个人简介

Robert S. Summers is the William G. McRoberts Research Professor in the Administration of Law at Cornell Law School. He has won international acclaim for his work in contracts and commercial law and authored and coauthored multiple works on contracts, commercial law, jurisprudence and legal theory. His treatise on the Uniform Commercial Code, coauthored with James White, is the most widely cited on the subject. Professor Summers has served as official advisor both to the Drafting Commission for Russian Civil Code and to the Drafting Commission for Egyptian Civil Code. He lectures annually on jurisprudence and legal theory in Britain, Scandinavia, and Europe.

内容简介

This book addresses three major questions about law and legal systems: (1) What are the defining and organizing forms of legal institutions, legal rules, interpretive methodologies, and other legal phenomena? (2) How does frontal and systematic focus on these forms advance understanding of such phenomena? (3) What credit should the functions of forms have when such phenomena serve policy and related purposes, rule of law values, and fundamental political values such as democracy, liberty, and justice? The answers not only provide articulate conversancy with the subject but also reveal insights into the nature of law itself, as well as allied subjects.
Focusing on legal structures as they developed in Western societies, "Form and Function in a Legal System" looks at four paradigms of the forms of a varied selection of functional legal units: legislatures and courts, statutory rules, contracts and property, legal methodologies for interpreting law, and enforcive devices such as sanctions and remedies. In contrast to the rules-based analysis made prominent by legal thinkers such as H. L. A. Hart and Hans Kelsen, the form-oriented analysis provides a new and intellectually stimulating understanding on how law can be conceptually approached.