Books

Property and practical reason (cambridge university press 2015)

Property and Practical Reason makes a moral argument for common law property institutions and norms, and challenges the prevailing dichotomy between individual rights and state interests and its assumption that individual preferences and the good of communities must be in conflict. One can understand competing intuitions about private property rights by considering how private property enables owners and their collaborators to exercise practical reason consistent with the requirements of reason, and thereby to become practically reasonable agents of deliberation and choice who promote various aspects of the common good. The plural and mediated domains of property ownership, though imperfect, have material and moral benefits for all members of the community.

The age of selfies: reasoning about rights when the stakes are personal (Rowman & littlefield 2020)

Our most contentious controversies today are moral. We disagree not only about questions of efficiency and democracy and civil liberties but also about what is right to do and who we are becoming as a people. We have not yet understood the implications of this shift in public reasoning from discourse about political ideals to debates about moral imperatives.

The book prescribes a way to educate ourselves and our young people how to disagree well. We are not able to engage in moral discourse effectively because our educational programs are still organized around obsolete principles of political neutrality. Meanwhile, our young people have learned to bend moral claims in service to self-authorship. Also, different groups of us look to different sources of moral truth. Further complicating our efforts, different generations use the same language to refer to different moral ideas. The book suggests principles for a practical education that is robustly moral, that will enable us to understand and overcome these new challenges. And it lays out a framework for flourishing together in society despite our radical differences.

Foundations of Law (Carolina Academic Press 2017)

Foundations of Law is designed to help law and pre-law students make sense of law in a changeful age. It is founded upon the conviction of the English jurist William Blackstone that students who intend to study law need both technical instruction in law and liberal education in the history and jurisprudential concepts of law. The book considers the enduring nature of law and its relationship to equity and justice with the assistance of the authors of what we today call the Great Books. It also emphasizes enduring aspects of legal practice: the role of logic; the meaning and importance of conscience and of due process; different approaches to textual interpretation; and the relation of law to other normative concepts (such as morality and religion) and to science (such as economics).

The book surveys classic writings concerning law and justice—for example, the works of Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas. It contains writings that are foundational to Anglo-American legal norms and institutions—Blackstone, Bentham, Locke, the Federalists, Lincoln, Holmes, and others. It includes helpful analytical insights from influential jurisprudence scholars—Austin, Hart, Hohfeld, Dworkin, and Finnis, among others. Most uniquely, it matches each of those writings with constitutions, declarations, statutes, judicial decisions, and other legal and political texts (even a letter from jail) that illustrate and reinforce the key lessons drawn from the great works. The book does not leave students adrift in abstractions. It provides a solid grounding for understanding and practicing law in a rapidly-changing world.

Christie & Martin’s Jurisprudence

This book is designed for use in courses in law schools and university departments of philosophy. It can serve as a text for basic and advanced courses and seminars. Readings include excerpts of classic works of Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke, Hobbes, Kant, Bentham, and Austin. Provided also are excerpts from standard works of 20th-century philosophers. The book explores contemporary legal discourse with readings on topics such as sociobiology, Islamic law, the legal process school, legal feminism, and critical legal studies. It reprints leading cases on natural rights/human rights and readings from online blogs, op-ed essays, news stories, and Internet publications.

books I teach and recommend for learning law and jurisprudence

• Sophocles, Antigone

• Plato, The Trial and Death of Socrates

• Aristotle, The Politics

• Aristotle, The Ethics

• The Bible

• Cicero, The Republic and The Laws

• The Institutes of Justinian

• Thomas Aquinas, Treatise on Law

• Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity

• Matthew Hale, On the Law of Nature

• William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England

• Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., The Path of the Law

• Wesley Hohfeld, Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning

• H.L.A. Hart, The Concept of Law

• Joseph Raz, Practical Reason and Norms

• Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom

• John M. Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights

• John M. Finnis, The Collected Essays

• Robert P. George, Making Men Moral