Normative Jurisprudence: An Introduction

normative jurisprudence Normative Jurisprudence aims to reinvigorate normative legal scholarship that both criticizes positive law and suggests reforms 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 such normative scholarship. Over the past fifty years or so, all of these traditions have taken a number of different turns, although for different reasons, toward empirical analysis, conceptual analysis, or Foucauldian 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. This book criticizes these developments and suggests a return – albeit with different and, in many ways, larger challenges – to the traditional understanding of the purpose of legal scholarship. Robin West is Associate Dean for Research and Frederick Haas Professor of Law and Philosophy at the Georgetown University Law Center. She is the author of several books and more than a hundred articles on feminist legal theory, law and literature, law and humanities, jurisprudence, Constitutional law and theory, and, most recently, of Marriage, Sexuality, and Gender (2007) and Re-Imagining Justice (2003). She is the recipient of a J. B. White Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and Humanities, and she has held the John Carroll Research Chair at Georgetown. CAMBRIDGE INTRODUCTIONS TO PHILOSOPHY AND LAW Series Editors Brian H. Bix University of Minnesota William A. Edmundson Georgia State University This introductory series of books provides concise studies of the philosophical foundations of law, of perennial topics in the philosophy of law, and of important and opposing schools of thought. The series is aimed principally at students in philosophy, law, and political science. Matthew Kramer, Objectivity and the Rule of Law William A. Edmundson, An Introduction to Rights Normative Jurisprudence an introduction ROBIN WEST Georgetown University Law Center cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, S˜ao Paulo, Delhi, Tokyo, Mexico City Cambridge University Press 32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, ny 10013-2473, usa www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521738293 C Robin West 2011 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. Fi