Normative Jurisprudence: An Introduction [Paperback]

This book aims to reinvigorate normative legal scholarship that both criticizes positive law and suggests reforms for it.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. The book suggests a return, albeit with different and in many ways larger challenges, to the traditional understanding of the purpose of legal scholarship.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. The book suggests a return, albeit with different and in many ways larger challenges, to the traditional understanding of the purpose of legal scholarship.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.1. Revitalizing natural law; 2. Legal positivism, censorial jurisprudence, and legal reform; 3. Critical legal studies  the missing years; 4. Recon