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2Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Law Volume 3 (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2018.Oxford Studies in the Philosophy of Law is a forum for new philosophical work on law. The essays range widely over general jurisprudence, philosophical foundations of specific areas of law, and other philosophical topics relating to legal theory.
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62Law as a leap of faith: essays on law in generalOxford University Press. 2012.Law as a leap of faith -- Legal positivism : 5 1/2 myths -- Some types of law -- Can there be a written constitution? -- How law claims, what law claims -- Nearly natural law -- The legality of law -- The supposed formality of the rule of law -- Hart on legality, justice, and morality -- The virtue of justice and the character of law -- Law in general.
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How law claims, what law claimsIn Matthias Klatt (ed.), Institutionalized reason: the jurisprudence of Robert Alexy, Oxford University Press. 2012.
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Hart and Feinberg on responsibilityIn Matthew H. Kramer (ed.), The legacy of H.L.A. Hart: legal, political, and moral philosophy, Oxford University Press. 2008.
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6Kelsen revisited: new essays on the pure theory of law (edited book)Hart Publishing. 2013.Forty years after his death, Hans Kelsen (1881-1973) remains one of the most discussed and influential legal philosophers of our time. This collection of new essays takes Kelsen's Pure Theory of Law as a stimulus, aiming to move forward the debate on several central issues in contemporary jurisprudence. The essays in Part I address legal validity, the normativity of law, and Kelsen's famous but puzzling idea of a legal system's 'basic norm'. Part II engages with the difficult issues raised by th…Read more
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1Tort law and its theoryIn John Tasioulas (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Philosophy of Law, Cambridge University Press. 2020.
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15Oxford studies in philosophy of law volume 4 (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2021.This volume provides a forum for some of the best new philosophical work on law, by both senior and junior scholars from around the world. The chapters range widely over issues in general jurisprudence (the nature of law, adjudication, and legal reasoning); the philosophical foundations of specific areas of law (from criminal law to evidence to international law); the history of legal philosophy; and related philosophical topics that illuminate the problems of legal theory.
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15Liberals and Unlawful DiscriminationOxford Journal of Legal Studies 9 (1): 1-22. 1989.JOHN GARDNER; Liberals and Unlawful Discrimination, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Volume 9, Issue 1, 1 March 1989, Pages 1–22, https://doi.org/10.1093/ojls/9.
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275The Twilight of LegalityAustralasian Journal of Legal Philosophy 43 (1): 1-16. 2019.This paper argues that juridification has become the enemy of legality. By 'juridification' is meant the proliferation of legal norms and legally recognized norms. By legality is meant conformity with the ideal of the rule of law. The paper begins with the most obvious ways in which juridification threatens legality. Too much law makes the law on any subject hard to discover, hard to remember, and hard to follow. It also makes us too dependent on the discretion of petty officials, who are theref…Read more
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10Law as a Leap of Faith: And Other Essays on Law in GeneralOxford University Press UK. 2012.How do laws resemble rules of games, moral rules, personal rules, rules found in religious teachings, school rules, and so on? Are laws rules at all? Are they all made by human beings? And if so how should we go about interpreting them? How are they organized into systems, and what does it mean for these systems to have 'constitutions'? Should everyone want to live under a system of law? Is there a special kind of 'legal justice'? Does it consist simply in applying the law of the system? And how…Read more
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20From Personal Life to Private LawOxford University Press. 2018.The book examines the philosophical foundations of private law, arguing that the foremost preoccupations of the law of obligations are grounded in and pervade the personal lives of individuals.
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12Making sense of mens Rea: Antony duffs accountOxford Journal of Legal Studies 11 (4): 559-588. 1991.
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154Simply in virtue of being human': The whos and whys of human rightsJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 2 (2): 1-23. 2007.In this paper I raise some questions about the familiar claim, recently reiterated by James Griffin, that human rights are rights that humans have….
