Books in the Oxford Legal Philosophy series

Private law governs our most pervasive relationships: the wrongs we do one another, the contracts we make and break, and the property we own. This book analyses the deepest questions about the law's foundations, showing how a distinctive notion of justice, 'corrective justice', describes the special morality intrinsic to private law.

What are the moral and legal issues of contemporary warfare? Drawing on cutting-edge debates in moral philosophy, this book proposes how the laws of war can be evaluated, criticized, and reformed, making a valuable and timely contribution to a pressing international debate.

When we impose risk upon others, what is it that we are doing? What is risking's moral significance? What moral standards govern the imposition of risk? And how should the law respond to it? Drawing on philosophy and legal theory the author constructs a normative framework of risk imposition to help answer these important and oft-ignored questions.

How can the brutal and costly enterprise of criminal punishment be justified? This book makes a provocative, original contribution to the philosophical literature and debate on the morality of punishing, arguing that punishment is justified in the duties that offenders incur as a result of their wrongdoing.

When is it justified to disobey the law? How should the law respond to instances of conscientious disobedience? This book presents the first full-length philosophical examination of the morality and legality of civil disobedience, and the legitimate responses to civil dissent open to the state.

The idea of legislative intent plays a central role in legal interpretation and constitutional theory, yet is repeatedly challenged as being an illusion. Refuting these challenges, this book develops a robust account of how and why legislatures form intentions, and the importance of these intentions to understanding law and parliamentary democracy.

Within limits, the law allows for exceptions. But how do we draw the line between a rule and its exceptions? This is a long-debated question with important practical consequences, but legal theorists have found it surprisingly difficult to answer. This book tackles this persistent puzzle by offering a new account of exceptions in the law.

Why Law Matters argues that public institutions and legal procedures are valuable and matter as such, irrespective of their instrumental value. Examining the value of rights, public institutions, and constitutional review, the book criticises instrumentalist approaches in political theory, claiming they fail to account for their enduring appeal.

While unjust enrichment is often identified as the third major branch of private law alongside contract and tort, there remains uncertainty what this body of law covers and what it's about. This book provides an account of the reasons supporting these claims and how these reasons bear on the law's application and development.

This work offers a new theory of what it means to be a legal person and suggests that it is best understood as a cluster property. The book explores the origins of legal personhood, the issues afflicting a traditional understanding of the concept, and the numerous debates surrounding the topic.

This book makes a systematic defence of the Coercion Thesis in law, arguing that coercion or enforcement mechanisms are not only a necessary feature of legal systems, but a conceptually necessary feature of legal systems.

The Right of Redress advances the discussion of corrective justice in private law by refocusing the reversal of transactions away from the prevailing account of the wrongdoer's remedial duty and toward the right of an individual to obtain redress, which the author terms 'redressive justice'.