Law, Institution and Legal Politics: Fundamental Problems of Legal Theory and Social Philosophy (Law and Philosophy Library, 14)

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. Front Matter....Pages i-xviii Front Matter....Pages 1-1 Elements of Institutional Legal Positivism....Pages 3-29 Towards a Formal-Teleological Theory of Action....Pages 30-69 The Significance of Logic for Modern Legal Theory Fundamental Problems of Institutionalist Normativism....Pages 70-89 Front Matter....Pages 91-91 Ontology, Hermeneutics and the Concept of Valid Law....Pages 93-110 Constitutional Theory in the Light of the New Institutionalism....Pages 111-132 The Formal-Teleological Theory of Action and Criminal Law....Pages 133-147 Institutional Theory and Institutional Legal Positivism....Pages 148-185 Sociology and the Normative Institutional Theory Reflections on Helmut Schelsky’s Institutional Theory from the Point of View of the Normative Institutional Ontology....Pages 186-205 Front Matter....Pages 207-207 Legal-Political Analysis of Institutions....Pages 209-246 The Conditio Humana and the Ideal of Justice....Pages 247-259 Back Matter....Pages 261-277