An accessible, comprehensive, and high quality companion to legal philosophy written by a stellar cast of international contributors.

The book brings together 33 state-of-the-art chapters on the import and the pros and cons of legal positivism.

"Reflection on the law gives rise to many methodological questions. Some relate to legal doctrines - how best to understand, rationalise and potentially justify areas such as contract law or administrative law or criminal procedure. This chapter, by contrast, will focus on the question of how to understand 'law in general', or the 'nature of law'. Law in this sense is standardly regarded as a particular type of social practice with two dimensions: an institutional dimension involving bodies such as legislatures and courts, and a normative dimension involving the standards and other considerations created and applied by those bodies ('the law'). How should we go about making sense of this social practice? In what way should it be approached? There are three prominent features of our contemporary understanding of law that feed into the methodological debate: (a) the idea that law is a general type of social practice, found in different cultures at different times; (b) the idea that law is a social construction, whose existence depends upon the combined beliefs and actions of a variety of social actors; and (c) the idea that law is a hermeneutic practice, that is, a practice that we self-consciously understand as a distinctive sort of social practice, and in terms of which we understand and structure features of our social world"--

This volume brings together leading experts on natural law theory to provide perspectives on the nature and foundations of law.

The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Law provides a comprehensive, non-technical philosophical treatment of the fundamental questions about the nature of law. Its coverage includes law's relation to morality and the moral obligations to obey the law, the main philosophical debates about particular legal areas such as criminal responsibility, property, contracts, family law, law and justice in the international domain, legal paternalism and the rule of law. The entirely new content has been written specifically for newcomers to the field, making the volume particularly useful for undergraduate and graduate courses in philosophy of law and related areas. All 39 chapters, written by the world's leading researchers and edited by an internationally distinguished scholar, bring a focused, philosophical perspective to their subjects. The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Law promises to be a valuable and much consulted student resource for many years.

The most convenient, accessible guide to Hobbes available.

The Cambridge Companion to the Rule of Law introduces students, scholars, and practitioners to the theory and history of the rule of law, one of the most frequently invoked-and least understood-ideas of legal and political thought and policy practice. It offers a comprehensive re-assessment by leading scholars of one of the world's most cherished traditions. This high-profile collection provides the first global and interdisciplinary account of the histories, moralities, pathologies and trajectories of the rule of law. Unique in conception, and critical in its approach, it evaluates, breaks down, and subverts conventional wisdom about the rule of law for the twenty-first century.