Legal Theories : Contexts & Practices

Legal Theories: Contexts and Practices presents legal theory as a living and evolving entity. The reader is brought into its story as an active participant who is challenged to think about where they sit within the history and traditions of legal theory and jurisprudence.

This second edition explores how lawyers and the courts adopt theoretical and jurisprudential positions and how they are influenced by the historical, social, cultural, and legal conditions characteristic of the time in which they live. It considers how legal theories, too, are influenced by those conditions, and how these combined forces influence and continue to affect contemporary legal thinking and legal interpretation.

Notable in the new edition:

• the addition of two chapters: Legal Theory in the Age of Google considers the challenges to existing jurisprudential assumptions wrought by new technologies; and, Historicising Legal Theory examines what happens to legal thinking when assumed non-legal knowledge is lost.
• the development of themes introduced in the first edition: whether different generations of lawyers share common assumptions about the human condition; whether shared ideas of community, autonomy and responsibility have been displaced; and, what this might mean for legal theory on the one hand, and for the development of legal principles on the other.
• provision of examples of the uses of legal theory in practice, an explanation of its methods, and an overview of aspects of the content of legal theory.
• remains visually engaging through diagrams, illustrations, tables, charts and photographs demonstrating aspects of legal theories.
• includes a most valuable fold-out historical and contextual timeline tracking the contexts and practices of legal theories across generations, allowing readers to see how the developments in legal theory over time have been expanded.
• builds on the popular case studies in two chapters – Just in Case I and Just in Case II – illustrating the way legal theory is used by the courts.

Legal Theories: Contexts and Practices is invaluable reading for students, scholars and practitioners alike and is highly recommended for anyone wanting to know and understand how legal theory, legal philosophy, and jurisprudence form part of the law. This book presents a new contribution to the emerging body of cultural legal studies theory.