Green Legal Theory

Legal Theory Construction

The legal self: executive processes and legal theory.

When laws or legal principles mention mental states such as intentions to form a contract, knowledge of risk, or purposely causing a death, what parts of the brain are they speaking about? We argue here that these principles are tacitly directed at our prefrontal executive processes. Our current best theories of consciousness portray it as a workspace in which executive processes operate, but w...

Action-based Jurisprudence: Praxeological Legal Theory in Relation to Economic Theory, Ethics, and Legal Practice

THEORIZING ABOUT LAW and legal concepts falls under the field of jurisprudence, as do certain aspects of the assessment of legal institutions, procedures, and processes. Theorists in this field are typically described as working within various schools of thought, principally: natural law, legal positivism, legal realism, and critical legal studies. An alternative to these schools has been emerg...

Method and Principle in Legal Theory

description he offered captured common ground among the various theories of law he discussed. Positivism, in particular, should not be understood as making any claims about the justifiability of coercion. It should instead be understood, at least according to most contemporary versions, as attributing to law the function of guiding conduct. But this mistake on Dworkin’s part was a mistake in th...

A Jurisprudential Inquiry into Contemporary Legal Theory

TO FUNDAMENTAL JURISPRUDENCE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 814 R II. THE FOUNDING BLOCKS OF CONTEMPORARY LEGAL THEORY: SCIENCE, POLICY, AND CULTURE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 820 R III. LAW BEYOND SCIENCE, POLICY, AND CULTURE: CASE STUDIES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 825 R A. Law as Science and Codifi...