from II - Evolutionary Approach to the Normativity of Law
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2014
After the Critical Legal Studies and the Law and Economics movement, “Law and Evolutionary Biology” seems well on its way to becoming all the rage in American law schools and the wave could well spill over into European law faculties. That evolutionary theory will eventually revolutionize legal thinking may not be as obvious as the most enthusiastic advocates of the new creed would like to believe. However, the movement has already spawned a rapidly expanding literature, which suggests that lawyers and legal academics may have something useful to learn from Darwin and his twenty-first century disciples. Skimming over the last batch of journal articles and monographs reveals that insofar as scholars regard evolutionary biology as a source of potential insights for the law it is primarily as a source of insights for law-making or for the normative discipline of legal philosophy. The relevance of evolutionary thinking for law is in answering questions such as ‘How can evolutionary biology help us design better, more efficient legal rules?’ or ‘What values and political philosophy can the law effectively realize given what evolution says about human nature?’ As those questions suggest, the concept of law implicit in the work of those who purport to explore the interconnections between law and evolutionary theory is essentially normative.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.