Normative Jurisprudence

Normative Jurisprudence aims to reinvigorate normative legal scholarship that both criticizes positive law and suggests reforms for it, on the basis of stated moral values and legalistic ideals. It looks sequentially and in detail at the three major traditions in jurisprudence - natural law, legal positivism, and critical legal studies - that have in the past provided philosophical foundations for just such normative scholarship. Over the last fifty years or so, all of these traditions, although for different reasons, have taken a number of different turns - toward empirical analysis, conceptual analysis, or Foucaultian critique - and away from straightforward normative criticism. As a result, normative legal scholarship - scholarship that is aimed at criticism and reform - is now lacking a foundation in jurisprudential thought. The book criticizes those developments and suggests a return, albeit with different and in many ways larger challenges, to this traditional understanding of the purpose of legal scholarship.

Author: Robin West
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 08/22/2011
Pages: 220
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.00w x 0.60d
ISBN: 9780521738293

About the Author
West, Robin: - Robin West is an Associate Dean for Research and Frederick Haas Professor of Law and Philosophy at the Georgetown University Law Center. She is the author of several books and more than a hundred articles on issues in feminist legal theory, law and literature, law and humanities, jurisprudence and constitutional law and theory, most recently, Marriage, Sexuality, and Gender (2007) and Re-Imagining Justice (2003). She is the recipient of a J. B. White Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and Humanities and she has held the John Carroll Research Chair at Georgetown.