Jurisprudence As Ideology

In Jurisprudence as Ideology, Valerie Kerruish asks how it is that people who are put down, let down and kept down by law can be thought to have a general political obligation to obey it. She engages with contemporary issues in socialist, feminist and critical legal theory, and links these issues to debates in jurisprudence and the philosophy and sociology of law.

The Bourgeois Charm of Karl Marx & the Ideological Irony of American Jurisprudence employs a well-known body of work, Marx’s, to explain the inevitable limits of scholarship, in hopes to encourage academic boldness, and diversity, especially within American jurisprudence

This book provides a rare view of a creative scholar at work during a highly productive phase of his career. It shows him as an innovator, theorist, methodologist, “missionary,” critic, and scientist, but he remains, withal, in his fashion, a humanist. He believes that institutions and processes—particularly law, politics, and scholarship—are best understood in human terms. With Holmes, he believes that law is a prediction of what courts will do; hence, to understand law it is necessary to understand judicial behavior. A full explanation of a judge’s behavior would take into account his health (both physical and mental), his personality, his culture and society, and his ideology. Glendon Schubert concedes this but focuses primarily on ideology because he believes the other variables are sublimated in it. Therefore, to him, ideology—attitudes toward human values—is the basic explanation of judicial behavior, and jurisprudence is necessarily human. The studies in this volume are important in the study of judicial behavior, for they broke new ground, and some were forerunners of major books, such as The Judicial Mind, which was published in 1965. Each shows Professor Schubert’s concern at the time they were written, and taken together they show the movement and growth of his ideas and interests.

Karls Renner on socialist legality; Pashukanis and the comodity form theory; Legality and political legitimacy in the sociology of Max Weber; Gramsci, the state and the place of law; Law, legitimation and the advanced capitalist state: the jurisprudence and social theory of Jurgen Habermas; Law, plurality and underdevelopment; State, civil society and total institution: a critique of recent social histories of punishment; Law, economy and the state in England, 1750-1914: some major issues; Anarchism, marxism and the critique law.

This book is about 'Kantianism' in both a narrow and a broad sense. In the former, it is about the tracing of the development of the retributive philosophy of punishment into and beyond its classical phase in the work of a number of philosophers, one of the most prominent of whom is Kant. In the latter, it is an exploration of the many instantiations of the 'Kantian' ideas of individual guilt, responsibility and justice within the substantive criminal law . On their face, such discussions may owe more or less explicitly to Kant, but, in their basic intellectual structure, they share a recognisably common commitment to certain ideas emerging from the liberal Enlightenment and embodied within a theory of criminal justice and punishment which is in this broader sense 'Kantian'. The work has its roots in the emergence in the 1970s and early 1980s in the United States and Britain of the 'justice model' of penal reform, a development that was as interesting in terms of the sociology of philosophical knowledge as it was in its own right. Only a few years earlier, I had been taught in undergraduate criminology (which appeared at the time to be the only discipline to have anything interesting to say about crime and punishment) that 'classical criminology' (that is, Beccaria and the other Enlightenment reformers, who had been colonised as a 'school' within criminology) had died a major death in the 19th century, from which there was no hope of resuscitation.

Features the groundbreaking law-related research of political psychologists. Includes leading legal scholars' commentary and analysis of political psychologists' work. The first book to bring together experts to discuss the interaction between psychology, ideology, and law.