Albert Alschuler's study of Holmes is very different from other books about him, in that it is an exercise in debunking him.

In recent decades, Oliver Wendell Holmes has been praised as "the only great American legal thinker" and "the most illustrious figure in the history of American law." But in Albert Alschuler's critique of both Justice Holmes and contemporary legal scholarship, a darker portrait is painted-that of a man who, among other things, espoused Social Darwinism, favored eugenics, and, as he himself acknowledged, came "devilish near to believing that might makes right."

In recent decades, Oliver Wendell Holmes has been praised as "the only great American legal thinker" and "the most illustrious figure in the history of American law." But in Albert Alschuler's critique of both Justice Holmes and contemporary legal scholarship, a darker portrait is painted—that of a man who, among other things, espoused Social Darwinism, favored eugenics, and, as he himself acknowledged, came "devilish near to believing that might makes right."

Law Without Force is a landmark in political and social philosophy. It proposes nothing less than a completely new basis for international law. As relevant today as when it was first published nearly sixty years ago, it commands the attention of all concerned with what the future may bring to the law of nations. The great scope of Niemeyer's undertaking draws respect even from those who disagree with his challenging analysis of the historical past and his suggestions for the future of international law. In his new introduction, Michael Henry observes that Law Without Force provides us with a foundation of Niemeyer's thinking. Published in 1941, when Hitler was swallowing up Europe, this volume shows how a first-rate mind grappled with a legal, historical, social, and ultimately metaphysical problem. It provides in detail the reasoning behind Niemeyer's rejection of a foreign policy based on morality and his distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian governments; and it provides us with the first stage of his lengthy and prodigious effort to understand "this terrible century." It is a book that no serious student of Niemeyer can afford to ignore. At the very heart of the author's vigorous discussion may be found his rejection of a moral basis for international law and his suggestion that a functional basis should be substituted for it. The book incisively reviews the relation between traditional international law and the changing structure of international politics concluding that the traditional system of law has operated as an agency of disharmony and conflict. After an investigation of the traditional legal system, the author then asks, "What type of law fits the social structure of this modern world?" The answers are presented in the last part of the book, as Neimeyer offers his case for a functional system of law, divorced from moral exhortations or appeals to shattered authority. Philosophy, sociology, and legal theory are brilliantly interwoven in this volume, which will engage serious readers interested in political and social theory.

This book advances a theoretical account of contract law, grounded in value pluralism. Arguing against attempts to delineate branches of legal doctrine by reference to single unifying values, the book suggests that a field such as contract law can only be explained and justified by the interaction of a multiplicity of moral values. In recent times, the philosophy of contract law has been dominated by the 'promise theory', according to which the morality of promise provides a 'blueprint' for the structure, shape, and content that contract law rules and doctrines should take. The promise theory is an example of what this book calls a 'foundationalist' theory, whereby areas of law reflect or are underlain by particular moral principles or sets of such principles. By considering contract law from the point of view of its theory, rules and doctrines, and broader political context, the book argues that the promise theory can only ever offer part of the picture. The book claims that 'top-down' theories of contract law such as the promise theory and its bitter rival the economic analysis of law seriously mishandle legal doctrine by ignoring or underplaying the irreducible plurality of values that shape contract law. The book defends the role of this multiplicity of values in forging contract doctrine by developing from the 'ground-up' a radical and distinctly republican reinterpretation of the field. The book encourages readers to move away from a 'top-down' theory of contract law such as the promise theory and instead embrace a distinctly republican approach to contract law that would justify the legal rules and doctrines we find in particular jurisdictions at particular times.

How can criminal punishment be morally justified? Zisman addresses this classical question in legal philosophy. He provides two maybe surprising answers to the question. First, as for a methodological claim, it argues that this question cannot be answered by philosophers and legal scholars alone. Rather, we need to take into account research from social psychology, economy, anthropology, and so on in order to properly analyze the arguments in defense of criminal punishment. Second, the book argues that when such research is properly accounted for, none of the current attempts to justify criminal punishment succeed. But that does not imply that the state should do nothing about criminal wrongdoing. Rather, the arguments that were supposed to justify criminal punishment actually speak in favor of an alternative approach to criminal law: restitution to the victim and restorative justice. That is to say, the state should coerce offenders to provide restitution for the harm inflicted on victims, and whenever possible restorative approaches should be taken to address criminal wrongdoing.

Emotions, Values, and the Law brings together ten of John Deigh's essays written over the past fifteen years. In the first five essays, Deigh ask questions about the nature of emotions and the relation of evaluative judgment to the intentionality of emotions, and critically examines the cognitivist theories of emotion that have dominated philosophy and psychology over the past thirty years. A central criticism of these theories is that they do not satisfactorily account for the emotions of babies or animals other than human beings. Drawing on this criticism, Deigh develops an alternative theory of the intentionality of emotions on which the education of emotions explains how human emotions, which innately contain no evaluative thought, come to have evaluative judgments as their principal cognitive component. The second group of five essays challenge the idea of the voluntary as essential to understanding moral responsibility, moral commitment, political obligation, and other moral and political phenomena that have traditionally been thought to depend on people's will. Each of these studies focuses on a different aspect of our common moral and political life and shows, contrary to conventional opinion, that it does not depend on voluntary action or the exercise of a will constituted solely by rational thought. Together, the essays in this collection represent an effort to shift our understanding of the phenomena traditionally studied in moral and political philosophy from that of their being products of reason and will, operating independently of feeling and sentiment to that of their being manifestations of the work of emotion. "Deigh's writing is clear and precise, his arguments are strong, and he uses a wide range of real world examples that give his essays a vibrant and very readable character." - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews "I believe that Deigh is as clear-headed and insightful a philosopher as is currently at work today in the areas of moral, political, and legal philosophy and moral psychology, and I believe these essays beautifully demonstrate his many virtues." - Herbert Morris, University of California, Low Angeles Law School "[John Deigh] has acquired a very good knowledge of a field which he has very much made his own. No one writes better or thinks more productively on that area of thought where the theory of the emotions, psychoanalysis, value theory, and the theory of law intersect. And if we closely connect the name Deigh with this particular concatenation of topics, I believe that very soon there will be a number of voices clamoring to be heard in this area." - Richard Wollheim, University of California, Berkeley