Law Without Values

In recent decades, Oliver Wendell Holmes has been praised as "the only great American legal thinker" and "the most illustrious figure in the history of American law." But in Albert Alschuler's critique of both Justice Holmes and contemporary legal scholarship, a darker portrait is painted-that of a man who, among other things, espoused Social Darwinism, favored eugenics, and, as he himself acknowledged, came "devilish near to believing that might makes right."

In recent decades, Oliver Wendell Holmes has been praised as "the only great American legal thinker" and "the most illustrious figure in the history of American law." But in Albert Alschuler's critique of both Justice Holmes and contemporary legal scholarship, a darker portrait is painted—that of a man who, among other things, espoused Social Darwinism, favored eugenics, and, as he himself acknowledged, came "devilish near to believing that might makes right."

Albert Alschuler's study of Holmes is very different from other books about him, in that it is an exercise in debunking him.

Global Administrative Law has recently emerged as one of the most important contemporary fields in public law scholarship. Concerned with developing fuller understandings of patterns in global governance, it represents one of the most insightful ways of viewing the multifarious forms of public power that now exist beyond the State. The present collection brings together some of the leading scholars working in the field of global administrative law to address past and future challenges related to global governance. Each of the contributions picks up on the more general theme of the values that do or should inform global administrative law, and the book in this way provides a novel and thought-provoking commentary on this most engaging area of debate. Values in Global Administrative Law will be of interest to public lawyers, social and political scientists and scholars of international relations. It will also be an invaluable resource for undergraduate and postgraduate courses that touch partly or exclusively on the challenges of global governance.

This festschrift, in honor of the work of Gray L. Dorsey, covers their major areas of his lifelong commitment to the culture and jurisprudence of law in an historical and comparative, East-West context. Within his normative framework, Dorsey took account of the crisis in positivism, Marxism, and alternative conceptions of value in the law. His work emphasized intercultural conflicts in a societal and global environment without surrendering the sense of western culture and its special contributions to legal and moral thought. The volume, originally prepared as a special issue of the Washington University Law Quarterly, has the benefit of an urbane new opening essay by Professor Vojcanin, which seeks to show how jurisculture is a "treasure map one may use to unearth the holes in which justice was hidden." It also contains a special essay by Gray Dorsey to conclude the volume in which he offers his current views on the philosophy of law and social theory in general. The volume is vigorous in its analysis, and central to any serious appraisal of the status of the philosophy of international law at this stage in history. The essays by Abraham Edel, Elizabeth Flower, Harold J. Berman, and Iredell Jenkins give special attention to this theme. The chapters by Jerome Hall, Herbert H.P. Ma, and Thomas H. Fang each take up a central issue in the relationship of world religion to world law. A third set of papers--by Edward McWhinney, Palitha T.B. Kohona, and Jacob W.F. Sundberg, discuss the major sociological implications of Dorsey's type of legal theory--with figures from Karl Marx, Max Weber, and F.S.C. Northrop covered in detail. For three decades, Gray L. Dorsey has contributed to comparative legal systems, emphasizing through his novel method of reasoning--jurisculture--a synthesis of empirical investigation and legal reasoning. Dorsey's work focuses on a set of meanings derived without reference to observed events, but by the adaptation and use of fundamental beliefs to organize and govern human cooperation. Gray L. Dorsey is Charles Nagel Professor Emeritus of Jurisprudence at International Law at Washington University Law School in St. Louis. He is the author of, among other works, Beyond the United States: Changing Discourse in International Politics and Law, and Jurisculture--the first two volumes, on Greece and Rome, and on India and China are now published by Transaction Publishers--with an additional five volumes remaining to complete this massive project. He is a past president of the International Association for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy.

It is clear that the current crisis of the EU is not confined to the Eurozone and the EMU, evidenced in its inability to ensure the compliance of Member States to follow the principles and values underlying the integration project in Europe (including the protection of democracy, the Rule of Law, and human rights). This defiance has affected the Union profoundly, and in a multi-faceted assessment of this phenomenon, The Enforcement of EU Law and Values: Ensuring Member States' Compliance, dissects the essence of this crisis, examining its history and offering coping methods for the years to come. Defiance is not a new concept and this volume explores the richness of EU-level and national-level examples of historical defiance - the French empty chair policy, the Luxembourg compromise, and the FPO crisis in Austria - and draws on the experience of the US legal system and that of the integration projects on other continents. Building on this legal-political context, the book focuses on the assessment of the adequacy of the enforcement mechanisms whilst learning from EU integration history. Structured in four parts, the volume studies (1) theoretical issues on defiance in the context of multi-layered legal orders, (2) EU mechanisms of acquis and values' enforcement, (3) comparative perspective on law-enforcement in multi-layered legal systems, and (4) case-studies of defiance in the EU.

This book brings together twelve of the most important legal philosophers in the Anglo-American and Civil Law traditions. The book is a collection of the papers these philosophers presented at the Conference on Neutrality and Theory of Law, held at the University of Girona, in May 2010. The central question that the conference and this collection seek to answer is: Can a theory of law be neutral? The book covers most of the main jurisprudential debates. It presents an overall discussion of the connection between law and morals, and the possibility of determining the content of law without appealing to any normative argument. It examines the type of project currently being held by jurisprudential scholarship. It studies the different approaches to theorizing about the nature or concept of law, the role of conceptual analysis and the essential features of law. Moreover, it sheds some light on what can be learned from studying the non-essential features of law. Finally, it analyzes the nature of legal statements and their truth values. This book takes the reader a step further to understanding law.

The book explores a variety of problems connected to philosophy and philosophy of law. It discusses the problem of monism-pluralism in philosophy and philosophy of law, criticizes philosophy of post-positivism and postmodernism, and investigates dialectics as a universal global methodological basis of scientific cognition and philosophy of law. The volume also pays particular attention to contemporary legal education, offering potential solutions to problems in this field. The book is the result of a range of sociological studies conducted both in Russia and abroad concerning the legal process and legal consciousness.