The Legal and Political Philosophy of Leonard Nelson1

Levi D. Gresh

American Political Science Review, 1941, vol. 35, issue 3, 437-453

Abstract: The legal philosophy of Nelson is fundamentally a liberal doctrine. It is, on the one hand, opposed to the philosophy which places a supreme trust in human reason and which believes that man can sit down and codify a system of laws in which there will be no gaps; and, on the other, it is opposed to a belief in the necessary rationality of existing institutions in the onward sweep of human history, the idea which was so dear to the Historical School of jurisprudence.Nelson is a Naturrechtlehrer in the sense that he believes in the existence of metajuristic criteria of justice. That there are elemental principles of justice which are universal, and according to which laws are either just or unjust, decisions either right or wrong, Nelson believes cannot be denied. The moment we admit the injustice of a statute, or a judicial decision, we admit that we have used a criterion on which to base our opinion. The mistake we make, however, is to suppose that we can discover criteria, either empirically or logically.

Date: 1941
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:35:y:1941:i:03:p:437-453_04

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in American Political Science Review from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().