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172-515: Despite wide variation in the opinions of critical legal scholars around the world, there is general consensus regarding the key goals of critical legal studies: The abbreviations " CLS " and " Crit " are sometimes used to refer to the movement and its adherents. Considered "the first movement in legal theory and legal scholarship in the United States to have espoused a committed Left political stance and perspective," critical legal studies

344-577: A lower house based on population; and the Senate , an upper house based on equal representation for each state. Federalism provides substantial autonomy to the 50 states, while the country's political culture promotes liberty , equality , individualism , personal autonomy , and limited government . One of the world's most developed countries , the United States has had the largest nominal GDP since about 1890 and accounted for over 15% of

516-580: A " Special Relationship " with the United Kingdom and strong ties with Canada , Australia , New Zealand , the Philippines , Japan , South Korea , Israel , and several European Union countries ( France , Italy , Germany , Spain , and Poland ). The U.S. works closely with its NATO allies on military and national security issues, and with countries in the Americas through

688-545: A "combination of neoliberal orthodoxy, state capitalism, and compensatory redistribution by tax and transfer." Critical legal scholars challenged that consensus and sought to use legal theory as a means to explore alternative forms of social and political organization. In accordance with the Critical rationalism the German jurist Reinhold Zippelius uses Popper's method of "trial and error" in his 'Legal Philosophy'. Although

860-542: A coordinated, continent-wide military effort. Finally, deteriorating relations between the British military establishment and the colonists, relations that were already less than positive, set the stage for further distrust and dislike of British troops. Following their victory in the French and Indian War, Britain began to assert greater control over local colonial affairs, resulting in colonial political resistance ; one of

1032-462: A critical legal theory based LLM at Birkbeck's School of Law. Various research centers and institutions offer CLS-based taught and research courses in a variety of legal fields including human rights, jurisprudence, constitutional theory and criminal justice. In New Zealand , the University of Otago Legal Issues Centre was established at the university's law faculty in 2007. Law and Critique

1204-534: A decentralized government that operated until 1789. After the British surrender at the siege of Yorktown in 1781 American sovereignty was internationally recognized by the Treaty of Paris (1783), through which the U.S. gained territory stretching west to the Mississippi River, north to present-day Canada, and south to Spanish Florida . The Northwest Ordinance (1787) established the precedent by which

1376-407: A few prominent industrialists , largely by their formation of trusts and monopolies to prevent competition. Tycoons led the nation's expansion in the railroad , petroleum , and steel industries. The United States emerged as a pioneer of the automotive industry . These changes were accompanied by significant increases in economic inequality , slum conditions , and social unrest , creating

1548-638: A founding member of the World Bank , Organization of American States , NATO , and the United Nations , as well as a permanent member of the UN Security Council . The first documented use of the phrase "United States of America" is a letter from January 2, 1776. Stephen Moylan , a Continental Army aide to General George Washington , wrote to Joseph Reed , Washington's aide-de-camp , seeking to go "with full and ample powers from

1720-429: A general perspective of what law is and what it ought to be. It investigates issues such as the definition of law; legal validity; legal norms and values; as well as the relationship between law and other fields of study, including economics , ethics , history , sociology , and political philosophy . Modern jurisprudence began in the 18th century and was based on the first principles of natural law , civil law , and

1892-410: A law, especially when the "particular" law of one's own city was adverse to the case being made, not that there actually was such a law. Aristotle, moreover, considered certain candidates for a universally valid, natural law to be wrong. Aristotle's theoretical paternity of the natural law tradition is consequently disputed. Thomas Aquinas is the foremost classical proponent of natural theology , and

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2064-540: A moral virtue derived as the mean between opposing vices, just like every other virtue he describes. His longest discussion of his theory of justice occurs in Nicomachean Ethics and begins by asking what sort of mean a just act is. He argues that the term "justice" actually refers to two different but related ideas: general justice and particular justice. When a person's actions toward others are completely virtuous in all matters, Aristotle calls them "just" in

2236-406: A new theory of jurisprudence that has developed since the 1970s. The theory can generally be traced to American legal realism and is considered "the first movement in legal theory and legal scholarship in the United States to have espoused a committed Left political stance and perspective". It holds that the law is largely contradictory, and can be best analyzed as an expression of the policy goals of

2408-481: A norm. Joseph Raz's theory of legal positivism argues against the incorporation of moral values to explain law's validity. In Raz's 1979 book The Authority of Law , he criticised what he called the "weak social thesis" to explain law. He formulates the weak social thesis as "(a) Sometimes the identification of some laws turn on moral arguments, but also with, (b) In all legal systems the identification of some law turns on moral argument." Raz argues that law's authority

2580-598: A period of heightened, overt racism following Reconstruction, a time often called the nadir of American race relations . A series of Supreme Court decisions, including Plessy v. Ferguson , emptied the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of their force, allowing Jim Crow laws in the South to remain unchecked, sundown towns in the Midwest, and segregation in communities across the country , which would be reinforced by

2752-428: A pivotal book on Hart (second edition published in 2008), which further refined and offered some important criticisms that led MacCormick to develop his own theory (the best example of which is his Institutions of Law , 2007). Other important critiques include those of Ronald Dworkin , John Finnis, and Joseph Raz . In recent years, debates on the nature of law have become increasingly fine-grained. One important debate

2924-488: A prominent leader in the early 1960s. The Great Society plan of President Lyndon Johnson 's administration resulted in groundbreaking and broad-reaching laws, policies and a constitutional amendment to counteract some of the worst effects of lingering institutional racism . The counterculture movement in the U.S. brought significant social changes, including the liberalization of attitudes toward recreational drug use and sexuality . It also encouraged open defiance of

3096-456: A scholarly literature: [C]ritical legal studies has two aspects. It’s a scholarly literature and it has also been a network of people who were thinking of themselves as activists in law school politics. Initially, the scholarly literature was produced by the same people who were doing law school activism. Critical legal studies is not a theory. It’s basically this literature produced by this network of people. I think you can identify some themes of

3268-526: A sense of manifest destiny . The Missouri Compromise attempted to balance the desire of northern states to prevent the expansion of slavery into new territories with that of southern states to extend it, admitting Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state. It further prohibited slavery in all other lands of the Louisiana Purchase north of the 36°30′ parallel . As Americans expanded further into land inhabited by Native Americans,

3440-614: A sense of American identity as well. Men who otherwise never left their own colony now traveled across the continent to fight alongside men from decidedly different backgrounds but who were no less "American". British officers trained American officers for battle, most notably George Washington ; these officers would lend their skills and expertise to the colonists' cause during the American Revolutionary War to come. In addition, colonial legislatures and officials found it necessary to cooperate intensively in pursuit of

3612-581: A sovereign, to whom people have a habit of obedience". H. L. A. Hart criticized Austin and Bentham's early legal positivism because the command theory failed to account for individual's compliance with the law. Hans Kelsen is considered one of the preeminent jurists of the 20th century and has been highly influential in Europe and Latin America, although less so in common law countries. His Pure Theory of Law describes law as "binding norms", while at

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3784-632: A status solidified after its involvement in World War I . After Japan 's attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the U.S. entered World War II . Its aftermath left the U.S. and the Soviet Union as the world's two superpowers and led to the Cold War , during which both countries struggled for ideological dominance and international influence . Following the Soviet Union's collapse and

3956-422: A system of law, or to give it our respect. Thus, the law must have a morality that goes beyond the societal rules under which laws are made. Sophisticated positivist and natural law theories sometimes resemble each other and may have certain points in common. Identifying a particular theorist as a positivist or a natural law theorist sometimes involves matters of emphasis and degree, and the particular influences on

