The Unity Of The Common Law: Studies In Hegelian Jurisprudence

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Countering the influential view of Critical Legal Studies that law is an incoherent mixture of conflicting political ideologies, this book forges a new paradigm for understanding the common law as being unified and systematic. Alan Brudner applies Hegel's legal and moral philosophy to fashion a comprehensive synthesis of the common law of property, contract, tort, and crime. At a time when there is a strong tendency among scholars to view the common law as essentially fragmentary, inconsistent, and contradictory, Brudner suggests instead a coherence that synthesizes several interrelated dichotomies: good- centered and right-based legal paradigms, instrumental and non- instrumental conceptions of law, externalist and internalist interpretations of the common law system, and communitarian and individualist attempts to found the legal enterprise. Brudner covers genuinely new ground through an interpretation of the common law from the standpoint of Hegelian legal philosophy. His unifying notion of common law corresponds to Hegel's notion of Geist, suggesting a designation of the mutual dependence of the community and the atomistic self for their confirmation as ends.

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The Unity of the Common Law Studies in Hegelian Jurisprudence Alan Brudner UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley — Los Angeles — Oxford © 1995 The Regents of the University of California For more e-books plea se contact me:D Sociology,philosophy, history... [email protected] ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Several chapters of this book have appeared elsewhere in previous versions. Chapter I contains material from "Hegel and the Crisis of Private Law," which appeared in ē Cardozo Law Review ( #$#) and in Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson, eds., Hegel and Legal Theory (New York: Routledge, ## ); Chapter II reworks material published in Ī Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence ( ## ); Chapter III reworks and expands material published in Īī University of Toronto Law Journal ( ##ī); Chapter V reworks and expands material published in Stephen Shute, John Gardner, and Jeremy Horder, eds., Action and Value in Criminal Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ##ī); and Chapter VI contains material from "The Ideality of Difference: Toward Objectivity in Legal Interpretation," Cardozo Law Review ( ##ē). I thank the editors and publishers of these volumes for their permission to republish this material. It is unlikely that this book would have been conceived, let alone written, without the aid of a stimulating collegial environment or without the advice and support of several very able scholars. I am particularly grateful to Bruce Chapman, who read the entire manuscript and offered invaluable criticisms and suggestions. Robert Berman, David Gray Carlson, David Dyzenhaus, John Gardner, Jeremy Horder, Robert Howse, Michel Rosenfeld, Stephen Shute, Stephen Waddams, Arnold Weinrib, Richard Dien Winfield, and Susan Zimmerman read portions of the manuscript and prompted many revisions. The students in my Hegel, Property, and Criminal Law seminars challenged me to produce as coherent a set of ideas as I possibly could. I wish to acknowledge a special debt of thanks to Ernest Weinrib. Part _ xii _ of this obligation stems from his efforts in reading most of the manuscript and in patiently explaining his disagreement. The greater part, however, arises from a continuing discussion in which he, both as teacher and as colleague, has helped define for me the problems to which this book is addressed. In writing this book, I have also incurred debts to several institutions. In particular, I wish to thank the Faculty of Law of the University of Toronto for granting me a research leave to complete the manuscript; and the Benjamin Ca