I first lectured on themes here while I was the Arthur L. Goodhart Visiting Professor of Legal Science at Cambridge University in 1991–2, and began the book a number of years later. I have written it not only for those with academic interests in law and legal systems, such as law students, professors of law, legal theorists, and other scholars, but for lawyers and judges as well. The scope of the book is not confined to Anglo-American systems. It is addressed more generally to the forms and functions of legal phenomena in developed Western societies, and its central themes apply still more widely. I now offer the book as an ambitious yet unhurried attempt to develop systematic ways of giving form in law its due, both as an avenue of understanding and as a means of serving a variety of purposes: policy and related ends, rule of law values, and fundamental political values.

I focus here on paradigms of the forms of a varied selection of functional legal units: legislatures and courts; statutory and other rules; species of law besides rules, such as contracts and property interests; legal methodologies, such as those for interpreting statutes; and enforcive devices, such as sanctions and remedies. In addressing the make-up, unity, instrumental capacity, distinct identity, and other attributes of these functional legal units with focus on their forms, the book provides a new way of viewing the familiar.