1 Reflection on Law’s Nature 1
Jurisprudence and the Moral Life 7
The Importance of a Historical Perspective 14
2 Reason, Will and Law 19
Morality, History and the Will 20
Natural Law and Protestant Autonomy 26
Historicism and Geist 34
3 Doctrinal Scholarship and the Science of Right 39
Rights and Forms of Justice 40
Natural Right and Political Authority 48
Natural Right, Juridical Reason and Legal Doctrine 57
4 Legal Positivism, Doctrinal Science and Statist Conceptions of Law 65
Doctrinal Science and Posited Rules 66
Political Stability and ‘Top-Down’ Authority 69
Posited Rules and Formal Authority 74
Positivism and Statism 79
Statism and its Limits 83
Statist Impulses and Moral Visions 88
5 The Changing Face of Positivism: From Hobbes to Hart 91
Legal Science in the Century after Hobbes 92
The Nature of Positivistic Legal Science 97
Social Order and the Significance of ‘Rules’ 100
The Limits of Legal Positivism 108
6 The Limits of Legal Positivism 111
Validity and Recognition 111
Recognition and its Limits 116
Recognition and Construction 118
From Positivism to Idealism 124
7 Beyond Positivism and Idealism 127
The Character of Legal Reflection 130
Legal Reason 139
The Withering of Ideals 144
8 Liberal Politics and Private Law 147
Rights, Interests and Legal Doctrine 148
Private Law, Powers and the Will 152
Individualism and Autonomy 160
9 The Moral Nature of Law 163
Morality and Identity 164
Constructing the Ideal 172
Legality, Theory and Geist 177
Index 181