Gustav Radbruch was a German legal scholar and politician. He served as Minister of Justice of Germany during the early Weimar period. Radbruch is also regarded as one of the most influential legal philosophers of the 20th century.
Jurisprudence is the philosophy and theory of law. It is concerned primarily with what the law is and what it ought to be. That includes questions of how persons and social relations are understood in legal terms, and of the values in and of law. Work that is counted as jurisprudence is mostly philosophical, but it includes work that also belongs to other disciplines, such as sociology, history, politics and economics.
Philosophy of law is a branch of philosophy that examines the nature of law and law's relationship to other systems of norms, especially ethics and political philosophy. It asks questions like "What is law?", "What are the criteria for legal validity?", and "What is the relationship between law and morality?" Philosophy of law and jurisprudence are often used interchangeably, though jurisprudence sometimes encompasses forms of reasoning that fit into economics or sociology.
In the field of jurisprudence, equity is the particular body of law, developed in the English Court of Chancery, with the general purpose of providing legal remedies for cases wherein the common law is inflexible and cannot fairly resolve the disputed legal matter. Conceptually, equity was part of the historical origins of the system of common law of England, yet is a field of law separate from common law, because equity has its own unique rules and principles, and was administered by courts of equity.
Nulla poena sine lege is a legal formula which, in its narrow interpretation, states that one can only be punished for doing something if a penalty for this behavior is fixed in criminal law. Variant nullum crimen sine lege establishes that conduct is not criminal if not found among the behavior/cirumstance combinations of a statute. The other interpretations of the formula include the rules prohibiting retroactive criminalization and prescribing laws to be strictly construed.
Case law, also used interchangeably with common law, is a law that is based on precedents, that is the judicial decisions from previous cases, rather than law based on constitutions, statutes, or regulations. Case law uses the detailed facts of a legal case that have been resolved by courts or similar tribunals. These past decisions are called "case law", or precedent. Stare decisis—a Latin phrase meaning "let the decision stand"—is the principle by which judges are bound to such past decisions, drawing on established judicial authority to formulate their positions.
Legal positivism is a school of thought of analytical jurisprudence developed largely by legal philosophers during the 18th and 19th centuries, such as Jeremy Bentham and John Austin. While Bentham and Austin developed legal positivist theory, empiricism provided the theoretical basis for such developments to occur. The most prominent legal positivist writer in English has been H. L. A. Hart.
Lon Luvois Fuller was an American legal philosopher best known as a proponent of a secular and procedural form of natural law theory. Fuller was a professor of law at Harvard Law School for many years, and is noted in American law for his contributions to both jurisprudence and the law of contracts. His debate in 1958 with the prominent British legal philosopher H. L. A. Hart in the Harvard Law Review was important in framing the modern conflict between legal positivism and natural law theory. In his widely discussed 1964 book The Morality of Law, Fuller argues that all systems of law contain an "internal morality" that imposes on individuals a presumptive obligation of obedience. Robert S. Summers said in 1984: "Fuller was one of the four most important American legal theorists of the last hundred years".
Legality, in respect of an act, agreement, or contract is the state of being consistent with the law or of being lawful or unlawful in a given jurisdiction, and the construct of power.
Hans Kelsen was an Austrian jurist, legal philosopher and political philosopher. He was the principal architect of the 1920 Austrian Constitution, which with amendments is still in operation. Due to the rise of totalitarianism in Austria, Kelsen left for Germany in 1930 but was forced out of his university post after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 because of his Jewish ancestry. That year he left for Geneva and in 1940 he moved to the United States. In 1934, Roscoe Pound lauded Kelsen as "undoubtedly the leading jurist of the time". While in Vienna, Kelsen met Sigmund Freud and his circle, and wrote on social psychology and sociology.
Robert Alexy is a jurist and a legal philosopher.
Pure Theory of Law is a book by jurist and legal theorist Hans Kelsen, first published in German in 1934 as Reine Rechtslehre, and in 1960 in a much revised and expanded edition. The latter was translated into English in 1967 as Pure Theory of Law. The title is the name of his general theory of law, Reine Rechtslehre.
Georg Friedrich Puchta was an important German Legal scholar.
Georg Jellinek was a German public lawyer and was considered to be "the exponent of public law in Austria“.
The translation of "law" to other European languages faces several difficulties. In most European languages, as well as some others influenced by European languages, there are two different words that can be translated to English as "law". For the general comparison in this article the Latin terms ius and lex will be used. Etymologically, ius has some relation to right, just or straight.
Pepper v Hart [1992] UKHL 3, is a landmark decision of the House of Lords on the use of legislative history in statutory interpretation. The court established the principle that when primary legislation is ambiguous then, in certain circumstances, the court may refer to statements made in the House of Commons or House of Lords in an attempt to interpret the meaning of the legislation. Before this ruling, such an action would have been seen as a breach of parliamentary privilege.
The Hart–Fuller debate is an exchange between the American law professor Lon L. Fuller and his English counterpart H. L. A. Hart, published in the Harvard Law Review in 1958 on morality and law, which demonstrated the divide between the positivist and natural law philosophy. Hart took the positivist view in arguing that morality and law were separate. Fuller's reply argued for morality as the source of law's binding power.
The International Association for the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy (IVR) is a learned society for science and was founded in 1909 as the "Internationale Vereinigung für Rechts- und Wirtschaftsphilosophie". It was renamed to "Internationale Vereinigung für Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie" in 1933. The IVR is the world's central academic organization for the study and advancement of legal and social philosophy.
Alexander Somek is an Austrian legal scholar.
Stephan Kirste is a German legal scholar and university professor of legal and social philosophy at the Faculty of Law of the University of Salzburg (Austria). Since 2020, Kirste is also an associate professor at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil) in the graduate program.
