Studies in Jurisprudence – Serie

In Appeal to the People’s Court: Rethinking Law, Judging, and Punishment, Vincent Luizzi turns to the goings on in courts at the lowest level of adjudication for fresh insights for rethinking these basic features of the legal order. In the pragmatic tradition of turning from fixed and unchanging conceptions, the work rejects the view of law as a set of black and white rules, of judging as the mechanical application of law to facts, and of punishment as a necessary, punitive response to crime. The author, a municipal judge and philosophy professor, joins theory and practice to feature the citizen in rethinking these institutions. The work includes a foreword by Richard Hull, special Guest Editor for this volume in Studies in Jurisprudence.

In this book, William Brant uncovers social causes of violence, in search of reductive measures. Multiple legal systems are explored as reducers and implementers of violence and threats, especially criminal justice systems. War, propagandizing, power, corporate and governmental involvement in social domination, statehood, dangerous ideologies, and tribal sexual domination are explored in many cultures. Various levels and methods are given for observing, measuring and analyzing how people think and behave regarding the law, including examples of comedy. A theoretical chapter presents legal theory in relation to conceptions of possibility and misconceptions. These ideas are applied to judiciaries, which expose winning strategies for lawyers’ desired verdicts. Dr. Brant accounts for the interconnections between sexual selection, legal systems and wars.

This book shows that Hauriou’s positivist and pragmatic jurisprudence and social theory, as well as their application to the study of institutions, is satisfactorily supported by his idealistic philosophy. The nine chapters first locate Hauriou’s influences, then situate his disciplinary methodologies within methodology in general. The central chapters concern each of the three methodologies in turn.