4128-532: A theory of ius gentium (law of nations), and thus is an important figure in the transition to modernity. He extrapolated his ideas of legitimate sovereign power to international affairs, concluding that such affairs ought to be determined by forms respecting of the rights of all and that the common good of the world should take precedence before the good of any single state. This meant that relations between states ought to pass from being justified by force to being justified by law and justice. Some scholars have upset

4300-401: A year). Juvenile correctional facilities are operated by local or state governments and serve as longer-term placements for any minor adjudicated as delinquent and ordered by a judge to be confined. As of January 2023, the United States has the sixth-highest per capita incarceration rate in the world—531 people per 100,000 inhabitants—and the largest prison and jail population in

4472-417: Is the case. So analysing and clarifying the way the world is must be treated as a strictly separate question from normative and evaluative questions of what ought to be done. The most important questions of analytic jurisprudence are: "What are laws?"; "What is the law?"; "What is the relationship between law and power/sociology?"; and "What is the relationship between law and morality?" Legal positivism

4644-411: Is a necessary truth that there are vices that a legal system cannot possibly have (for example, it cannot commit rape or murder). Legal realism is the view that a theory of law should be descriptive and account for the reasons why judges decide cases as they do. Legal realism had some affinities with the sociology of law and sociological jurisprudence. The essential tenet of legal realism is that all law

4816-416: Is based on "first principles": ... this is the first precept of the law, that good is to be done and promoted, and evil is to be avoided. All other precepts of the natural law are based on this ... The desires to live and to procreate are counted by Aquinas among those basic (natural) human values on which all other human values are based. Francisco de Vitoria was perhaps the first to develop

4988-591: Is believed to be the first widespread culture in the Americas. Over time, indigenous North American cultures grew increasingly sophisticated, and some, such as the Mississippian culture , developed agriculture , architecture , and complex societies . In the post-archaic period , the Mississippian cultures were located in the midwestern , eastern , and southern regions, and the Algonquian in

5160-496: Is commonly said that Hobbes's views on human nature were influenced by his times. The English Civil War and the Cromwellian dictatorship had taken place; and, in reacting to that, Hobbes felt that absolute authority vested in a monarch, whose subjects obeyed the law, was the basis of a civilized society. John Austin and Jeremy Bentham were early legal positivists who sought to provide a descriptive account of law that describes

5332-425: Is conceptually distinct from morality. While law might contain morality, the separability thesis states that "it is in no sense a necessary truth that laws reproduce or satisfy certain demands of morality, though in fact they have often done so." Legal positivists disagree about the extent of the separability thesis. Exclusive legal positivists, notably Joseph Raz , go further than the standard thesis and deny that it

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5504-485: Is from this cultural movement that Justinian 's Corpus Juris Civilis was born. Modern jurisprudence began in the 18th century and was based on the first principles of natural law , civil law , and the law of nations . Natural law holds that there are rational objective limits to the power of rulers, the foundations of law are accessible through reason, and it is from these laws of nature that human laws gain force. The moral theory of natural law asserts that law

5676-528: Is identifiable purely through social sources, without reference to moral reasoning. This view he calls "the sources thesis". Raz suggests that any categorisation of rules beyond their role as authority is better left to sociology than to jurisprudence. Some philosophers used to contend that positivism was the theory that held that there was "no necessary connection" between law and morality; but influential contemporary positivists—including Joseph Raz, John Gardner , and Leslie Green —reject that view. Raz claims it

5848-446: Is inherent in nature and constitutive of morality, at least in part, and that an objective moral order, external to human legal systems, underlies natural law. On this view, while legislators can enact and even successfully enforce immoral laws, such laws are legally invalid. The view is captured by the maxim: " an unjust law is no law at all ", where 'unjust' means 'contrary to the natural law.' Natural law theory has medieval origins in

6020-498: Is known as the presidential system , in contrast to the parliamentary system , where the executive is part of the legislative body. Many countries around the world imitated this aspect of the 1789 Constitution of the United States , especially in the Americas. The Constitution is silent on political parties. However, they developed independently in the 18th century with the Federalist and Anti-Federalist parties. Since then,

6192-424: Is made by humans and thus should account for reasons besides legal rules that led to a legal decision. There are two separate schools of legal realism: American legal realism and Scandinavian legal realism. American legal realism grew out of the writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes . At the start of Holmes's The Common Law , he claims that "[t]he life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience". This view

6364-438: Is now the United States experienced conflicts with Native Americans, they also engaged in trade, exchanging European tools for food and animal pelts. Relations ranged from close cooperation to warfare and massacres. The colonial authorities often pursued policies that forced Native Americans to adopt European lifestyles, including conversion to Christianity. Along the eastern seaboard, settlers trafficked African slaves through

6536-809: Is one of the few UK journals that specifically identifies itself with critical legal theory. In America, The Crit and Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left are the only journals that continue to explicitly position themselves as platforms for critical legal studies. However, other journals such as Law, Culture and the Humanities , the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review , The National Lawyers Guild Review , Social and Legal Studies , and The Australian Feminist Law Journal all published avowedly critical legal research. The stance "law

6708-466: Is politics" of Critical legal studies has been criticized for rejecting the distinction between political argument and legal argument. Critical legal studies has been criticized as attacking the rule of law and separation of powers . The indeterminacy thesis stance by Critical legal studies has been criticized to not distinguish between the strong and weak indeterminacy thesis. The strong indeterminancy thesis has been argued by some to be incorrect due to

6880-554: Is possible for morality to be a part of law at all. The discretion thesis states that judges create new law when they are given discretion to adjudicate cases where existing law underdetermines the result. Hobbes was a social contractarian and believed that the law had peoples' tacit consent. He believed that society was formed from a state of nature to protect people from the state of war that would exist otherwise. In Leviathan , Hobbes argues that without an ordered society life would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." It

7052-472: Is the dominant theory, although there is a growing number of critics who offer their own interpretations. Historical jurisprudence came to prominence during the debate on the proposed codification of German law . In his book On the Vocation of Our Age for Legislation and Jurisprudence , Friedrich Carl von Savigny argued that Germany did not have a legal language that would support codification because

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7224-552: Is the federal agency charged with addressing most environmental-related issues . The idea of wilderness has shaped the management of public lands since 1964, with the Wilderness Act . The Endangered Species Act of 1973 provides a way to protect threatened and endangered species and their habitats. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service implements and enforces the Act. In 2024, the U.S. ranked 34th among 180 countries in

7396-420: Is within legal positivism. One school is sometimes called "exclusive legal positivism" and is associated with the view that the legal validity of a norm can never depend on its moral correctness. A second school is labeled "inclusive legal positivism", a major proponent of which is Wil Waluchow, and is associated with the view that moral considerations may , but do not necessarily, determine the legal validity of

7568-530: The Nicomachean Ethics (Book IV of the Eudemian Ethics ). Aquinas's influence was such as to affect a number of early translations of these passages, though more recent translations render them more literally. Aristotle's theory of justice is bound up in his idea of the golden mean . Indeed, his treatment of what he calls "political justice" derives from his discussion of "the just" as

7740-603: The Allies of World War I , helping to turn the tide against the Central Powers . In 1920, a constitutional amendment granted nationwide women's suffrage . During the 1920s and '30s, radio for mass communication and the invention of early television transformed communications nationwide. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 triggered the Great Depression , which President Franklin D. Roosevelt responded to with

