Shared authority
Courts and legislatures in legal theory
- ISBN: 9781509913794
- Editorial: Hart Publishing
- Fecha de la edición: 2017
- Lugar de la edición: Oxford. Reino Unido
- Colección: Law and Practical Reason
- Encuadernación: Rústica
- Medidas: 22 cm
- Nº Pág.: 159
- Idiomas: Inglés
This new book advances a fresh philosophical account of the relationship between the legislature and courts, opposing the common conception of law, in which it is legislatures that primarily create the law, and courts that primarily apply it. This conception has eclectic affinities with legal positivism, and although it may have been a helpful intellectual tool in the past, it now increasingly generates more problems than it solves. For this reason, the author argues, legal philosophers are better off abandoning it. At the same time they are asked to dismantle the philosophical and doctrinal infrastructure that has been based on it and which has been hitherto largely unquestioned. In its place the book offers an alternative framework for understanding the role of courts and the legislature; a framework which is distinctly anti-positivist and which builds on Ronald Dworkin's interpretive theory of law.