The Essential Nature Of Law

This volume examines power-sharing agreements, their legitimacy and their compatibility with human rights law. Providing a clear, accessible introduction to the political science and human rights law on the issue, the book is an invaluable guide to all those engaged with transitional justice, peace agreements, and human rights.

Presents a systematic, contemporary defence of the natural law outlook in ethics, politics and jurisprudence.

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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1909 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER V. Laws Relative To Personal Beings, Continued.--Society, Sociological Laws. In the last two chapters we have seen how the individual is subject to the laws of thought;.to the laws of association; to moral and spiritual law, and to a phenomenal order that prevails throughout the universe; and now, we wish to enquire whether Human Society--the entire aggregation of individuals--is also subject to invariable and uniform laws, and if so whether those laws, or some of them, have been discovered and reliably formulated so that there may properly be said to exist at the present time a Science of Sociology. Is human society subject to law in its primary meaning, as we have seen physical nature to be, and have social affairs also such a fixed order of sequence as we have found to prevail throughout the realm of matter? If there is such a phenomenal and definite order of sequence, if the movements of society, the successive stages to civilization, have all taken place conformably to certain uniform laws, then this order and these laws are, of course, the subject of scientific investigation, and to discover and formulate them is to found the Science of Sociology. That human society has progressed from simplicity to an almost incomprehensible complexity there can be no question. In language, in government, in music, in art, and every other line of social development, progress has been from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, and that this progress has taken place conformably to law, rather than by chance, is also generally admitted. But the disputed question relative to human progress has been whether the law of causation reigns supreme and universal throughout the realm of social phenomena. Are human choices necessitated, so that they...

Morality and the Nature of Law explores the conceptual relationship between morality and the criteria that determine what counts as law in a given societythe criteria of legal validity. Is it necessary condition for a legal system to include moral criteria of legal validity? Is it even possible for a legal system to have moral criteria of legal validity? The book considers the views of natural law theorists ranging from Blackstone to Dworkin and rejects them, arguing that it is not conceptually necessary that the criteria of legal validity include moral norms. Further, it rejects the exclusive positivist view, arguing instead that it is conceptually possible for the criteria of validity to include moral norms. In the process of considering such questions, this book considers Raz's views concerning the nature of authority and Shapiro's views about the guidance function of law, which have been thought to repudiate the conceptual possibility of moral criteria of legal validity. The book, then, articulates a thought experiment that shows that it is possible for a legal system to have such criteria and concludes with a chapter that argues that any legal system, like that of the United States, which affords final authority over the content of the law to judges who are fallible with respect to the requirements of morality is a legal system with purely source-based criteria of validity.

Understanding the Nature of Law explores methodological questions about how best to explain law. Among these questions, one is central: is there something about law which determines how it should be theorized? This novel book explains the importance of