7912-553: The Atlantic slave trade . The original Thirteen Colonies that would later found the United States were administered as possessions of Great Britain , and had local governments with elections open to most white male property owners . The colonial population grew rapidly, eclipsing Native American populations; by the 1770s, the natural increase of the population was such that only a small minority of Americans had been born overseas. The colonies' distance from Britain allowed for

8084-789: The Court of Cassation , the Conseil d'Etat , and the Ecole Nationale de la Magistrature, famed sociologist Pierre Bourdieu caused an uproar when he released his "La Force de la loi, élements pour une sociologie du champ juridique" in 1986 - translated as "The Force of Law: Toward a Sociology of the Juridical Field", in the Hastings Law Journal (1987). It heralded the beginning of continental Critical Legal Studies. Critical legal studies had its intellectual origins in

8256-552: The Daoists , Confucians , and Legalists all had competing theories of jurisprudence. Jurisprudence in ancient Rome had its origins with the periti —experts in the jus mos maiorum (traditional law), a body of oral laws and customs. Praetors established a working body of laws by judging whether or not singular cases were capable of being prosecuted either by the edicta , the annual pronunciation of prosecutable offences, or in extraordinary situations, additions made to

8428-549: The Environmental Performance Index . The country joined the Paris Agreement on climate change in 2016 and has many other environmental commitments. The United States is a federal republic of 50 states and a separate federal capital district, Washington, D.C. It also asserts sovereignty over five unincorporated territories and several uninhabited island possessions . The U.S. is

8600-500: The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the U.S. Marshals Service have national jurisdiction and specialized duties, such as protecting civil rights , national security and enforcing U.S. federal courts ' rulings and federal laws. State courts conduct most civil and criminal trials, and federal courts handle designated crimes and appeals of state court decisions . There is no unified "criminal justice system" in

8772-720: The Great Lakes , Mississippi River and Gulf of Mexico . British colonization of the East Coast began with the Virginia Colony (1607) and Plymouth Colony (1620). The Mayflower Compact and the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut established precedents for representative self-governance and constitutionalism that would develop throughout the American colonies. While European settlers in what

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8944-719: The Great Lakes region and along the Eastern Seaboard , while the Hohokam culture and Ancestral Puebloans inhabited the southwest . Native population estimates of what is now the United States before the arrival of European immigrants range from around 500,000 to nearly 10 million. Christopher Columbus began exploring the Caribbean for Spain in 1492, leading to Spanish-speaking settlements and missions from Puerto Rico and Florida to New Mexico and California . France established its own settlements along

9116-596: The Midwest . At the same time, about one million French Canadians migrated from Quebec to New England . During the Great Migration , millions of African Americans left the rural South for urban areas in the North. Alaska was purchased from Russia in 1867. The Compromise of 1877 effectively ended Reconstruction and white supremacists took local control of Southern politics . African Americans endured

9288-688: The National Park Service and other agencies. About 28% of the country's land is publicly owned and federally managed, primarily in the Western States . Most of this land is protected , though some is leased for commercial use, and less than one percent is used for military purposes. Environmental issues in the United States include debates on non-renewable resources and nuclear energy , air and water pollution , biodiversity , logging and deforestation , and climate change . The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

9460-596: The New Deal , a series of sweeping programs and public works projects combined with financial reforms and regulations . All were intended to protect against future economic depressions. Initially neutral during World War II , the U.S. began supplying war materiel to the Allies of World War II in March 1941 and entered the war in December after the Empire of Japan 's attack on Pearl Harbor . The U.S. developed

9632-778: The Organization of American States and the United States–Mexico–Canada Free Trade Agreement . In South America, Colombia is traditionally considered to be the closest ally of the United States. The U.S. exercises full international defense authority and responsibility for Micronesia , the Marshall Islands , and Palau through the Compact of Free Association . It has increasingly conducted strategic cooperation with India , but its ties with China have steadily deteriorated. Since 2014,

9804-648: The Pentium microprocessor in accordance with Moore's law , rechargeable lithium-ion batteries , the first gene therapy trial, and cloning either emerged in the U.S. or were improved upon there. The Human Genome Project was formally launched in 1990, while Nasdaq became the first stock market in the United States to trade online in 1998. In the Gulf War of 1991, an American-led international coalition of states expelled an Iraqi invasion force that had occupied neighboring Kuwait . The September 11 attacks on

9976-591: The Spanish–American War . (The Philippines was granted full independence from the U.S. on July 4, 1946, following World War II. Puerto Rico and Guam have remained U.S. territories.) American Samoa was acquired by the United States in 1900 after the Second Samoan Civil War . The U.S. Virgin Islands were purchased from Denmark in 1917. The United States entered World War I alongside

10148-623: The United States ( U.S. ) or America , is a country primarily located in North America . It is a federal union of 50 states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 contiguous states border Canada to the north and Mexico to the south, with the states of Alaska to the northwest and the archipelagic Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean . The United States also asserts sovereignty over five major island territories and various uninhabited islands . The country has

10320-507: The University of Glasgow , the University of East London among others. In the American legal academy its influence and prominence seems to have waned in recent years. However, offshoots of CLS, including critical race theory continue to grow in popularity. Associated schools of thought, such as fem-crit, contemporary feminist theory and ecofeminism and critical race theory now play a major role in contemporary legal scholarship. An impressive stream of CLS-style writings has also emerged in

10492-772: The Yale Law Journal , included dozens of authors and hundreds of works. A 2011 collection of four volumes edited by Costas Douzinas and Colin Perrin, with the assistance of J-M Barreto, compiles the work of the British Critical Legal Studies, including their philosophical mentors. It showcases scholarship elaborated since its origins in the late 1980s in areas such as legal philosophy , literature, psychoanalysis , aesthetics , feminism , gender , sexuality , post-colonialism , race , ethics , politics and human rights . Prominent participants in

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10664-700: The cotton gin made the institution increasingly profitable for Southern elites . This sectional conflict regarding slavery culminated in the American Civil War (1861–1865). Eleven slave states seceded and formed the Confederate States of America , while the other states remained in the Union . War broke out in April 1861 after the Confederates bombarded Fort Sumter . After

10836-424: The edicta . A iudex (originally a magistrate , later a private individual appointed to judge a specific case ) would then prescribe a remedy according to the facts of the case. The sentences of the iudex were supposed to be simple interpretations of the traditional customs, but—apart from considering what traditional customs applied in each case—soon developed a more equitable interpretation, coherently adapting

11008-523: The end of the Cold War in 1991, the U.S. emerged as the world's sole superpower , wielding significant geopolitical influence globally . The U.S. national government is a presidential constitutional federal republic and liberal democracy with three separate branches : legislative , executive , and judicial . It has a bicameral national legislature composed of the House of Representatives ,

11180-537: The fall of communism and the collapse of the Soviet Union , which marked the end of the Cold War and left the United States as the world's sole superpower . The 1990s saw the longest recorded economic expansion in American history , a dramatic decline in U.S. crime rates , and advances in technology . Throughout this decade, technological innovations such as the World Wide Web , the evolution of

11352-400: The global economy in 2023. It possesses by far the largest amount of wealth of any country and has the highest disposable household income per capita among OECD countries. The U.S. ranks among the world's highest in economic competitiveness , productivity , innovation , human rights , and higher education . Its hard power and cultural influence have a global reach. The U.S. is

