Full Description
This book gathers together leading voices in virtue theory—an increasingly influential aspect of legal theory in the 21st century—to take stock of virtue jurisprudence's evolution and suggest ways in which this approach can be further developed.
The contributions address the three main axes along which virtue jurisprudence has unfolded in the past decades: the quest to provide a suitable virtue-based foundation for the law (in general) or for some aspects of it (in particular, but not exclusively, criminal law); the investigation of the role played by character traits in legal decision-making; and the investigation of how the law can be part of a virtuous life. As will become apparent for readers of this volume, those lines are converging and, as they do so, a general virtue-based approach to the study of law is starting to emerge.
Crucial in addressing problems with legal experience for which the resources of traditional legal theory are insufficient, this book's investigation of virtue theory and virtue jurisprudence will be of interest to all of those studying legal decision-making and the philosophy of law, as well as those studying virtue ethics more widely.
It was originally published as a special issue of Jurisprudence.
Contents
Introduction 1. Virtue as the end of law: an aretaic theory of legislation 2. Plato on law-abidance and a path to natural law 3. Can the law help us to be moral? 4. Lawfulness and the perception of legal salience 5. Common virtue and the perspectival imagination: Adam Smith and common law reasoning 6. The perceptive judge 7. Reconciling virtues and action-guidance in legal adjudication 8. The virtue of judicial humility 9. Legal risk, legal evidence and the arithmetic of criminal justice 10. Legal reasoning, good citizens, and the criminal law
