Legal Theories: Contexts and Practices

Legal Theories; Contexts and Practices builds on the authors’ earlier work, Legal Theories: In Principle.

This new edition moves the text out of the ‘In Principle’ series, allowing a greater depth of treatment, while writing about legal theory as accessibly as possible. It explores how practices adopted by the courts involve the adoption of theoretical and jurisprudential positions and draws on the historical, legal and social conditions in which various legal theories were created, and examines how they influenced the practices of law.

The authors write about legal theory as accessibly as possible, by providing readers with 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. Diagrams, illustrations, tables, charts and photographs are used to demonstrate aspects of legal theories. A fold out historical and contextual timeline tracks the contexts and practices of the theories across generations, allowing students to see the developments in legal theory over time.

Chapters Three and Four delve into the question of whether different generations of lawyers share common assumptions about the human condition.