11524-663: The law of nations . Contemporary philosophy of law addresses problems internal to law and legal systems and problems of law as a social institution that relates to the larger political and social context in which it exists. Jurisprudence can be divided into categories both by the type of question scholars seek to answer and by the theories of jurisprudence, or schools of thought, regarding how those questions are best answered: The terms "philosophy of law" and "jurisprudence" are often used interchangeably, though jurisprudence sometimes encompasses forms of reasoning that fit into economics or sociology . Whereas lawyers are interested in what

11696-569: The "basic institutional arrangements of the market economy, of democratic politics, and of civil society outside the market and the state". Reasoned elaboration was a pernicious influence for several reasons, Unger and others argued: it de-emphasized the contingent nature of law as a product of deals and compromise, instead treating it as containing a coherent prescriptive system that needed simply to be uncovered by legal interpretation; it obscured how judges usurp authority by denying their own role in making law; and finally, reasoned elaboration inhibited

11868-442: The "inbuilt legal content of a ... free society", the method of reasoned elaboration treated law materials as containing an "ideal element", an inherent legal substance underlying the contradictions and ambiguities in the law's text. Under the practice of reasoned elaboration, this inherent legal substance forms a prescriptive system that judges gradually uncover by reasoning through the policies and principles of law without questioning

12040-813: The 1775 Battles of Lexington and Concord , igniting the American Revolutionary War . At the Second Continental Congress , the colonies appointed George Washington commander-in-chief of the Continental Army , and created a committee that named Thomas Jefferson to draft the Declaration of Independence . Two days after passing the Lee Resolution to create an independent nation the Declaration

12212-520: The 2010s, political polarization in the country increased between liberal and conservative factions. This polarization was capitalized upon in the January 2021 Capitol attack , when a mob of insurrectionists entered the U.S. Capitol and sought to prevent the peaceful transfer of power in an attempted self-coup d'état . The United States is the world's third-largest country by total area behind Russia and Canada. The 48 contiguous states and

12384-596: The American West have an alpine climate . The climate is arid in the Southwest, Mediterranean in coastal California , and oceanic in coastal Oregon , Washington , and southern Alaska . Most of Alaska is subarctic or polar . Hawaii , the southern tip of Florida and U.S. territories in the Caribbean and Pacific are tropical . States bordering the Gulf of Mexico are prone to hurricanes, and most of

12556-468: The American legal realist movement in the 1930s. Prior to the 1930s, American jurisprudence had been dominated by a formalist account of how courts decide cases, an account which held that judges decide cases on the basis of distinctly legal rules and reasons that justify a unique result. The legal realists argued that statutory and case law is indeterminate, and that appellate courts decide cases not based upon law, but upon what they deem fair in light of

12728-473: The American legal realists of the early twentieth century, legal realism sought to describe the way judges decide cases. For legal realists such as Jerome Frank , judges start with the facts before them and then move to legal principles. Before legal realism, theories of jurisprudence turned this method around where judges were thought to begin with legal principles and then look to facts. It has become common today to identify Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., as

12900-508: The CLS (like most schools and movements) has not produced a single, monolithic body of thought, several common themes can be generally traced in its adherents' works. These include: Increasingly, however, the traditional themes are being superseded by broader and more radical critical insights. Interventions in intellectual property law , human rights , jurisprudence , criminal law , property law , international law , etc., have proved crucial to

13072-465: The CLS movement include Derrick Bell , Drucilla Cornell , Mary Joe Frug , Mark Kelman , Alan Hunt , Catharine MacKinnon , Paul O'Connell, Peter Fitzpatrick, Morton Horwitz , Jack Balkin , Costas Douzinas , Karl Klare , Peter Gabel , Roberto Unger , Renata Salecl , Mark Tushnet , Louis Michael Seidman , John Strawson and Martha Fineman . Roberto Unger, a key member of critical legal studies whose influence had continued to be far-reaching in

13244-459: The Dean of Harvard Law School , used this term to characterise his legal philosophy . In the United States, many later writers followed Pound's lead or developed distinctive approaches to sociological jurisprudence. In Australia, Julius Stone strongly defended and developed Pound's ideas. In the 1930s, a significant split between the sociological jurists and the American legal realists emerged. In

13416-475: The Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The term "United States" and the initialism "U.S.", used as nouns or as adjectives in English, are common short names for the country. The initialism "USA", a noun, is also common. "United States" and "U.S." are the established terms throughout the U.S. federal government , with prescribed rules. In English, the term "America" rarely refers to topics unrelated to

13588-573: The District of Columbia occupy a combined area of 3,119,885 square miles (8,080,470 km ). The coastal plain of the Atlantic seaboard gives way to inland forests and rolling hills in the Piedmont plateau region. The Appalachian Mountains and the Adirondack massif separate the East Coast from the Great Lakes and the grasslands of the Midwest . The Mississippi River System ,

13760-573: The Elder concluded that major military resources needed to be devoted to North America to win the war against France. For the first time, the continent became one of the main theaters of what could be termed a " world war ". The British colonies' position as an integral part of the British Empire became more apparent during the war, with British military and civilian officials becoming a more significant presence in American life. The war increased

13932-683: The January 1863 Emancipation Proclamation , many freed slaves joined the Union army . The war began to turn in the Union's favor following the 1863 Siege of Vicksburg and Battle of Gettysburg , and the Confederacy surrendered in 1865 after the Union's victory in the Battle of Appomattox Court House . The Reconstruction era followed the war. After the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln , Reconstruction Amendments were passed to protect

14104-522: The National Critical Lawyers Group. There remain a number of fault lines in the community; between theory and practice, between those who look to Marxism and those who worked on Deconstruction , between those who look to explicitly political engagements and those who work in aesthetics and ethics. In France, where the legal tradition had been closely guarded by law faculties and watched over by Napoleonic institutions such as

14276-611: The Rocky Mountains, the Yellowstone Caldera , is the continent's largest volcanic feature. In 2021, the United States had 8% of global permanent meadows and pastures and 10% of cropland. With its large size and geographic variety, the United States includes most climate types. East of the 100th meridian , the climate ranges from humid continental in the north to humid subtropical in the south. The western Great Plains are semi-arid . Many mountainous areas of

14448-647: The U.S. has become a key ally of Ukraine ; it has also provided the country with significant military equipment and other support in response to Russia's 2022 invasion . The president is the commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces and appoints its leaders, the secretary of defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff . The Department of Defense , which is headquartered at the Pentagon near Washington, D.C., administers five of

14620-661: The U.S. territories." Despite disparate systems of confinement, four main institutions dominate: federal prisons , state prisons , local jails, and juvenile correctional facilities . Federal prisons are run by the Federal Bureau of Prisons and hold people who have been convicted of federal crimes, including pretrial detainees. State prisons, run by the official department of correction of each state, hold sentenced people serving prison time (usually longer than one year) for felony offenses. Local jails are county or municipal facilities that incarcerate defendants prior to trial; they also hold those serving short sentences (typically under

14792-464: The United States and the peaceful transfer of power , respectively. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 from France nearly doubled the territory of the United States. Lingering issues with Britain remained , leading to the War of 1812 , which was fought to a draw. Spain ceded Florida and its Gulf Coast territory in 1819. In the late 18th century, American settlers began to expand westward , many with

14964-714: The United States entered the Cold War, where geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union led the two countries to dominate world affairs . The U.S. utilized the policy of containment to limit the USSR's sphere of influence, and prevailed in the Space Race , which culminated with the first crewed Moon landing in 1969. Domestically, the U.S. experienced economic growth , urbanization , and population growth following World War II . The civil rights movement emerged, with Martin Luther King Jr. becoming

