Frontiers of Legal Theory

by Posner, Richard A.

• ISBN13: 9780674004856
• ISBN10: 067400485X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-06-30
• Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr

Summary

The most exciting development in legal thinking since World War II has been the growth of interdisciplinary legal studies--the application of the social sciences and the humanities to law in the hope of making law less formalistic, more practical, better grounded empirically, bettered tailored to social goals. Judge Richard A. Posner has been a leader in this movement, and his new book explores its rapidly expanding frontier. The book examines five principal areas or directions of interdisciplinary study: economics, history, psychology, the epistemology of law and the empirical study of law. These approaches are seen to interpenetrate and to compose a coherent body of legal theory--a unified framework for understanding such seemingly disparate phenomena as the economics of free speech, the intellectual history of economic analysis of law, the relation between income and liberty, the law of possession, the psychology of legal decisionmaking, the role of emotion in law, and the use of citation analysis to evaluate judges and law professors. The book carries on Posner's project of analyzing the law as an institution of social governance.

Author Biography

Richard A. Posner is Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School

Table of Contents

Introduction	1	(30)
I Economics
The Law and Economics Movement: From Bentham to Becker	31	(31)
The Speech Market	62	(33)
Normative Law and Economics: From Utilitarianism to Pragmatism	95	(50)
II History
Law's Dependence on the Past	145	(25)
Historicism in Legal Scholarship: Ackerman and Kahn	170	(23)
Savigny Holmes, and the Law and Economics of Posession	193	(32)
III Psychology
Emotion in Law	225	(27)
Behavioral Law and Economics	252	(36)
Social Norms, with a Note on Religion	288	(31)
IV Epistemology
Testimony	319	(17)
The Principles of Evidence and the Critique of Adversarial Procedure	336	(44)
The Rules of Evidence	380	(31)
V Empiricism
Counting, Especially Citations	411	(32)
Acknowledgments	443	(4)
Index	447