Philosophy, History, and Law: On the Essays of Harold J. Berman (original) (raw)
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A Prequel to Law and Revolution: A Long Lost Manuscript of Harold J. Berman Comes to Light
Journal of Law and Religion, 2014
The late Harold Berman was a pioneering scholar of Soviet law, legal history, jurisprudence, and law and religion; he is best known today for his monumental Law and Revolution series on the Western legal tradition. In the early 1960s, Berman wrote a short book, Law and Language, which was only recently discovered and published in 2013. In this early text, he adumbrated many of the main themes of his later work, including Law and Revolution. He also anticipated a good deal of the interdisciplinary and comparative methodology that we take for granted today, even though it was rare in the intense legal positivist era during which he was writing. This Article contextualizes Berman's Law and Language within the development of his own legal thought and in the evolution of interdisciplinary legal studies. It focuses particularly on the themes of law and religion, law and history, and law and communication that dominated Berman's writing until his death in 2007.
Harold J. Berman as Historian and Prophet
Ius Commune, 2013
In this brief reflection on his mentor, John Witte describes Harold Berman's theories of law and religion in the Western legal tradition, and the religious sources of his drive to produce a global integrative jurisprudence.
Philosophy in Review, 2010
H. L. A. Hart’s (1907-1992) influence on contemporary philosophy is not restricted to the philosophy of law. As the book’s sub-title suggests and the table of contents confirm, he wrote widely on matters social, political and moral, not just legal. Probably best known for The Concept of Law (1961), Hart also authored a collection of essays on Jeremy Bentham (Essays on Bentham,1982), two books on the morality of criminal law based on his exchange with Lord Patrick Devlin (Law, Liberty and Morality, 1963) and The Morality of the Criminal Law, 1965), one on punishment (Punishment and Responsibility, 1968), a treatise as well as a collection of essays on jurisprudential theory (Definition and Theory in Jurisprudence, 1953, and Essays in Jurisprudence and Philosophy, 1983), and finally a volume on legal causation, co-authored with Tony Honoré (Causation in the Law, 1959). The book under review here, on Hart’s legacy, is divided into six sections: the first is devoted to Hart’s general jurisprudential theory; the second to his writings on criminal law; the third to legal causation; the fourth to concerns of justice; the fifth to legal, political and moral rights; and the sixth and final section to matters of toleration and liberalism.