15136-666: The United States has operated as a de facto two-party system , though the parties in that system have been different at different times. The two main national parties are presently the Democratic and the Republican . The former is perceived as relatively liberal in its political platform while the latter is perceived as relatively conservative . In the American federal system , sovereign powers are shared between two levels of elected government: national and state. People in

15308-593: The United States in 2001 by the pan-Islamist militant organization al-Qaeda led to the war on terror , and subsequent military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq . The cultural impact of the attacks was profound and long-lasting. The U.S. housing bubble culminated in 2007 with the Great Recession , the largest economic contraction since the Great Depression. Coming to a head in

15480-597: The United States of America to Spain" to seek assistance in the Revolutionary War effort. The first known public usage is an anonymous essay published in the Williamsburg newspaper, The Virginia Gazette , on April 6, 1776. By June 1776, the "United States of America" appeared in the Articles of Confederation and the Declaration of Independence . The Second Continental Congress adopted

15652-593: The United States, despite the usage of "the Americas " as the totality of North and South America. "The States" is an established colloquial shortening of the name, used particularly from abroad; "stateside" is the corresponding adjective or adverb. The first inhabitants of North America migrated from Siberia across the Bering land bridge about 12,000 years ago; the Clovis culture , which appeared around 11,000 BC,

15824-624: The United States, except Iran , North Korea , and Bhutan . Though Taiwan does not have formal diplomatic relations with the U.S., it maintains close unofficial relations. The United States regularly supplies Taiwan with military equipment to deter potential Chinese aggression. Its geopolitical attention also turned to the Indo-Pacific when the United States joined the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue with Australia, India, and Japan. The United States has

15996-509: The United States. The American prison system is largely heterogenous, with thousands of relatively independent systems operating across federal, state, local, and tribal levels. In 2023, "these systems [held] almost 2 million people in 1,566 state prisons, 98 federal prisons, 3,116 local jails, 1,323 juvenile correctional facilities, 181 immigration detention facilities, and 80 Indian country jails, as well as in military prisons , civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in

16168-411: The basis of being analogous to the laws of physical science. Natural law is often contrasted to positive law which asserts law as the product of human activity and human volition. Another approach to natural-law jurisprudence generally asserts that human law must be in response to compelling reasons for action. There are two readings of the natural-law jurisprudential stance. Aristotle is often said to be

16340-468: The content of legal concepts using the methods of social science , analytical jurisprudence seeks to provide a general account of the nature of law through the tools of conceptual analysis . The account is general in the sense of targeting universal features of law that hold at all times and places. Analytic, or clarificatory , jurisprudence takes a neutral point of view and uses descriptive language when referring to various aspects of legal systems. This

16512-457: The contiguous United States are in the State of California, about 84 miles (135 km) apart. At an elevation of 20,310 feet (6,190.5 m), Alaska's Denali is the highest peak in the country and continent. Active volcanoes are common throughout Alaska's Alexander and Aleutian Islands , and Hawaii consists of volcanic islands. The supervolcano underlying Yellowstone National Park in

16684-556: The country's GDP. The U.S. has 42% of the world's nuclear weapons —the second-largest share after Russia. The United States has the third-largest combined armed forces in the world, behind the Chinese People's Liberation Army and Indian Armed Forces . The military operates about 800 bases and facilities abroad, and maintains deployments greater than 100 active duty personnel in 25 foreign countries. State defense forces (SDFs) are military units that operate under

16856-469: The country's territory would expand with the admission of new states , rather than the expansion of existing states. The U.S. Constitution was drafted at the 1787 Constitutional Convention to overcome the limitations of the Articles. It went into effect in 1789, creating a federal republic governed by three separate branches that together ensured a system of checks and balances . George Washington

17028-399: The critical legal studies movement caused considerable controversy within the legal academy. Members such as Roberto Mangabeira Unger have sought to rebuild these institutions as "fragmentary and imperfect expressions of an imaginative scheme of human coexistence rather than just as provisional truce lines in a brutal and amoral conflict." Such members were seen as the most powerful voices and

17200-467: The decades following the movement's decline, has written that the founders of critical legal studies "never meant it to become an ongoing school of thought or genre of writing. They wanted to intervene in a particular circumstance ..." That circumstance was the dominant practice of legal analysis which Unger calls the "method of reasoned elaboration". A close descendant of nineteenth-century doctrinal formalism, which sought through legal analysis to identify

17372-713: The development of self-governance, and the First Great Awakening , a series of Christian revivals , fueled colonial interest in religious liberty . For a century, the American colonists had been providing their own troops and materiel in conflicts with indigenous peoples allied with Britain's colonial rivals , especially France, and the Americans had begun to develop a sense of self-defense and self-reliance separate from Britain. The French and Indian War (1754–1763) took on new significance for all North American colonists after Parliament under William Pitt

17544-776: The development of those discourses. Equally, CLS has introduced new frameworks to the legal field, such as postmodernism , queer theory , literary approaches to law, psychoanalysis , law and aesthetics , and post-colonialism . Critical legal studies continues as a diverse collection of schools of thought and social movements. The CLS community is an extremely broad group with clusters of critical theorists at law schools and socio-legal studies departments such as Harvard Law School , Georgetown University Law Center , Northeastern University , University at Buffalo , Chicago-Kent College of Law , Birkbeck, University of London , University of New South Wales , University of Melbourne , University of Kent , Carleton University , Keele University ,

17716-554: The difference between civil and criminal law. In addition to analytic jurisprudence, legal philosophy is also concerned with normative theories of law. "Normative jurisprudence involves normative, evaluative, and otherwise prescriptive questions about the law." The English word is derived from the Latin, iurisprudentia . Iuris is the genitive form of ius meaning law, and prudentia meaning prudence (also: discretion, foresight, forethought, circumspection). It refers to

17888-414: The dispossession of native inhabitants . As more states were admitted , a North–South division over slavery led to the secession of the Confederate States of America , which fought states remaining in the Union in the 1861–1865 American Civil War . With the victory and preservation of the United States, slavery was abolished nationally . By 1900, the country had established itself as a great power ,

18060-538: The diverse kinds of developing transnational law) and the increasingly important interrelations of law and culture, especially in multicultural Western societies. Legal positivism is the view that the content of law is dependent on social facts and that a legal system's existence is not constrained by morality. Within legal positivism, theorists agree that law's content is a product of social facts, but theorists disagree whether law's validity can be explained by incorporating moral values. Legal positivists who argue against

18232-575: The early Roman Empire to the 3rd century, a relevant body of literature was produced by groups of scholars, including the Proculians and Sabinians . The scientific nature of the studies was unprecedented in ancient times. After the 3rd century, juris prudentia became a more bureaucratic activity, with few notable authors. It was during the Eastern Roman Empire (5th century) that legal studies were once again undertaken in depth, and it

18404-412: The emergence of critical legal studies in the late 1970s has been a series of unsuccessful attempts to recover from the shock of realism some basis for a legal theory which articulates an image of the objectivity of the legal process, even though the explanation offered by post-realism had to be more complex than that provided by a doctrine of rule-following." The critical legal studies movement emerged in

18576-501: The empirical methods used by social scientists. Prominent Scandinavian legal realists are Alf Ross , Axel Hägerström , and Karl Olivecrona . Scandinavian legal realists also took a naturalist approach to law. Despite its decline in popularity, legal realism continues to influence a wide spectrum of jurisprudential schools today, including critical legal studies , feminist legal theory , critical race theory , sociology of law , and law and economics . Critical legal studies are

