Law as a leap of faith : essays on law in general

How do laws resemble rules of games, moral rules, personal rules, rules found in religious teachings, school rules, and so on? Are laws rules at all? Are they all made by human beings? And if so how should we go about interpreting them? How are they organized into systems, and what does it mean for these systems to have ‘constitutions’? Should everyone want to live under a system of law? Is there a special kind of ‘legal justice’? Does it consist simply in applying the law of the system? And how does it relate to the ideal of ‘the rule of law’? These and other classic questions in the philosophy of law form the subject-matter of this book. Taking an agenda broadly from H.L.A. Hart's The Concept of Law (1961), this book shows how the key ideas in that work live on, and how they have been and can still be improved in modest ways to meet important criticisms — in some cases by concession, in some cases by circumvention, and in some cases by restatement. In the process the book engages with key ideas of other modern giants of the subject including Kelsen, Holmes, Raz, and Dworkin