Law As A Means To An End

The contemporary US legal culture is marked by ubiquitous battles among various groups attempting to seize control of the law and wield it against others in pursuit of their particular agenda. This battle takes place in administrative, legislative, and judicial arenas at both the state and federal levels. This book identifies the underlying source of these battles in the spread of the instrumental view of law - the idea that law is purely a means to an end - in a context of sharp disagreement over the social good. It traces the rise of the instrumental view of law in the course of the past two centuries, then demonstrates the pervasiveness of this view of law and its implications within the contemporary legal culture, and ends by showing the various ways in which seeing law in purely instrumental terms threatens to corrode the rule of law.

Jhering, Rudolph von. Law as a Means to an End. Translated from the German by Isaac Husik with an Editorial Preface by Joseph H. Drake and with Introductions by Henry Lamm and W.M. Geldart. Boston: The Boston Book Company, 1913. lxi, 483 pp. Reprinted 1999 by The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd. LCCN 99-23754. ISBN 1-58477-009-0. Cloth. $80. * Originally published as Volume V of the Modern Legal Philosophy Series. Influential landmark of nineteenth century jurisprudence on which the modern concept of social utilitarianism is based. Jhering [1818-1892] advances the idea that law should be used to realize social justice. The Struggle for Law, another Jhering classic, is also available as a reprint published by The Lawbook Exchange.

Excerpt from Law as a Means to an End The need of the series now proposed is so obvious as hardly to need advocacy. We are on the threshold of a long period of construe tive readjustment and restatement of our law in almost every depart ment. We come to the task, as a profession, almost wholly untrained in the technic of legal analysis and legal science in general. Neither we. Nor any community, could expect anything but crude results without thorough preparation. Many teachers, and scores of students and practitioners, must first have become thoroughly familiar with the world's methods of juristic thought. As a first preparation for the coming years of that kind of activity, it is the part of wisdom first to familiarize ourselves with what has been done by the great modern thinkers abroad to catch up with the general state of learning on the subject. After a season of this, we shall breed a family of well-equipped and original thinkers of our own. Our own law must, of course, be worked out ultimately by our own thinkers; but they must first be equipped with the state of learning in the world to date. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.