Routledge Research in Legal Philosophy
About the Book Series
This series features thought-provoking and original scholarship on the philosophy of law. Books explore key topics, themes and questions in the field as well as philosophical issues associated with particular legal subjects.
A Philosophical Approach to War Crimes Trials: Between Theory and Practice
1st Edition
Edited
By Wibke K. Timmermann, Predrag Dojčinović
July 03, 2026
This volume examines the underexplored relationship between philosophy and international criminal law, disciplines commonly separated despite their shared engagement with truth, responsibility, and judgment. Philosophical inquiry has long analyzed concepts central to criminal adjudication, yet ...
Against Legal Punishment: An Argument for Abolition
1st Edition
By Nathan Hanna
June 19, 2026
This book argues that legal punishment is almost never morally justified. Many criminal law theorists think that this view is deeply at odds with common sense and that it’s subject to decisive objections. Against these theorists, the book argues that the standard objections to this view fail and ...
Law and Morality: Perspectives on Natural Law Theory and Legal Positivism
1st Edition
Edited
By Mir Ahmad Murtiza
February 19, 2026
Philosophers considering the relationship between law and morality are often divided into two schools: natural law theory and legal positivism. Broadly speaking, natural law theorists assert that law is intrinsically linked to the moral order and that ethical considerations are integral to the ...
Democracy and the Rule of Law in Indonesia: A Legal Philosophical Analysis
1st Edition
By Stefanus Hendrianto
February 18, 2026
This book explores democratic development in Indonesia—the world's third-largest democracy after India and the United States. Through case studies, it looks at two rival versions of democracy—the republican form and the electoral form—and posits that electoral democracy is not sustainable without ...
Human Dignity, Judicial Reasoning, and the Law: Comparative Perspectives on a Key Constitutional Concept
1st Edition
Edited
By Brett G. Scharffs, Andrea Pin, Dmytro Vovk
December 26, 2025
This volume explores how national and international human rights courts interpret and apply human dignity. The book tracks the increasing deployment of the concept of human dignity within courts in recent decades. It identifies how human-dignity-based arguments have expanded to cover larger sets of...
Legal and Ethical Retributivism: A Restorative Analysis
1st Edition
By Halil Cesur
July 31, 2025
This book explores a foundational philosophical tension in contemporary retributivism, revealing ambiguities in its approach to punishment between two conflicting conceptions of restoration: legal justice and ethical love. Through an analysis of the three parties involved in a crime – the victim, ...
The Illegality Defence in Law: A Constitutional and Human Rights Perspective
1st Edition
By Edit Deutch
June 30, 2025
The Illegality Defence posits that a cause of action cannot arise from a wrongful act. Barring a claim through the application of this defence contradicts considerations of corrective justice, as the defendant is released from liability even though the claimant would otherwise have been entitled to...
Theorizing Legal Punishment
1st Edition
By Richard L. Lippke
June 27, 2025
This book systematically defends an account of the institution of legal punishment that draws on both retributive and crime-prevention thinking. The work argues that legal punishment censures convicted offenders and thus morally communicates with them, any victims, and the broader community, while ...
Purely Formal Legal Theory: Deontic Networks
1st Edition
By Ottavio Quirico
April 16, 2025
This book elaborates on deontic logic and network theory to present a reductionist theory of the law, disclosing a simple understanding of legal norms based on minimum necessary and sufficient notions. The analysis explores the concept of a ‘norm’ as a claim-obligation relation that regulates ...
Judges, Decision Making and Empathy: Insights from the Bench
1st Edition
By Mateusz Stępień, Ewa Wilczek-Rużyczka
March 31, 2025
This book presents empirical research uncovering the views and experiences of Polish judges regarding the utilization of empathy in their work. Although there is growing interest in the role of empathy in judicial decision-making, there is little research on how judges themselves approach this ...
Sport, Law and Philosophy: The Jurisprudence of Sport
1st Edition
Edited
By Miroslav Imbrišević
January 30, 2025
Sport, Law and Philosophy: The Jurisprudence of Sport discusses the intersection of law and sport and highlights its usefulness to both legal scholars and philosophers of sport. There is a general recognition that law and sports bear strong similarities. Both can be understood as systems of rules, ...
Metaethical Issues in Contemporary Legal Philosophy: A Constitutivist Approach
1st Edition
Edited
By Stefano Bertea, Jorge Silva Sampaio
December 31, 2024
This volume explores the importance of constitutivism for legal studies. Constitutivism is the view that the normative force, or authority, of practical reasons is grounded in principles, capacities, aims, or functions that are essential to, and thus constitutive of, agency. While the implications ...