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49On the general part of the criminal lawIn Antony Duff (ed.), Philosophy and the Criminal Law: Principle and Critique, Cambridge University Press. pp. 205--256. 1998.
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133How law claims, what law claimsIn Matthias Klatt (ed.), Institutionalized reason: the jurisprudence of Robert Alexy, Oxford University Press. 2012.In this paper, written for a volume on the work of Robert Alexy, I discuss the idea that law makes certain distinctive claims, an idea familiar from the work of both Alexy and Joseph Raz. I begin by refuting some criticisms by Ronald Dworkin of the very idea of law as a claim-maker. I then discuss whether, as Alexy and Raz agree, law's claim is a moral one. Having arrived at an affirmative verdict, I discuss the content of law's moral claim. Is it, as Alexy says, a claim to moral correctness? Or…Read more
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112Value, interest, and well-beingUtilitas 18 (4): 362-382. 2006.In this article we consider and cast doubt on two doctrines given prominence and prestige by the utilitarian tradition in ethics. According to the interest theory of value, value is realized only in the advancement of people's interests. According to the well-being theory of interests, people's interests are advanced only in the augmentation of their well-being. We argue that it is possible to resist these doctrines without abandoning the value-humanist doctrine that the value of anything has to…Read more
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186The logic of excuses and the rationality of emotionsJournal of Value Inquiry 43 (3): 315-338. 2009.Sometimes emotions excuse. Fear and anger, for example, sometimes excuse under the headings of (respectively) duress and provocation. Although most legal systems draw the line at this point, the list of potentially excusatory emotions outside the law seems to be longer. One can readily imagine cases in which, for example, grief or despair could be cited as part of a case for relaxing or even eliminating our negative verdicts on those who performed admittedly unjustified wrongs. To be sure, the a…Read more
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45Review: Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Born Free and Equal? A Philosophical Inquiry into the Nature of Discrimination (review)Ethics 125 (4): 1204-1210. 2015.
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120Justification under AuthorityCanadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 23 (1): 71-98. 2010.In a recent paper in the Yale Law Journal, Malcolm Thorburn argued that to enjoy a justificatory defence in the criminal law is to have a normative power that is exercised in the circumstances which give rise to the justification. He also argued that where such powers are conferred on private citizens, those citizens should be understood as acting as public officials pro tempore when they exercise them. In this extended reply, I resist both propositions and reply to some of the criticisms that T…Read more
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56Fifteen Themes from Law as a Leap of FaithJurisprudence 6 (3): 601-623. 2015.This article contains the author's responses to five critics of his book Law as a Leap of Faith whose criticisms appear in this journal. The critics are Kimberley Brownlee, Antony Hatzistavrou, Kristen Rundle, Sari Kisilevsky and Nicola Lacey. The criticisms and responses pick up the following fifteen themes from the book: law, morality, society, explanation, continuity, rationality, ends, instruments, values, justice, allocation, games, modalities, generalities, jurisprudence
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262What is Tort Law For? Part 1. The Place of Corrective JusticeLaw and Philosophy 30 (1): 1-50. 2011.In this paper I discuss the proposal that the law of torts exists to do justice, more specifically corrective justice, between the parties to a tort case. My aims include clarifying the proposal and defending it against some objections (as well as saving it from some defences that it could do without). Gradually the paper turns to a discussion of the rationale for doing corrective justice. I defend what I call the ‘continuity thesis’ according to which at least part of the rationale for doing co…Read more
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74Destined for the Cardozo Law Review. Posted 28 November 2006.
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249Hart on Legality, Justice and MoralityJurisprudence 1 (2): 253-265. 2010.HLA Hart has sometimes been associated with the false proposition that there is 'no necessary connection between law and morality'. Nigel Simmonds is the latest critic to make the association. He offers an 'ironic' interpretation of a famous passage in Hart's The Concept of Law in which the proposition is apparently rejected as false by Hart. In this paper I explain why, even if Simmonds's ironic interpretation is tenable, it does not associate Hart with the proposition in the way that Simmonds …Read more