Political jurisprudence is the branch of jurisprudence that treats law as an aspect of human experience called 'the political'. This is an approach that many contemporary jurists, those whose work presupposes the autonomy of legal order, tend to suppress. In this book, Martin Loughlin assesses the contribution made by political jurists and explains its contemporary significance. Political jurists maintain that the essential characteristics of modern legal order can only be revealed by considering how political authority is constituted. The political is orientated to the fact that people are organized into territorially-bounded units within which authoritative governing arrangements have been established, but the authority of this way of viewing the world is strengthened only through institution-building. Law may be an aspect of the political, but to perform its authority-generating functions effectively it must operate relatively autonomously. The political and the legal operate relationally, without one being reduced to the other. Loughlin introduces the rich literature of political jurisprudence through essays on innovative political jurists such as Hobbes, Burke, Constant, Romano, and Schmitt, and on such central themes as political right, institutionalism, constitutional legality, and reason of state. Building on his earlier books, The Idea of Public Law (OUP 2003) and Foundations of Public Law (OUP 2010), this collection extends his account of this influential strand of European legal thought.

Political jurisprudence is the branch of jurisprudence that treats law as an aspect of human experience called 'the political'. This is an approach that many contemporary jurists, those whose work presupposes the autonomy of legal order, tend to suppress. In this book, Martin Loughlin assesses the contribution made by political jurists and explains its contemporary significance. Political jurists maintain that the essential characteristics of modern legal order can only be revealed by considering how political authority is constituted. The political is orientated to the fact that people are organized into territorially-bounded units within which authoritative governing arrangements have been established, but the authority of this way of viewing the world is strengthened only through institution-building. Law may be an aspect of the political, but to perform its authority-generating functions effectively it must operate relatively autonomously. The political and the legal operate relationally, without one being reduced to the other. Loughlin introduces the rich literature of political jurisprudence through essays on innovative political jurists such as Hobbes, Burke, Constant, Romano, and Schmitt, and on such central themes as political right, institutionalism, constitutional legality, and reason of state. Building on his earlier books, The Idea of Public Law (OUP 2003) and Foundations of Public Law (OUP 2010), this collection extends his account of this influential strand of European legal thought.

This text explores what jurisprudence is about, what it seeks to do and how. The book considers how the conclusions of jurisprudence can be brought to bear on everyday problems of legal practice and major social, moral or political issues.

Jurisprudence is the prudence of jus, law's consciousness and conscience. Throughout history, when thinkers wanted to contemplate the organisation of society or the relationship between authority and the subject, they turned to law. All great philosophers, from Plato to Hobbes, Kant, Hegel, Marx and Weber had either studied the law or had a deep understanding of legal operations. But jurisprudence is also the conscience of law, the exploration of law's justice and of an ideal law or equity at the bar of which state law is always judged. Jurisprudence brings together 'is' and 'ought', the positive and the normative, law and justice. But after a long process of decay, legal theory is today characterised by cognitive and moral poverty. Jurisprudence has become restricted and academically peripheral, a guidebook to technocratic legalism and a legitimation of the existent. Critical jurisprudence returns to the classical tradition of a general philosophy of law and adopts a much wider concept of legality. It is concerned both with posited law and with the law of the law. All legal aspects of the economic, political, emotional and physical modes of production and reproduction of society are part of critical jurisprudence. This widening of scope allows a radical rethinking of the nature of rights, justice, sovereignty and judgement. A political philosophy of justice today must examine the political economy of law; transitions from Empire to nation; ideological and imaginary constructions through which we understand ourselves and relate to others; ways in which gender, race or sexuality create forms of identity that both discipline bodies and offer sites of resistance. Law's complicity with political oppression, violence and racism has to be faced before it is possible to speak of a new beginning for legal thought, which in turn is the necessary precondition for a theory of justice. Critical Jurisprudence offers an ethics of law against the nihilism of power and an aesthetics of existence for the melancholic lawyer.

In his introduction Professor Hart offers both an exposition and a critical assesment of some central issues in jurisprudence and political theory. Essay themes include Bentham's identification of the forms of mistification protecting the law from criticism, his relation to Beccaria and his conversion to democratic radicalism.

Across the globe, the domain of the litigator and the judge has radically expanded, making it increasingly difficult for those who study comparative and international politics, public policy and regulation, or the evolution of new modes of governance to avoid encountering a great deal of law and courts. In On Law, Politics, and Judicialization, two of the world's leading political scientists present the best of their research, focusing on how to build and test a social science oflaw and courts. The opening chapter features Shapiro's classic 'Political Jurisprudence,' and Stone Sweet's 'Judicialization and the Construction of Governance,' pieces that critically redefined research agendas on the politics of law and judging. Subsequent chapters take up diverse themes: thestrategic contexts of litigation and judging; the discursive foundations of judicial power; the social logic of precedent and appeal; the networking of legal elites; the lawmaking dynamics of rights adjudication; the success and diffusion of constitutional review; the reciprocal impact of courts and legislatures; the globalization of private law; methods, hypothesis-testing, and prediction in comparative law; and the sources and consequences of the creeping 'judicialization of politics' aroundthe world. Chosen empirical settings include the United States, the GATT-WTO, France and Germany, Imperial China and Islam, the European Union, and the transnational world of the Lex Mercatoria. Written for a broad, scholarly audience, the book is also recommended for use in graduate and advancedundergraduate courses in law and the social sciences.

Natural law is a perennial though poorly represented and understood issue in political philosophy and the philosophy of law. In this 2006 book, Mark C. Murphy argues that the central thesis of natural law jurisprudence - that law is backed by decisive reasons for compliance - sets the agenda for natural law political philosophy, demonstrating how law gains its binding force by way of the common good of the political community. Murphy's work ranges over the central questions of natural law jurisprudence and political philosophy, including the formulation and defense of the natural law jurisprudential thesis, the nature of the common good, the connection between the promotion of the common good and requirement of obedience to law, and the justification of punishment.

Defining Civil and Political Rights provides a comprehensive analysis and commentary on the decisions - technically known as views - of the United Nations Human Rights Committee, for use by human rights lawyers throughout the world. Each of the substantive rights and freedoms set out in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights is considered in detail, by analysis of final reviews and comments of the Human Rights Committee. This second edition has been thoroughly revised and updated to take account of recent jurisprudence on the Human Rights Committee. New material has been added based upon substantive areas of the committee's 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.