Legal System And Lawyers Reasonings

Legal System and Lawyers' Reasoning

This book follows the author's "The Province and Function of Law" (1946) and is intended (roughly) as an expansion of the first section of that book (Law and Logic). This book is designed to be self-contained but it is part of a larger survey of the contemporary problems falling within the field of jurisprudence. Against a background of the elements of unity and disunity within the legal order, this volume provides major studies of the processes of judicial and juristic thought and the place therein of logic and other kinds of reasoning. Examines the theories of John Austin, Hans Kelsen, H. L. A. Hart and Wesley Hohfeld in depth, weighs the potential of symbolic and deontic logic, examines the theory and prcatice of courts with a massive but discriminating documentation of case law and with a concern for European as well as British and American problems. Special attention is paid to the diverse kinds of reasoning in the appellate process and to the relation of these to the contemporary philosophical concern with "rhetorical argument." 454 pages.