18748-580: The environment for labor unions to begin to flourish . This period eventually ended with the advent of the Progressive Era , which was characterized by significant reforms. Pro-American elements in Hawaii overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy ; the islands were annexed in 1898. That same year, Puerto Rico , the Philippines , and Guam were ceded to the U.S. by Spain after the latter's defeat in

18920-669: The exercise of good judgment, common sense, and caution, especially in the conduct of practical matters. The word first appeared in written English in 1628, at a time when the word prudence meant knowledge of, or skill in, a matter. It may have entered English via the French jurisprudence , which appeared earlier. The terms "philosophy of law" and "jurisprudence" are often used interchangeably, though jurisprudence sometimes encompasses forms of reasoning that fit into economics or sociology . Ancient jurisprudence begins with various Dharmaśāstra texts of India. Dharmasutras of Āpastaṃba and Baudhāyana are examples. In Ancient China,

19092-487: The existence of easy legal cases where some outcomes cannot be legally correct. Constitutionalism argues that the authority of government is limited by constitutional law ", in contrast to Critical legal studies, which disputes the constraints by constitution. Further information on the title subject, presented in inverse order of date of publication, and alphabetical by author, within year: United States The United States of America ( USA ), commonly known as

19264-425: The experiences of the civil rights movement, women's rights movement, and the anti-war movement of the 1960s and 1970s. What started off as a critical stance towards American domestic politics eventually translated into a critical stance towards the dominant legal ideology of modern Western society. Drawing on both domestic theory and the work of European social theorists, the "crits" sought to demystify what they saw as

19436-476: The extent to which they are binding. Kelsen contends that the extent to which legal norms are binding, their specifically "legal" character, can be understood without tracing it ultimately to some suprahuman source such as God, personified Nature or—of great importance in his time—a personified State or Nation. In the English-speaking world, the most influential legal positivist of the twentieth century

19608-411: The facts of a case. Considered "the most important jurisprudential movement of the 20th century", American legal realism sent a shock through American legal scholarship by undermining the formalist tenets that were long considered a bedrock of jurisprudence . The influence of legal realism unsettled American jurisprudence for decades. Alan Hunt writes that the period "between the realism of the 1930s and

19780-488: The father of natural law. Like his philosophical forefathers Socrates and Plato, Aristotle posited the existence of natural justice or natural right ( dikaion physikon , δικαίον φυσικόν , Latin ius naturale ). His association with natural law is largely due to how he was interpreted by Thomas Aquinas . This was based on Aquinas' conflation of natural law and natural right, the latter of which Aristotle posits in Book V of

19952-734: The father of the Thomistic school of philosophy, for a long time the primary philosophical approach of the Roman Catholic Church . The work for which he is best known is the Summa Theologiae . One of the thirty-five Doctors of the Church , he is considered by many Catholics to be the Church's greatest theologian. Consequently, many institutions of learning have been named after him. Aquinas distinguished four kinds of law: eternal, natural, divine, and human: Natural law

20124-541: The federal government often applied policies of Indian removal or assimilation . The Trail of Tears (1830–1850) was a U.S. government policy that forcibly removed and displaced most Native Americans living east of the Mississippi River to lands far to the west. These and earlier organized displacements prompted a long series of American Indian Wars west of the Mississippi. The Republic of Texas

20296-429: The field has traditionally focused on giving an account of law's nature, some scholars have begun to examine the nature of domains within law, e.g. tort law, contract law, or criminal law. These scholars focus on what makes certain domains of law distinctive and how one domain differs from another. A particularly fecund area of research has been the distinction between tort law and criminal law, which more generally bears on

20468-606: The first nuclear weapons and used them against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, ending the war. The United States was one of the " Four Policemen " who met to plan the post-war world , alongside the United Kingdom , Soviet Union , and China . The U.S. emerged relatively unscathed from the war, with even greater economic power and international political influence . After World War II,

20640-665: The first settlement of the Thirteen Colonies in Virginia in 1607. Clashes with the British Crown over taxation and political representation sparked the American Revolution , with the Second Continental Congress formally declaring independence on July 4, 1776. Following its victory in the 1775–1783 Revolutionary War , the country continued to expand westward across North America , resulting in

20812-553: The governed to obey. Secondary rules are rules that confer authority to create new primary rules or modify existing ones. Secondary rules are divided into rules of adjudication (how to resolve legal disputes), rules of change (how laws are amended), and the rule of recognition (how laws are identified as valid). The validity of a legal system comes from the "rule of recognition", which is a customary practice of officials (especially barristers and judges) who identify certain acts and decisions as sources of law. In 1981, Neil MacCormick wrote

20984-532: The incorporation of moral values to explain law's validity are labeled exclusive (or hard) legal positivists. Joseph Raz's legal positivism is an example of exclusive legal positivism. Legal positivists who argue that law's validity can be explained by incorporating moral values are labeled inclusive (or soft) legal positivists. The legal positivist theories of H. L. A. Hart and Jules Coleman are examples of inclusive legal positivism. Legal positivism has traditionally been associated with three doctrines:

21156-463: The integration of Army National Guard units and personnel into the U.S. Army and (since 1947) the U.S. Air Force. There are about 18,000 U.S. police agencies from local to national level in the United States. Law in the United States is mainly enforced by local police departments and sheriff departments in their municipal or county jurisdictions. The state police departments have authority in their respective state , and federal agencies such as

21328-475: The last two decades in the areas of international and comparative law. In addition, CLS has had a practical effect on legal education, as it was the inspiration and focus of Georgetown University Law Center's alternative first year curriculum, (Termed "Curriculum B", known as "Section 3" within the school). In the UK both Kent and Birkbeck have sought to draw critical legal insights into the legal curriculum, including

21500-524: The law as it is. Austin explained the descriptive focus for legal positivism by saying, "The existence of law is one thing; its merit and demerit another. Whether it be or be not is one enquiry; whether it be or be not conformable to an assumed standard, is a different enquiry." For Austin and Bentham, a society is governed by a sovereign who has de facto authority. Through the sovereign's authority come laws, which for Austin and Bentham are commands backed by sanctions for non-compliance. Along with Hume, Bentham

21672-446: The law is on a specific issue in a specific jurisdiction, analytical philosophers of law are interested in identifying the features of law shared across cultures, times, and places. Taken together, these foundational features of law offer the kind of universal definition philosophers are after. The general approach allows philosophers to ask questions about, for example, what separates law from morality, politics, or practical reason. While

21844-473: The law to newer social exigencies. The law was then adjusted with evolving institutiones (legal concepts), while remaining in the traditional mode. Praetors were replaced in the 3rd century BC by a laical body of prudentes . Admission to this body was conditional upon proof of competence or experience. Under the Roman Empire , schools of law were created, and practice of the law became more academic. From

22016-616: The literature, themes that have changed over time. Scholars affiliated with critical legal studies often identified with the movement in several ways: by including in their articles an opening footnote mentioning the Conference on Critical Legal Studies and providing the organization's contact information, by attending conferences of the CCLS, and by citing the work of fellow critical legal studies scholars. A 1984 bibliography of CLS works, compiled by Duncan Kennedy and Karl Klare and published in

22188-519: The main precursor of American Legal Realism (other influences include Roscoe Pound , Karl Llewellyn , and Justice Benjamin Cardozo ). Karl Llewellyn, another founder of the U.S. legal realism movement, similarly believed that the law is little more than putty in the hands of judges who are able to shape the outcome of cases based on their personal values or policy choices. The Scandinavian school of legal realism argued that law can be explained through

