Newly updated ninth edition: “A superbly written, pedagogically rich, historically and conceptually informed introduction to legal reasoning.” —Law and Politics Book Review Over the decades it has been in print, Reason in Law has established itself as the place to start for understanding legal reasoning, a critical component of the rule of law. This ninth edition brings the book’s analyses and examples up to date, adding new cases while retaining old ones whose lessons remain potent. It examines several recent controversial Supreme Court decisions, including rulings on the constitutionality and proper interpretation of the Affordable Care Act and Justice Scalia’s powerful dissent in Maryland v. King. Also new to this edition are cases on same-sex marriage, the Voting Rights Act, and the legalization of marijuana. A new appendix explains the historical evolution of legal reasoning and the rule of law in civic life. The result is an indispensable introduction to the workings of the law.

Previous editions : 1988 (3rd) ; and 1994 (4th).

Over the nearly four decades it has been in print, Reason in Law has established itself as the place to start for understanding legal reasoning, a critical component of the rule of law. This ninth edition brings the book’s analyses and examples up to date, adding new cases while retaining old ones whose lessons remain potent. It examines several recent controversial Supreme Court decisions, including rulings on the constitutionality and proper interpretation of the Affordable Care Act and Justice Scalia’s powerful dissent in Maryland v. King. Also new to this edition are cases on same-sex marriage, the Voting Rights Act, and the legalization of marijuana. A new appendix explains the historical evolution of legal reasoning and the rule of law in civic life. The result is an indispensable introduction to the workings of the law.

'This is an outline of a coherence theory of law. Its basic ideas are: reasonable support and weighing of reasons. All the rest is commentary.’ These words at the beginning of the preface of this book perfectly indicate what On Law and Reason is about. It is a theory about the nature of the law which emphasises the role of reason in the law and which refuses to limit the role of reason to the application of deductive logic. In 1989, when the first edition of On Law and Reason appeared, this book was ground breaking for several reasons. It provided a rationalistic theory of the law in the language of analytic philosophy and based on a thorough understanding of the results, including technical ones, of analytic philosophy. That was not an obvious combination at the time of the book’s first appearance and still is not. The result is an analytical rigor that is usually associated with positivist theories of the law, combined with a philosophical position that is not natural law in a strict sense, but which shares with it the emphasis on the role of reason in determining what the law is. If only for this rare combination, On Law and Reason still deserves careful study. On Law and Reason also foreshadowed and influenced a development in the field of Legal Logic that would take place in the nineties of the 20th century, namely the development of non-monotonic (‘defeasible’) logics for the analysis of legal reasoning. In the new Introduction to this second edition, this aspect is explored in some more detail.

Arguing that good legal reasoning remains the best device by which we can ensure that judicial impartiality, the rule of law, and social trust and peace are preserved, Thomas F. Burke and Lief H. Carter present an accessible and lively text that analyzes the politics of the judicial process. Looking at the larger social and institutional contexts that affect the rule of law - including religious beliefs and media coverage of the courts - Reason in Law uses cases ripped from the headlines to illustrate its theory in real-world practice.

Law and the Limits of Reason asks "what are the consequences of recognizing the limits of reason within the legal system?" In particular, what are the consequences for the allocation of lawmaking authority among judges, legislators, and administrative agencies or executive officials? Vermeule examines the conditions under which the limits of reason support a greater or lesser allocation of authority to one institution or another.

"Public reason" is one of the central concepts in modern liberal political theory. As articulated by John Rawls, it presents a way to overcome the difficulties created by intractable differences among citizens' religious and moral beliefs by strictly confining the place of such convictions in the public sphere. Identifying this conception as a key point of conflict, this book presents a debate among contemporary natural law and liberal political theorists on the definition and validity of the idea of public reason. Its distinguished contributors examine the consequences of interpreting public reason more broadly as "right reason," according to natural law theory, versus understanding it in the narrower sense in which Rawls intended. They test public reason by examining its implications for current issues, confronting the questions of abortion and slavery and matters relating to citizenship. This energetic exchange advances our understanding of both Rawls's contribution to political philosophy and the lasting relevance of natural law. It provides new insights into crucial issues facing society today as it points to new ways of thinking about political theory and practice.