From a Realist Point of View

Erscheinungsjahr 2026
ISBN: 978-0-19-774982-1
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 456 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 235 mm

Reihe: Oxford Legal Philosophy

From A Realist Point of View combines new essays with revised versions of the most important recent work of preeminent legal realist Brian Leiter. This collection offers a systematic and philosophically ambitious account of legal realism and links it, for the first time, to political realism. Throughout, Leiter engages with various legal traditions (American, Scandinavian, Italian, French) and realist thinkers, from Thucydides to Nietzsche.

Part I, "Realism about Law and Legal Reasoning," examines the problem of theoretical disagreement, the relation between legal positivism and realism, and the realist theory of precedent, concluding with a penetrating critique of the recent metaphysical inflation of general jurisprudence in America. Part II, "Realism about Courts, Politics and Morality," brings the realistic perspective to bear on courts and democracy, as well as on morality (understood as a culturally variably human artifact) and moral philosophy (treated as ethnographic data, irrelevant to political practice). It concludes with case studies of two realist political thinkers, Marx and Foucault.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Leiter, Brian

Über Autor(innen)

Brian Leiter is Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the Center for Law, Philosophy & Human Values at the University of Chicago. He has been a visiting professor of law or philosophy at Oxford, Yale, and the Universities of Paris X and Rome III, among others. He is the author of Naturalizing Jurisprudence (OUP, 2007), Moral Psychology with Nietzsche (OUP, 2019), and (with J. Edwards) Marx (Routledge, 2025). He is also editor of Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Law.