A Treatise of Legal Philosophy and General Jurisprudence

Volume 11, the sixth of the historical volumes of A Treatise of Legal Philosophy and General Jurisprudence, offers a fresh, philosophically engaged, critical interpretation of the main currents of jurisprudential thought in the English-speaking world of the 20th century. It tells the tale of two lectures and their legacies: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s "The Path of Law" (1897) and H.L.A. Hart's Holmes Lecture, "Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals" (1958). Holmes's radical challenge to late 19th century legal science gave birth to a rich variety of competing approaches to understanding law and legal reasoning from realism to economic jurisprudence to legal pragmatism, from recovery of key elements of common law jurisprudence and rule of law doctrine in the work of Llewellyn, Fuller and Hayek to root-and-branch attacks on the ideology of law by the Critical Legal Studies and Feminist movements. Hart, simultaneously building upon and transforming the undations of Austinian analytic jurisprudence laid in the early 20th century, introduced rigorous philosophical method to English-speaking jurisprudence and offered a reinterpretation of legal positivism which set the agenda for analytic legal philosophy to the end of the century and beyond. A wide-ranging debate over the role of moral principles in legal reasoning, sparked by Dworkin's fundamental challenge to Hart's theory, generated competing interpretations of and fundamental challenges to core doctrines of Hart's positivism, including the nature and role of conventions at the foundations of law and the methodology of philosophical jurisprudence.

Gerald J. Postema has published extensively in legal and political philosophy and ethics. In 2011 he published Legal Philosophy in the 20th Century: The Common Law World, He wrote Bentham and the Common Law Tradition (Clarendon 1986/1989) and edited Racism and the Law (Kluwer 1997); Rationality, Conventions, and the Law (Kluwer 1998); Jeremy Bentham: Moral, Political, and Legal Philosophy (Ashgate 2002) and Philosophy and the Law of Torts (CUP 2001). He is associate editor of the 12 volume, Treatise in the Philosophy of Law (Springer 2005, 2007, 2009, 2011).
A selection of the jurisprudential writings of Sir Matthew Hale will also be published by Oxford University Press under his editorship. Former Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellow, and fellow of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies and the National Humanities Center, he was editor of Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Law (1995-2006) and was special issues editor of Law and Philosophy (1996-2001). In fall, 2012, he was awarded the George J. Johnson Prize for Distinguished Achievement in the Art and Humanities, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.