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This is the story of Alf Ross, one of the founding fathers of the so-called Scandinavian legal realism. On the surface, the life of Alf Ross was a fairy tale; at least he had to go through an awful lot of hardship both in relation to love and work before he became an internationally known and recognized philosopher and legal scholar. But the story of Alf Ross is not a fairy tale. It is the story about a man's struggle to greatness and the consequences of such a struggle in his relationship with other people including his spouse. This is the story that is told in the book on Alf Ross. Published wi.
Ross, Alf. On Law and Justice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959. xi, 383 pp. Reprint available December 2004 by the Lawbook Exchange, Ltd. ISBN 1-58477-488-6. Cloth. $90. * In this influential and oft-cited study Ross discounted the theories of natural law, positivism and legal realism. In their stead, he proposed the abandonment of "ought-propositions" for the "is-propositions" employed by other empirical sciences, thereby envisioning lawyers that serve merely as "rational technologists." Less bound by tradition, and traditional notions of justice, jurisprudence then becomes "not only a beautiful mental activity per se, but also an instrument which may benefit any lawyer who wants to understand what he is doing and why" (Preface).
Reprint of the first American edition. One of the most interesting jurists of the post-World War II era, Ross [1899-1979] was a legal and moral philosopher, scholar of international law and the leading representative of Scandinavian Legal Realism. This book and On Law and Justice (1958) are his principal works. In Directives and Norms Ross asks whether imperatives (or, to use his term, 'directives') are subject to logic in the same way as indicatives. He shows the difference between indicative and directive discourse and explains the concepts 'directive' and 'norm' as they function in the social sciences, especially in the study of law. A contemporary essay in the Modern Law Review (32:544), though critical of this work, was still impressed by its "clear and convincing account" of these processes.
Selected essays originally published as a book in Danish in 1970. Three had been published before then in English, but the others are new. All deal with concepts common to law and morality. "They function in the same way in legal and moral discourse: guilt determines responsibility, and responsibility punishment. But the conditions under which a person incurs guilt differ according to whether the guilt is legal or moral, as do also the manner in which the responsibility takes effect and the penal reaction itself." Cf. Preface, page v.
Kelsen, Hans. What is Justice? Justice, Law and Politics in the Mirror of Science. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957. [vi], 397 pp. Reprinted 2000 by The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd. ISBN 1-58477-101-1. Cloth. New. $95. * Through the lens of science, Kelsen proposes a dynamic theory of natural law, examines Platonic and Aristotelian doctrines of justice, the idea of justice as found in the holy scriptures, and defines justice as "...that social order under whose protection the search for truth can prosper. 'My' justice, then, is the justice of freedom, the justice of peace, the justice of democracy-the justice of tolerance." (p. 24).
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Essays on the Doctrinal Study of Law is a summary of the author’s 40 years of research in the fields of civil law and the philosophy of law. The main focus is on the two main tasks in the doctrinal study of law: the interpretation and systematisation of legal norms. In this regard, Professor Aarnio deals with the theory of argumentation as well as with its foundations - i.e., with the ontology, epistemology and methodology of legal thinking - and develops the ideas that were first presented in The Rational as Reasonable (Kluwer 1987) in all of these dimensions. The work includes an updated discussion on the writings of Robert Alexy, Jûrgen Habermas, Ronald Dworkin and Alf Ross. A focal point of view concerns the distinction between positivism and non-positivism, in which the core of the criticism focuses on Scandinavian realism.