Form and Function in a Legal System

This book provides a systematic analysis of the concept of form in legal systems.

Focusing on legal structures as they developed in Western societies, this book looks at four paradigms of the forms of a varied selection of functional legal units: legislatures and courts, statutory rules, contracts and property, legal methodologies for interpreting law, and enforcive devices such as sanctions and remedies.This book addresses three major questions about law and legal systems: (1) What are the defining and organising forms of legal institutions, legal rules, interpretative 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 book 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.