OUP is publishing a new book on
the history of natural law in the American legal system.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Before the late 19th century,
natural law played an important role in the American legal system. Lawyers
routinely used it in their arguments and judges often relied upon it in their
opinions. Today, by contrast, natural law plays virtually no role in the legal
system. When natural law was part of a lawyer's toolkit, lawyers thought of judges
as finders of the law, but when natural law dropped out of the legal system,
lawyers began thinking of judges as makers of the law instead.
In The Decline of Natural Law,
the eminent legal historian Stuart Banner explores the causes and consequences
of this change. To do this, Banner discusses the ways in which lawyers used
natural law and why the concept seemed reasonable to them. He further examines
several long-term trends in legal thought that weakened the position of natural
law, including the use of written constitutions, the gradual separation of the
spheres of law and religion, the rapid growth of legal publishing, and the
position of natural law in some of the 19th century's most contested legal
issues. And finally, he describes both the profession's rejection of natural
law in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the ways in which the legal
system responded to the absence of natural law.
The first book to explain how
natural law once worked in the American legal system, The Decline of Natural
Law offers a unique look into how and why this major shift in legal thought
happened, and focuses, in particular, on the shift from the idea that law is
something we find to something we make.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stuart Banner is the
Norman Abrams Distinguished Professor of Law at UCLA. His nine previous books
include Speculation: A History of the Fine Line Between Gambling and
Investing and The Baseball Trust: A History of Baseball's
Antitrust Exemption.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Part I: Before the Transition
Chapter 1: The Law of Nature
Chapter 2: The Common Law
Part II: Causes of the Transition
Chapter 3: The Adoption of
Written Constitutions
Chapter 4: The Separation of Law
and Religion
Chapter 5: The Explosion in Law
Publishing
Chapter 6: The Two-Sidedness of
Natural Law
Part III: The Transition and
After
Chapter 7: The Decline of Natural
Law and Custom
Chapter 8: Substitutes for
Natural Law
Chapter 9: Echoes of Natural Law
Index
More info here
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