Classic Legal Theory

This Oxford Reference encyclopedia gives short overviews of legal theory topics with links to relevant resources.

The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory is a handy guide to the state of play in contemporary philosophy of law and legal theory. Comprises 23 essays critical essays on the central themes and issues of the philosophy of law today, written by an international assembly of distinguished philosophers and legal theorists.
This is an unlimited user ebook.

Philosophy of Law examines such topics as the concept of law, the dispute between natural law theorists and legal positivists, the relations between law and morality, criminal responsibility and legal punishment, rights of the individual against the state, justice and equality, and legal evidence as compared with scientific evidence. Readings, selected from both philosophy and law journals, include classic texts, contemporary theoretical developments and well-known current court cases.
This is a print book.

Using the rule of law as its main theme, this text shows how abstract questions and concepts of legal philosophy are connected to concrete legal, political, and social issues. The text addresses several modern controversies and challenges students to consider both sides of an argument, using sound, reasoned thinking.

This is a print book.

Jurisprudence is aimed at students new to the study of legal philosophy, while also offering new ideas and perspectives that will be of interest to established scholars. The author seeks to explain the often complex and difficult ideas in jurisprudence clearly, but in a way that avoids distortion of the ideas through oversimplification.
This is a print book.

Oxford Short Introductions offer simple entry points into complex topics. This book explores the notion of law and its role in our lives. The author refers to key thinkers from Aristotle to Rawls, from Bentham to Derrida and looks at the central questions behind legal theory, and law's relation to justice, morality, and democracy.

In Jurisprudence as Ideology, Valerie Kerruish asks how it is that people who are put down, let down and kept down by law can be thought to have a general political obligation to obey it. She engages with contemporary issues in socialist, feminist and critical legal theory, and links these issues to debates in jurisprudence and the philosophy and sociology of law.

In this wide-ranging and comprehensive volume, Gary Minda surveys the current state of legal scholarship and activism, providing an indispensable guide to the evolution of law in America.

Legal Traditions of the World places national laws in the broader context of major legal traditions, those of chthonic (or indigenous) law, talmudic law, civil law, islamic law, common law, hindu law and confucian law. Each tradition is examined in terms of its institutions and substantivelaw, its founding concepts and methods, its attitude towards the concept of change and its teaching on relations with other traditions and peoples. The concept of legal tradition is explained as non-conflictual in character and compatible with new and inclusive forms of logic.