Reviews for Law, language, and legal determinacy

The average rating for Law, language, and legal determinacy based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-09-29 00:00:00 Vicky Schulz Though undoubtedly a classic in contemporary jurisprudence, Dworkin's Law's Empire suffers from trying to make his argument superficially attractive than logically sound per se. At many stages, he abuses the technique of taking a fundamentally controversial assumption and prefacing it with 'as shown' or 'as we have seen' when such showing or sight has been in the best interpretation obscure, and in the worst completely absent. With that said, there are many areas in which the book excels. His criticism of legal positivism (building on Taking Rights Seriously), and Hart's version in particular, is often insightful, though unfortunately it is submitted he provides nothing better as a replacement. Often, analogies are used to illustrate obscure points well (the parallel drawn between legal interpretation and literary criticism in chapter 2 is nothing short of beautiful), though as touched on above, perhaps this skill could have been used to a greater extent to show exactly where certain points were coming from. Therefore, while Dworkin is probably wrong, and his argument fails in several places, this is a text which is a worthwhile read, if for no other reason than to provoke the reader to think. To dismiss it as awful or irrelevant because of its flaws is naive; it is no better than to dismiss Austin's (at the time) revolutionary take on the law because it has since been improved upon. A provision of perspective is useful, and although I, along with likely most readers, am not drawn away from positivist convention, this book remains a classic.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-01-31 00:00:00 Juan Mendiola Read this as part of our law faculty reading group. We met monthly and Fred Geddicks led discussions. Dworkin provides a liberal's con law theory answer to conservatives' Originalism. I recommend if you have someone like Fred (a Constitutional law expert) to lead you through the book.