Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Shared Authority : Courts and Legislatures in Legal Theory, Hardback Book

Shared Authority : Courts and Legislatures in Legal Theory Hardback

Part of the Law and Practical Reason series

Hardback

Description

This new book advances a fresh philosophical account of the relationship between the legislature and courts, opposing the common conception of law, in which it is legislatures that primarily create the law, and courts that primarily apply it.

This conception has eclectic affinities with legal positivism, and although it may have been a helpful intellectual tool in the past, it now increasingly generates more problems than it solves.

For this reason, the author argues, legal philosophers are better off abandoning it.

At the same time they are asked to dismantle the philosophical and doctrinal infrastructure that has been based on it and which has been hitherto largely unquestioned.

In its place the book offers an alternative framework for understanding the role of courts and the legislature; a framework which is distinctly anti-positivist and which builds on Ronald Dworkin’s interpretive theory of law.

But, contrary to Dworkin, it insists that legal duty is sensitive to the position one occupies in the project of governing; legal interpretation is not the solitary task of one super-judge, but a collaborative task structured by principles of institutional morality such as separation of powers which impose a moral duty on participants to respect each other’s contributions.

Moreover this collaborative task will often involve citizens taking an active role in their interaction with the law.

Information

£85.00

 
Free Home Delivery

on all orders

 
Pick up orders

from local bookshops

Information