Philosophical Foundations of Language in the Law

Andrei Marmor was Professor at Tel Aviv University from 1990 to 2000 and has been professor of philosophy and professor of law at the University of Southern California since 2003. He is the Director of the USC Center for Law and Philosophy and Editor in chief of the Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy. He has authored and edited numerous books, including Law in the Age of Pluralism (OUP, 2007), Interpretation and Legal Theory (2nd ed., Hart Publishing, 2005), and Positive Law & Objective Values (OUP, 2001).Scott Soames is the Director of the School of Philosophy at the University of Southern California, and was formerly Professor of Philosphy at Princeton University for 24 years. He is the Editor-in-Chief of The Princeton Series in the Foundatiions of Contemporary Philosophy and serves on the advisory boards of Analytica and Philosophical Perspectives. His works include Beyond Rigidity: The Unfinished Semantic Agenda of 'Naming and Necessity' (OUP, 2002), Reference and Description: The Case against Two-Dimensionalism (Princeton University Press, 2005), and the two-volume Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century (Princeton University Press, 2003).

I believe this book is of tremendous interest and it is to the credit of OUP that it published it, thus allowing further dissemination of knowledge.

• 1. Introduction ; 2. The Value of Vagueness ; 3. What Vagueness and Inconsistency Tell Us about Interpretation ; 4. Vagueness and the Guidance of Action ; 5. Can the Law Imply More Than It Says? On Some Pragmatic Aspects of Strategic Speech ; 6. Textualism and the Discovery of Rights ; 7. Textualism, Intentionalism, and the Law of Contracts ; 8. Modeling Legal Rules ; 9. Trying to Kill the Dead: De Dicto and De Re Intention in Attempted Crimes ; 10. Legislation As Communication? Legal Interpretation and the Study of Linguistic Communication