22360-415: The mid-1970s as a network of leftist law professors in the United States who developed the realist indeterminacy thesis in the service of leftist ideals. According to Roberto Unger, the movement "continued as an organized force only until the late 1980s. Its life as a movement lasted for barely more than a decade." Duncan Kennedy, a Harvard law professor who along with Unger, was one of the key figures in

22532-482: The military draft (leading to the end of conscription in 1973) and wide opposition to U.S. intervention in Vietnam (with the U.S. totally withdrawing in 1975). A societal shift in the roles of women was significantly responsible for the large increase in female paid labor participation during the 1970s, and by 1985 the majority of American women aged 16 and older were employed. The late 1980s and early 1990s saw

22704-500: The morality enacted as law, not the laws themselves. The best evidence of Aristotle's having thought there was a natural law comes from the Rhetoric , where Aristotle notes that, aside from the "particular" laws that each people has set up for itself, there is a "common" law that is according to nature. The context of this remark, however, suggests only that Aristotle thought that it could be rhetorically advantageous to appeal to such

22876-612: The most attractive to the population are the most vulnerable. The U.S. is one of 17 megadiverse countries containing large numbers of endemic species : about 17,000 species of vascular plants occur in the contiguous United States and Alaska, and over 1,800 species of flowering plants are found in Hawaii, few of which occur on the mainland. The United States is home to 428 mammal species, 784 birds, 311 reptiles, 295 amphibians , and around 91,000 insect species. There are 63 national parks , and hundreds of other federally managed parks, forests, and wilderness areas , managed by

23048-662: The most violent, the California genocide of thousands of Native inhabitants, lasted into the early 1870s, just as additional western territories and states were created. During the colonial period, slavery had been legal in the American colonies , though the practice began to be significantly questioned during the American Revolution. States in the North enacted abolition laws , though support for slavery strengthened in Southern states , as inventions such as

23220-416: The movement, has said that, in the early days of critical legal studies, "just about everyone in the network was a white male with some interest in 60s style radical politics or radical sentiment of one kind or another. Some came from Marxist backgrounds — some came from democratic reform ." Kennedy has emphasized the twofold nature of critical legal studies, as both a network of leftist scholar/activists and

23392-491: The numerous myths at the heart of mainstream legal thought and practice. The "crits" include Duncan Kennedy , Roberto Unger , Morton Horwitz , Mark Kelman , and Catharine MacKinnon . The British critical legal studies movement started roughly at a similar time as its American counterpart. However, it centered around a number of conferences held annually, particularly the Critical Legal Conference and

23564-508: The only way forward for the movement. Unger and other members of the movement continue to try to develop it in new directions, e.g., to make legal analysis the basis of developing institutional alternatives. Although the intellectual origins of the critical legal studies (CLS) can be generally traced to American legal realism , as a distinct scholarly movement CLS fully emerged only in the late 1970s. Many first-wave American CLS scholars entered legal education, having been profoundly influenced by

23736-465: The pedigree thesis, the separability thesis, and the discretion thesis. The pedigree thesis says that the right way to determine whether a directive is law is to look at the directive's source. The thesis claims that it is the fact that the directive was issued by the proper official within a legitimate government, for example, that determines the directive's legal validity—not the directive's moral or practical merits. The separability thesis states that law

23908-427: The philosophy of Thomas Aquinas , especially in his Treatise on law . In late 20th century, John Finnis revived interest in the theory and provided a modern reworking of it. For one, Finnis has argued that the maxim "an unjust law is no law at all" is a poor guide to the classical Thomist position. In its general sense, natural law theory may be compared to both state-of-nature law and general law understood on

24080-408: The policy of redlining later adopted by the federal Home Owners' Loan Corporation . An explosion of technological advancement accompanied by the exploitation of cheap immigrant labor led to rapid economic expansion during the late 19th and early 20th centuries , allowing the United States to outpace the economies of England, France, and Germany combined. This fostered the amassing of power by

24252-427: The post-1870 period. Francisco Suárez , regarded as among the greatest scholastics after Aquinas, subdivided the concept of ius gentium . Working with already well-formed categories, he carefully distinguished ius inter gentes from ius intra gentes . Ius inter gentes (which corresponds to modern international law) was something common to the majority of countries, although, being positive law, not natural law, it

24424-574: The primary colonial grievances was a denial of their rights as Englishmen , particularly the right to representation in the British government that taxed them . To demonstrate their dissatisfaction and resolve, the First Continental Congress met in 1774 and passed the Continental Association , a colonial boycott of British goods that proved effective. The British attempt to then disarm the colonists resulted in

24596-515: The rights of African Americans . National infrastructure, including transcontinental telegraph and railroads , spurred growth in the American frontier . From 1865 through 1917 an unprecedented stream of immigrants arrived in the United States, including 24.4 million from Europe. Most came through the port of New York City , and New York City and other large cities on the East Coast became home to large Jewish , Irish , and Italian populations, while many Germans and Central Europeans moved to

24768-614: The rocky Great Basin and Chihuahua , Sonoran , and Mojave deserts. In the northwest corner of Arizona , carved by the Colorado River over millions of years, is the Grand Canyon , a steep-sided canyon and popular tourist destination known for its overwhelming visual size and intricate, colorful landscape. The Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountain ranges run close to the Pacific coast . The lowest and highest points in

24940-461: The same time refusing to evaluate those norms. That is, "legal science" is to be separated from "legal politics". Central to the Pure Theory of Law is the notion of a ' basic norm ' ( Grundnorm )—a hypothetical norm, presupposed by the jurist, from which all "lower" norms in the hierarchy of a legal system , beginning with constitutional law , are understood to derive their authority or

25112-507: The second half of the twentieth century, sociological jurisprudence as a distinct movement declined as jurisprudence came more strongly under the influence of analytical legal philosophy; but with increasing criticism of dominant orientations of legal philosophy in English-speaking countries in the present century, it has attracted renewed interest. Increasingly, its contemporary focus is on providing theoretical resources for jurists to aid their understanding of new types of regulation (for example,

25284-401: The sense of "general justice"; as such, this idea of justice is more or less coextensive with virtue. "Particular" or "partial justice", by contrast, is the part of "general justice" or the individual virtue that is concerned with treating others equitably. Aristotle moves from this unqualified discussion of justice to a qualified view of political justice, by which he means something close to

25456-573: The six service branches, which are made up of the U.S. Army , Marine Corps , Navy , Air Force , and Space Force . The Coast Guard is administered by the Department of Homeland Security in peacetime and can be transferred to the Department of the Navy in wartime. The United States spent $ 916 billion on its military in 2023, which is by far the largest amount of any country , making up 37% of global military spending and accounting for 3.4% of

25628-545: The sole authority of a state government. SDFs are authorized by state and federal law but are under the command of the state's governor . They are distinct from the state's National Guard units in that they cannot become federalized entities. A state's National Guard personnel, however, may be federalized under the National Defense Act Amendments of 1933 , which created the Guard and provides for

25800-444: The standard account of the origins of International law, which emphasises the seminal text De iure belli ac pacis by Hugo Grotius , and argued for Vitoria and, later, Suárez's importance as forerunners and, potentially, founders of the field. Others, such as Koskenniemi, have argued that none of these humanist and scholastic thinkers can be understood to have founded international law in the modern sense, instead placing its origins in

