Ambitious legal thinkers have become mesmerized by moral philosophy, believing that great figures in the philosophical tradition hold the keys to understanding and improving law and justice and even to resolving the most contentious issues of constitutional law. They are wrong, contends Richard Posner in this book. Posner characterizes the current preoccupation with moral and constitutional theory as the latest form of legal mystification--an evasion of the real need of American law, which is for a greater understanding of the social, economic, and political facts out of which great legal controversies arise. In pursuit of that understanding, Posner advocates a rebuilding of the law on the pragmatic basis of open-minded and systematic empirical inquiry and the rejection of cant and nostalgia--the true professionalism foreseen by Holmes a century ago.

A bracing book that pulls no punches and leaves no pieties unpunctured or sacred cows unkicked, The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory offers a sweeping tour of the current scene in legal studies--and a hopeful prospect for its future.

Richard A. Posner is Circuit Judge, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School.

Read More by Richard A. Posner:

• Law and Literature, Revised and Enlarged Edition
• Private Choices and Public Health: The AIDS Epidemic in an Economic Perspective
• The Economics of Justice
• The Federal Courts: Challenge and Reform
• Overcoming Law
• The Problems of Jurisprudence
• Sex and Reason
• An Affair of State: The Investigation, Impeachment, and Trial of President Clinton
• The Economic Structure of Tort Law
• Frontiers of Legal Theory
• Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline
• Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy
• The Economic Structure of Intellectual Property Law
• Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, With a New Preface and Epilogue
• How Judges Think