In a series of new essays the authors attempt to answer important questions about the nature of jurisprudential thinking.

Moving from the scientific revolution to the nineteenth-century rise of legal codes, Berkowitz tells the story of how lawyers and philosophers invented legal science to preserve law's claim to moral authority. The "gift" of science, however, proved bittersweet. Instead of strengthening the bond between law and justice, the subordination of law to science transformed law from an ethical order into a tool for social and economic ends.

In this book, Richard A. Posner examines how judges go about making difficult decisions. Posner argues that they cannot rely on either logic or science, but must fall back on a grab bag of informal methods of reasoning that owe less than one might think to legal training and experience. -- Adapted from Amazon.com summary.

This text presents cutting edge contemporary materials, as well as new chapters on Natural Law, Positivism, Gay Legal Rights and Critical Lawyering. The book offers comprehensive coverage of legal theory from traditional to current movements, including new materials on Legal Formalism, Legal Process, Latino Critical, and Queer Critical Theory. Also contains extensive readings and updated and amplified notes, questions, problems, and bibliographies.

Proceedings of the Conference on Legal Theory and Philosophy of Science, Lund, Sweden, December 11-14, 1983

A first comprehensive account of Adam Smith's jurisprudence demonstrates how his ideas developed out of, and in response to, Hume's theory of justice and includes the social and political thought expounded in his major writings.

Here the influential Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Benjamin Cardozo [1870-1938] examines the nature of the relationship between justice and law.

This textbook, the first of its kind, makes it easy--and fun!--to teach an exciting new course on the "jurisprudence of sport." Unlike sports law, which treats sports as objects of regulation by ordinary legal systems, this course treats sports and games as legal systems to be studied in their own right. The book is appropriate not only for law students but also for undergraduates; it offers an introduction to legal thinking but requires no background in legal doctrine. Student-friendly and deeply comparative, the text draws examples from the world's most popular team and individual sports and games (including baseball, football, soccer, tennis, golf, gymnastics, chess, boxing, and esports) and also from less widely known competitions (competitive eating, cornhole, etc.). Chapters are organized in an intuitive sports-focused manner, covering such issues as scoring systems, penalties, league structure, player eligibility and assignment, amateurism, officiating, replay review, and cheating. The jurisprudence of sport is a fast-developing field of academic study. The authors, one of them a leading figure in the field and both professors at top law schools, maintain a high degree of analytical rigor and theoretical sophistication. Icons sprinkled throughout introduce students to fundamental concepts, some law-particular (such as rules vs. standards and prices vs. sanctions) and others from cognate disciplines (such as agency costs, the Coase Theorem, and psychological biases and heuristics). Richly filled with comments, questions, and exercises, the text facilitates a large variety of pedagogical approaches and is suitable for 2- to 4-credit courses.