Educating Oneself in Public : Critical Essays in Jurisprudence

The book is a sophisticated, detailed, and original examination of the main ideas that have dominated Anglo-American legal philosophy since the Second World War. The author critically probes such major themes as: whether there can be right answers to all disputed law cases; how laws and other rules impact on the practical rationality of actors subject to their authority; whether general principles justifying the law must themselves be thought of as part of the law binding on legal actors; the possibility of an interpretivist jurisprudence that is continuous with law practice in a given culture. Since the author has been a participant in many of the debates that made these issues central to late twentieth-century jurisprudence, he is in an excellent position to deepen our understanding of these matters.