N. MacCormick - Böcker

"The Judicial Application of Law" is an contribution to analytical jurisprudence. It gives an account of all that is involved in the idea of "applying" law as this is carried out by judges. Thus it explores analytically a vital idea for our understanding of legality as a value to which systems of government aspire. This is achieved by the construction and examination of models of the various steps involved in judicial decision making, including elements both of interpretation and of fact finding, and by the exploration of various possible ideologies of the application of law. The book takes as its main material for analysis statute-based legal systems in the form these took within socialist legal systems prior to the recent revolutions, being based principally on the law of Poland up to 1989.

Legal theory has been much occupied with understanding legal systems and analysing the concept of legal system. This has usually been done on the tacit or explicit assumption that legal systems and states are co-terminous. But since the Rome Treaty there has grown up in Europe a `new legal order', neither national law nor international law, and under its sway older conceptions of state sovereignty have been rendered obsolete. At the same time, it has been doubted whether the `European Union' that has grown out of the original `European Communities' has a satisfactory constitution or any constitution at all. What kind of legal and political entity is this `Union' and how does it relate juridically and politically to its member states? Further, the activity of construing or constructing `legal system' and legal knowledge becomes visibly problematic in this context. These essays wrestle with the above problems.

The Judicial Application of Law is an important contribution to analytical jurisprudence. It gives a thorough account of all that is involved in the idea of 'applying' law as this is carried out by judges. Thus it explores analytically a vital idea for our understanding of legality as a value to which systems of government aspire. This is achieved by the rigorous construction and examination of models of the various steps involved in judicial decision making, including elements both of interpretation and of fact finding, and by the exploration of various possible ideologies of the application of law. The book takes as its main material for analysis statute-based legal systems in the form these took within socialist legal systems prior to the recent revolutions, being based principally on the law of Poland up to 1989. This is the last work, posthumously translated, by the most distinguished analytical jurisprudent of modern Poland.

Legal theory has been much occupied with understanding legal systems and analysing the concept of legal system. But since the Rome Treaty there has grown up in Europe a `new legal order', neither national law nor international law, and under its sway older conceptions of state sovereignty have been rendered obsolete.