Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Books
  3. Normative Jurisprudence
  • Cited by 14
  • Robin West, Georgetown University, Washington DC
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
June 2012
Print publication year:
2011
Online ISBN:
9781139043922
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139043922
Subjects:
Law: General Interest, Law, Human Rights, Jurisprudence
Series:
Cambridge Introductions to Philosophy and Law
Information

Book description

Normative Jurisprudence aims to reinvigorate normative legal scholarship that both criticizes positive law and suggests reforms for it, on the basis of stated moral values and legalistic ideals. It looks sequentially and in detail at the three major traditions in jurisprudence – natural law, legal positivism and critical legal studies – that have in the past provided philosophical foundations for just such normative scholarship. Over the last fifty years or so, all of these traditions, although for different reasons, have taken a number of different turns – toward empirical analysis, conceptual analysis or Foucaultian critique – and away from straightforward normative criticism. As a result, normative legal scholarship – scholarship that is aimed at criticism and reform – is now lacking a foundation in jurisprudential thought. The book criticizes those developments and suggests a return, albeit with different and in many ways larger challenges, to this traditional understanding of the purpose of legal scholarship.

Reviews

"Robin West has done us all a tremendous service by reminding American lawyers, legislators and law professors that the only legitimate end of law is justice. By reinvigorating the science of "normative jurisprudence" -- the study of how to make the law more just -- Professor West has inaugurated a new era in American law. This is an important and immensely valuable book."

- M.N.S. Sellers
Regents Professor, University System of Maryland


"Robin West's brilliant book puts the state of normative legal theory in a new light by showing the motives that brought the major theories into being and the contingencies and confusions that laid them low. She gives reason to think we could, and should, have a much richer normative discussion about law than we do. This book is instructive, surprising, and full of well-earned inspiration for the next generation of legal thought."

Jedediah Purdy
Professor of Law, Duke University School of Law


Refine List

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

Contents

Contents
References

Metrics

Altmetric attention score

Full text views

Total number of HTML views: 0
Total number of PDF views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

Book summary page views

Total views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

* Views captured on Cambridge Core between #date#. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

Usage data cannot currently be displayed.