American law students learn about formalism and instrumentalism early on—although those particular terms may not be introduced explicitly in classroom discussion. Many law students hunger for “black letter law”: they are looking for legal rules that can be memorized and applied to the facts in a more or less determinate
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By Lawrence B. Solum Introduction Most law students begin to notice that there is a fundamental difference between the kinds of legal rules that come up in torts and criminal law, on the one hand, and the sorts of legal rules that arise in contracts and in the structural part of constitutional law, on the
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By Lawrence B. Solum Introduction How can we look at a legal system? H.L.A. Hart famously deployed the distinction between external and internal perspectives on a legal system in his famous book, The Concept of Law. This post provides a very brief introduction to this distinction for law students (especially first-year law students) with an
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By Lawrence B. Solum Introduction Our topic this week is “holism,” more particularly the idea that theories of the law are (or “should be” or “can be”) holistic. Legal holism can be captured in a famous slogan, “The law is a seamless web,” and the modern legal theorist who is most associated with legal holism
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By Lawrence B. Solum Introduction Law students with a background in philosophy are sure to notice the strong influence of moral philosophy on legal thinking. Theories such as Kant’s moral philosophy have had a profound influence on the idea of fairness and on the conception of rights that is at the heart of deontological legal