Description
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Interpretation and Legal Theory by Andrei Marmor
This is a revised and extensively rewritten edition of one of the most influential monographs on legal philosophy published in recent years. Writing in the introduction to the first edition the author characterized Anglophone philosophers as being .divided and often waver[ing] between two main philosophical objectives: the moral evaluation of law and legal institutions and an account of its actual nature. Questions of methodology have therefore tended to be sidelined but were bound to surface sooner or later as they have in the later work of Ronald Dworkin. The main purpose of this book is to provide a critical assessment of Dworkins methodological turn away from analytical jurisprudence towards a theory of interpretation and the issues it gives rise to. The author argues that the importance of Dworkins interpretative turn is not that it provides a substitute for semantic theories of law (a dubious concept) but that it provides a new conception of jurisprudence aiming to present itself as a comprehensive rival to the conventionalism manifest in legal positivism.Furthermore once the interpretative turn is regarded as an overall challenge to conventionalism it is easier to see why it does not confine itself to a critique of method. Law as interpretation calls into question the main tenets of its positivist rival in substance as well as method. The book re-examines conventionalism in the light of this interpretative challenge.show more