Law's Evolution and Human Understanding [Hardcover]

When should we follow the law? How can we know what law's words mean? Whatislaw?Law's Evolution and Human Understandingpresents fresh and surprising answers to these questions. In an account alive with the stories of our shared human history, Laurence Claus explains why we should discard the old idea that legal rules tell us what to do, and instead see law as a system of sayings that evolves among humans to help us betterunderstand each other.

When driving on public roads, when buying and selling, and in countless other aspects of our work and play, we depend on law to let us know what other people are likely to do and to expect of us. Through fast-paced pages of anecdote and argument,Law's Evolution and Human Understandingexplains the revolutionary consequences of seeing law as truly what Oliver Wendell Holmes called it: systematized prediction. The book reveals how this vision of law can transform our thinking about the way we make moral decisions, about the way we read law, and about many other ways that law affects our lives.

1. What Makes Words Law?
2. How Law Grows Up in a Group
3. The Invention of Because I Said So
4. The Empty Idea of Authority
5. Ideas that Endure
6. When Should We Do What Law Signals?
7. How Law Works
8. Evolution and Revolution
9. Reading to Understand Each Other
10. The Life of the Law
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index

The law of a community is an expression of its customs. Law evolves rather than being created. But what of such concepts as authority, legitimacy, and sovereignty within such a bottom-up approach to law? Claus's beautifully written book not only illustrates the answers with well-chosen examples, but sets the historical and philosophical scene with admirable panache.
--Ken Binmore, Professor
Economics Department, University College London

This superb book explains how words become law. The key to the success of thl4