This volume represents the main papers delivered by both prominent and rising philosophers at the 1999 SOFIA conference in Mazatlan, Mexico. The volume contains twenty substantial papers spanning important issues of current interest including sexuality and consent, rights and scarcity, democracy and individualism, and the nature of law and the value of punishment.

Legal and Political Philosophy, edited by Enrique Villanueva, is the first volume in the series Social, Political, and Legal Philosophy, published by Rodopi also under his editorship. It contains six original essays by leading political philosophers and philosophers of law (Waldron, Coleman, Postema, Shapiro, Sayre-McCord, and Kraus), along with critical papers on those essays, and replies. This is cutting edge work that elicits sharp responses already as it is published, with the debate joined as the authors reply. Social, Political, and Legal Philosophy is a new book series, edited by Enrique Villanueva, and published by Rodopi Publishers as part of Rodopi Philosophical Studies. The series will publish collections of new essays on topics in social or political or legal philosophy. New volumes will be published approximately every year or every other year.

Selected byChoice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title

It gives me great pleasure to offer this foreword to the present work of my admired friend and respected colleague Ota Weinberger. Apart from the essays of his which were published in our joint work An Institutional Theory of Law: New Approaches to Legal Positivism in 1986, relatively little of Wein berger's work is available in English. This is the more to be regretted, since his is work of particular interest to jurists of the English-speaking world both in view of its origins and in respect of its content As to its origins, Weinberger war reared as a student of the Pure Theory of Law, a theory which in its Kelsenian form has aroused very great interest and has had considerable influence among anglophoone scholars -perhaps even more than in the Germanic countries. Less well known is the fact that the Pure Theory itself divided into two schools, that of Vienna and that of Brno. It was in the Brno school of Frantisek Weyr that Weinberger's legal theory found its early formation, and perhaps from that early influence one can trace his continuing insistence on the dual character of legal norms -both as genuinely normative and yet at the same time having real social existence.

Mark David Hall fills a void in the literature by providing a comprehensive analysis of Wilson's political and legal philosophy. By placing him in the context of the history of ideas, and by showing how his political theory influenced his concrete contributions to the creation of the American republic, Hall reveals Wilson's views of morality, epistemology, and human nature. These views made him the founding period's most important advocate of a strong and democratic national government that also protects the rights of the individual. The Political and Legal Philosophy of James Wilson, 1742-1798 is a significant examination of the intellectual and political legacy of one of America's leading founders. The book will be of great interest to political scientists, historians, and students of the law.

This the first volume in the series Social, political, and legal philosophy. It contains six original essays by leading political philosophers and philosophers of law (Waldron, Coleman, Postema, Shapiro, Sayre-McCord, and Kraus), along with critical papers on those essays, and replies. This is cutting edge work that elicits sharp responses already as it is published, with the debate joined as the authors reply."