Normative Jurisprudence
An Introduction

This book aims to reinvigorate normative legal scholarship that both criticizes positive law and suggests reforms for it.

Robin West (Author)

9780521460002, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 22 August 2011

220 pages
23.5 x 16 x 1.9 cm, 0.47 kg

"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

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.

1. Revitalizing natural law
2. Legal positivism, censorial jurisprudence, and legal reform
3. Critical legal studies – the missing years
4. Reconstructing normative jurisprudence.

Subject Areas: Jurisprudence & philosophy of law [LAB], Law [L], Human rights [JPVH], Philosophy [HP]