Sympathy and Antipathy

Essays Legal and Philosophical
1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-1-138-73376-3
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch

Reihe: Routledge Revivals

This title was first published in 2002.The search for a moral standard of right and wrong which is external to any particular evaluator, and so escapes subjectivity, has a long history. Jeremy Bentham, in trying to find such a standard, opted for utilitarianism, which at least provides an inter-subjective standard of right and wrong. Everything else, thought Bentham, however dressed up, collapses into the purely subjective principle of sympathy and antipathy - I like it or I don’t like it. The essays in this book seek to show this principle of sympathy and antipathy is alive and well in legal philosophy today. This is the central theme of the book and the author uses it throughout to illuminate a host of questions ranging from the worth of constitutional rights to the merits of scepticism to the acceptability of spanking.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Allan, James

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Contents: Scepticism: Internal and engaged or external and detached?; Positively fabulous: why it is good to be a legal positivist; Truth’s empire: a reply to Ronald Dworkin’s ’objectivity and truth: you’d better believe it’; To exclude or not to exclude improperly obtained evidence; Is the right road wholly lost and gone?; Taking spanking seriously. Constitutional Rights: Rights, paternalism, constitutions and judges; Bills of rights and judicial power - a liberal’s quandary; Constitutional interpretation v statutory interpretation: understanding the attractions of ’original intent’; Liberalism, democracy and Hong Kong; Why business learns to love bills of rights. Dialogues: A tale of two scepticisms or relying on what comes naturally or the problem with deriving an epistemology from literary theory; Lon Fuller’s The Case of the Speluncean Explorers; A post-speluncean dialogue; a centenary path of the law; Concluding remarks; Bibliography; Index.

Über Autor(innen)

James Allan is a native born Canadian who has practised law at a large firm in Toronto and at the bar in London. He has taught in Hong Kong, Sydney and New Zealand. His primary areas of research interest are legal philosophy, constitutional law and bills of rights scepticism. He has also written The Vantage of Law (Ashgate, 2011) and A Sceptical Theory of Morality and Law (Peter Lang, 1998). He has also had published many articles and book chapters.