25972-543: The states are also represented by local elected governments , which are administrative divisions of the states. States are subdivided into counties or county equivalents , and further divided into municipalities . The District of Columbia is a federal district containing the U.S. capital, Washington, D.C. . The federal district is an administrative division of the federal government. Federally recognized tribes govern 326 Indian reservations . The United States has an established structure of foreign relations, and it has

26144-510: The structure and responsibilities of the national federal government and its relationship with the individual states. The U.S. Constitution is the world's oldest national constitution still in effect (from March 4, 1789). Composed of three branches, all headquartered in Washington, D.C., the federal government is the national government of the United States. It is regulated by a strong system of checks and balances . The three-branch system

26316-411: The subject of modern jurisprudence. Of political justice, Aristotle argues that it is partly derived from nature and partly a matter of convention. This can be taken as a statement that is similar to the views of modern natural law theorists. But it must also be remembered that Aristotle is describing a view of morality, not a system of law, and therefore his remarks as to nature are about the grounding of

26488-471: The theorist's work. The natural law theorists of the distant past, such as Aquinas and John Locke made no distinction between analytic and normative jurisprudence, while modern natural law theorists, such as John Finnis, who claim to be positivists, still argue that law is moral by nature. In his book Natural Law and Natural Rights (1980, 2011), John Finnis provides a restatement of natural law doctrine. Unlike experimental jurisprudence , which investigates

26660-451: The traditions, customs, and beliefs of the German people did not include a belief in a code. Historicists believe that law originates with society. An effort to systematically inform jurisprudence from sociological insights developed from the beginning of the twentieth century, as sociology began to establish itself as a distinct social science , especially in the United States and in continental Europe . In Germany, Austria and France ,

26832-469: The use of law as a mechanism of social change. In addition to the context of legal interpretation, critical legal studies also emerged in response to its political context, namely a setting in which the social-democratic settlement that was finalized after World War II had become canonical, and active dispute over the organization of society severely declined, effectively enshrining a reigning consensus about social organization that Unger describes as including

27004-410: The work of the "free law" theorists (e.g. Ernst Fuchs, Hermann Kantorowicz , Eugen Ehrlich and François Gény ) encouraged the use of sociological insights in the development of legal and juristic theory. The most internationally influential advocacy for a "sociological jurisprudence" occurred in the United States, where, throughout the first half of the twentieth century, Roscoe Pound , for many years

27176-582: The world's fourth-longest river system , runs predominantly north–south through the heart of the country. The flat and fertile prairie of the Great Plains stretches to the west, interrupted by a highland region in the southeast. The Rocky Mountains , west of the Great Plains, extend north to south across the country, peaking at over 14,000 feet (4,300 m) in Colorado . Farther west are

27348-583: The world's second-largest diplomatic corps as of 2024 . It is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council , and home to the United Nations headquarters . The United States is a member of the G7 , G20 , and OECD intergovernmental organizations. Almost all countries have embassies and many have consulates (official representatives) in the country. Likewise, nearly all countries host formal diplomatic missions with

27520-461: The world's third-largest land area , largest exclusive economic zone , and third-largest population , exceeding 334 million. Its three largest metropolitan areas are New York , Los Angeles , and Chicago , and its three most populous states are California , Texas , and Florida . Paleo-Indians migrated across the Bering land bridge more than 12,000 years ago, and formed various civilizations and societies . British colonization led to

27692-444: The world's oldest surviving federation, and its presidential system of national government has been adopted, in whole or in part, by many newly independent states worldwide following their decolonization . It is a liberal representative democracy "in which majority rule is tempered by minority rights protected by law ". The Constitution of the United States serves as the country's supreme legal document , also establishing

27864-553: The world's tornadoes occur in the country , mainly in Tornado Alley . Overall, the United States receives more high-impact extreme weather incidents than any other country. Extreme weather became more frequent in the U.S. in the 21st century, with three times the number of reported heat waves as in the 1960s. In the American Southwest , droughts became more persistent and more severe. The regions considered as

28036-503: The world, with almost 2 million people incarcerated . An analysis of the World Health Organization Mortality Database from 2010 showed U.S. homicide rates "were 7 times higher than in other high-income countries, driven by a gun homicide rate that was 25 times higher". Jurisprudence Jurisprudence , also known as theory of law or philosophy of law , is the examination in

28208-515: Was H. L. A. Hart , professor of jurisprudence at Oxford University . Hart argued that the law should be understood as a system of social rules. In The Concept of Law , Hart rejected Kelsen's views that sanctions were essential to law and that a normative social phenomenon, like law, cannot be grounded in non-normative social facts. Hart claimed that law is the union of primary rules and secondary rules. Primary rules require individuals to act or not act in certain ways and create duties for

28380-575: Was annexed in 1845, and the 1846 Oregon Treaty led to U.S. control of the present-day American Northwest . Victory in the Mexican–American War resulted in the 1848 Mexican Cession of California, Nevada, Utah, and much of present-day Colorado and the American Southwest . The California gold rush of 1848–1849 spurred a huge migration of white settlers to the Pacific coast, leading to even more confrontations with Native populations. One of

28552-416: Was a philosophical development that rejected natural law's fusing of what law is and what it ought to be. David Hume argued, in A Treatise of Human Nature , that people invariably slip from describing what the world is to asserting that we therefore ought to follow a particular course of action. But as a matter of pure logic, one cannot conclude that we ought to do something merely because something

28724-539: Was a reaction to legal formalism that was popular the time due to the Christopher Columbus Langdell . Holmes's writings on jurisprudence also laid the foundations for the predictive theory of law. In his article "The Path of the Law", Holmes argues that "the object of [legal] study...is prediction, the prediction of the incidence of the public force through the instrumentality of the courts." For

28896-759: Was adopted on July 4, 1776. The political values of the American Revolution included liberty , inalienable individual rights ; and the sovereignty of the people ; supporting republicanism and rejecting monarchy , aristocracy , and all hereditary political power; civic virtue ; and vilification of political corruption . The Founding Fathers of the United States , who included Washington, Jefferson, John Adams , Benjamin Franklin , Alexander Hamilton , John Jay , James Madison , Thomas Paine , and many others, were inspired by Greco-Roman , Renaissance , and Enlightenment philosophies and ideas. The Articles of Confederation were ratified in 1781 and established

29068-423: Was an early and staunch supporter of the utilitarian concept, and was an avid prison reformer, advocate for democracy , and firm atheist . Bentham's views about law and jurisprudence were popularized by his student John Austin . Austin was the first chair of law at the new University of London , from 1829. Austin's utilitarian answer to "what is law?" was that law is "commands, backed by threat of sanctions, from

29240-480: Was committed to shaping society based on a vision of human personality devoid of the hidden interests and class domination that CLS scholars argued are at the root of liberal legal institutions in the West. According to CLS scholars Duncan Kennedy and Karl Klare, critical legal studies was "concerned with the relationship of legal scholarship and practice to the struggle to create a more humane, egalitarian, and democratic society." During its period of peak influence,

29412-404: Was elected the country's first president under the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights was adopted in 1791 to allay skeptics' concerns about the power of the more centralized government. His resignation as commander-in-chief after the Revolutionary War and his later refusal to run for a third term as the country's first president established a precedent for the supremacy of civil authority in

29584-487: Was not necessarily universal. On the other hand, ius intra gentes , or civil law, is specific to each nation. Writing after World War II , Lon L. Fuller defended a secular and procedural form of natural law. He emphasised that the (natural) law must meet certain formal requirements (such as being impartial and publicly knowable). To the extent that an institutional system of social control falls short of these requirements, Fuller argued, we are less inclined to recognise it as

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