The Tapestry Of The Law

Although its concern is jurisprudence, The Tapestry of the Law is intended to offer neither an original theory of or about law nor an account of other people's theories in textbook form. It is, rather, an attempt to approach the subject without following either of these conventions. The reasons are as follows. Those engaged in legal theory are prone to assert that one cannot properly understand the law unless one takes a jurisprudential approach - preferably their own - to it. Equally, those engaged in exposition of the law may counter that legal theory fails to pay adequate attention to actual law. There is at least some truth in these claims. Analyses, courses and textbooks on both sides do often seem to be produced without reference to the other. Yet such isolation is probably more apparent than real. Most, if not all, so-called "black letter" lawyers do operate on the basis of certain jurisprudential understandings, even if these are not articulated ones. In the frequently quoted words ofF C S Northrop: There are lawyers, judges and even law professors who tell us they have no legal philosophy.

In recent years coherence theories of law and adjudication have been extremely influential in legal scholarship. These theories significantly advance the case for coherentism in law. Nonetheless, there remain a number of problems in the coherence theory in law. This ambitious new work makes the first concerted attempt to develop a coherence-based theory of legal reasoning, and in so doing addresses, or at least mitigates these problems. The book is organized in three parts. The first part provides a critical analysis of the main coherentist approaches to both normative and factual reasoning in law. The second part investigates the coherence theory in a number of fields that are relevant to law: coherence theories of epistemic justification, coherentist approaches to belief revision and theory-choice in science, coherence theories of practical and moral reasoning and coherence-based approaches to discourse interpretation. Taking this interdisciplinary analysis as a starting point, the third part develops a coherence-based model of legal reasoning. While this model builds upon the standard theory of legal reasoning, it also leads to rethinking some of the basic assumptions that characterize this theory, and suggests some lines along which it may be further developed. Thus, ultimately, the book not only improves upon the current state of coherence theory in law, but also contributes to the larger debate about how to articulate a theory of legal reasoning that results in better decision-making.

We cannot see the world as it is because we face it in a 'contaminated' vein. That is, our conceptual scheme and biological constitution condition our world view. The legal normative world we are dealing with has some special features, like the primacy of practical reason over theoretical reason and the primacy of the internal point of view over the external point of view. Although it is not a feature of all legal traditions, 'legal dogmatics' is a privileged way of knowing legal normative object, that is, our legal orders. But we are not undertaking - as legal scholars - an empiricist enterprise because, among other reasons, we are not interested in the reality 'in itself' but in the 'relevant' reality, at least for us. In this respect, we do not only depend on theories (like physicists) but also on legal authoritative sources, that is, power and legitimacy. Legal scholars (and other participants in the legal life) are not neutral observers of their own world, trying to discover some hidden truth. They are committed experts trying to describe, justify and improve the legal order.

After a brief introduction to some leading bio-ethical principles, Professor Devereux here examines the interplay of different areas of law as they impact on medical practice, such as constitutional limitations on the delivery of health care and the impact of the law of contract, tort and crime.

Knowledge Discovery from Legal Databases is the first text to describe data mining techniques as they apply to law. Law students, legal academics and applied information technology specialists are guided thorough all phases of the knowledge discovery from databases process with clear explanations of numerous data mining algorithms including rule induction, neural networks and association rules. Throughout the text, assumptions that make data mining in law quite different to mining other data are made explicit. Issues such as the selection of commonplace cases, the use of discretion as a form of open texture, transformation using argumentation concepts and evaluation and deployment approaches are discussed at length.

Legal statements are, according to the authors, the most basic elements of the law. Nevertheless they must be considered not only as the pieces of a puzzle, but also as the components of a dynamic and highly complex reality: the law of contemporary society. The book presents an analysis of the different types of legal statements (mandatory rules, principles, power-conferring rules, definitions, permissions, values and the rule of recognition) from a threeefold perspective, that is, considering their logical structure, their function in legal reasoning as reasons for action, and their connections with the interests and power relationships among the individuals and the social groups. The result is conceived as a first step in the building of a general theory of law designed not as an isolated discourse but as a decisive element for the dynamization of the legal culture.