Law and Truth

by Patterson, Dennis

• ISBN13: 9780195132472
• ISBN10: 0195132475
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-10-14
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Taking up a single question--"What does it mean to say a proposition of law is true?"--this book advances a major new account of truth in law. Drawing upon the later philosophy of Wittgenstein, as well as more recent postmodern theory of the relationship between language, meaning, and the world, Patterson examines leading contemporary jurisprudential approaches to this question and finds them flawed in similar and previously unnoticed ways. He offers a powerful alternative account of legal justification, one in which linguistic practice --the use of forms of legal argument--holds the key to legal meaning.

Author Biography

Dennis Patterson is Distinguished Professor of Law at Rutgers University School of Law, Camden.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Realism, Anti-Realism, and Legal Theory	3	(19)
Legal Formalism: On the Immanent Rationality of Law	22	(21)
Moral Realism and Truth in Law	43	(16)
Legal Positivism	59	(12)
Law as Interpretation: The Jurisprudence of Ronald Dworkin	71	(28)
Law as an Interpretive Community: The Case of Stanley Fish	99	(29)
Truth in Law: A Modal Account	128	(23)
Postmodern Jurisprudence	151	(30)
Afterword	181	(2)
Index	183