Legal Theory Reading List - Suggestions

[DOOFUS]

ya'll are some smart motherfuckers. help me out here.

worked with Rawls's A Theory of Justice on my dissertation. that's about my only grounding in this junk until this year.

read through Rawls's Political Liberalism, HLA Hart's The Concept of Law, and two books each by Ronald Dworkin and Joseph Raz this year.

where else would you send the doof? this is some interesting shit.

[Joel Benjamin L]

Martha Nussbaum
Michael Thompson has a very interesting but difficult essay entitled "What is it to wrong someone? A puzzle about Justice." To my mind, he is one of the most interesting philosophers working today. A student, ultimately, of Elizabeth Anscombe.

[caleb]

Brian Bix's text "Jurisprudence" is useful for general orientation.

Sounds like you're mainly reading in liberalism and positivism. Are you looking for more reading from that perspective, or are you looking to branch out?

[Jacques]

What's your dissertation about?

There was a time back when I was in school, where I became quite interested in communitarian responses to TOJ. Taylor's Sources of the Self and Walzer's Sheres of Justice stand out for me, but I think Sandel's Liberalism and the Limits of Justice is the most "definitive" of the movement's work and might be more instructive.

[DOOFUS]

My 1998 dissertation explored how some 18C literary works could illustrate frameworks for approaching problems of identity politics that a) had an enlightenment foundation in a Liberal vocabulary of rights but that b) also made communitarian claims that had a neo-Aristotean foundation. The argument was that a re-examination of some 18C literary treatments of contemporary issues could offer productive ground for taking a look at liberal/communitarian exchanges that emphasized some common ground and vocabularies for addressing identity claims without throwing the enlightenment rationality baby out with the bathwater.

Taylor was a source, and I finally got around to Sandel this year (just the freshman-level Justice, which I'm using as summer seminar reading with my AP kids).

I've just been focusing on the liberal/positivist strands because my entry point was Rawls, then Dworkin, then I picked up Raz because Dworkin kept refering to him as his principal critic. Basically, I've been trying to digest the 70s before working my way back to what I was reading just after finishing up in 98, Taylor, MacIntyre, and -- on a whlole different tack -- Benhabib.

I'm open to exploring any paths (except for some of the more extreme versions of Critical Legal Studies, which, I have to admit, I'm just too much of a Liberal to plug through).

I'm just interested in getting a broad understanding of the debates over justice and the role of the judicial branch in democratic society -- not trying to acquire any answers, just trying to learn how to ask reasonably informed questions to people who really know this stuff, as opposed to post-doc dilettantes such as myself.