Political Jurisprudence

by Martin Loughlin

Political jurisprudence is the branch of jurisprudence that treats law as an aspect of human experience called 'the political'. This is an approach that many contemporary jurists, those whose work presupposes the autonomy of legal order, tend to suppress. In this book, Martin Loughlin assesses the contribution made by political jurists and explains its contemporary significance.

Political jurists maintain that the essential characteristics of modern legal order can only be revealed by considering how political authority is constituted. The political is orientated to the fact that people are organized into territorially-bounded units within which authoritative governing arrangements have been established, but the authority of this way of viewing the world is strengthened only through institution-building. Law may be an aspect of the political, but to perform its authority-generating functions effectively it must operate relatively autonomously. The political and the legal operate relationally, without one being reduced to the other.

Loughlin introduces the rich literature of political jurisprudence through essays on innovative political jurists such as Hobbes, Burke, Constant, Romano, and Schmitt, and on such central themes as political right, institutionalism, constitutional legality, and reason of state. Building on his earlier books, The Idea of Public Law (OUP 2003) and Foundations of Public Law (OUP 2010), this collection extends his account of this influential strand of European legal thought.

200 pages, Hardcover

Published February 24, 2018

About the author

Martin Loughlin is Professor of Public Law. He was educated at LSE, the University of Warwick and Harvard Law School and held chairs at the Universities of Glasgow and Manchester before returning to LSE in 2000. He was a member of the Editorial Committee of The Modern Law Review from 1987 to 2010, serving as General Editor between 2002-07, and now sits on its Advisory Board. Martin was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2011 and in 2015 was awarded an honorary LL.D. by the University of Edinburgh. Between 2000 and 2002 he held a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, in 2007-08 was a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, in 20012-13 held a Law & Public Affairs Fellowship at Princeton University, in 2016-17 was EURIAS Senior Fellow at the Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies, and in Jan-March 2019 was a MacCormick Fellow at Edinburgh University. Martin has been a Visiting Professor at many law schools including Osgoode Hall, Paris II, Pennsylvania, Renmin University (Beijing), and Toronto.