Form & Function in a Legal System

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? This is the first book that seeks to offer general answers to these questions and thus gives form in the law its due. The answers not only provide articulate conversancy with the subject but also reveal insights into the nature of law itself, the oldest and foremost problem in legal theory and allied subjects. • Provides a systematic analysis of the concept of form that deserves to be more prominent in studies of how law and legal systems are organized • Addresses how a grasp of the form of a legal institution, rule, interpretive methodology, or other phenomenon can advance understanding as a whole • Provides an original and insightful way of viewing and presenting much that is taken for granted in law, yet much needs elucidation