Law

Just what is the difference between a lawyer and a legal philosopher? Does the legal philosopher care more for metaethics and less for social norms?

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A lawyer is someone who practises law, or perhaps studies it, an attorney (in the US) or a barrister or solicitor (in the UK), someone who might have little or no interest in the philosophy of law, or in the the concept of law in the abstract. A legal philosopher, on the other hand, is a philosopher, often or typically today an academic person, one who studies and perhaps contributes to the philosophy of law. The philosophy of law is one of the subject areas within philosophy (such as the philosophy of science, the philosophy of religion, ethics, the theory of knowledge, metaphysics, and so on) in which one studies the question 'What is law?' - to be distinguished of course from the question 'What is the law?' - which is not a philosophical question at all. Or a philosopher of the law might be interested in the question what it is that makes law "valid". There is little doubt what the laws were in say 1935 Germany, e.g. the Nuremberg laws prohibiting the marriage of citizens ("Staatsangehoerigen") and those of Jewish descent, and declaring even such marriages conducted outside Germany invalid within Germany, or the law authorizing among others the sterilization of those with bipolar disease; but were the laws themselves valid, resting as they did on an "Enabling Act", passed by the German Parliament, that abolished the Parliament and gave to Adolf Hitler absolute power? If this act was not valid, why not? Are there limits, perhaps based on "natural rights", as to which laws can be validly enacted? A very important and sane book written by someone who was a distinguished philosopher of law and had also been a practising lawyer is H.L.A. Hart's The Concept of Law, (Oxford: OUP, 1961). Jurisprudence is a wider field than the philosophy of law, though it includes the philosophy of law, containing in addition more narrowly social and political aspects of the law. None of this really has to do with the distinction between metaethics and normative ethics. The legal philosopher might be profoundly interested in normative ethics, as for example H.L.A. Hart was. His influential contribution to the discussion leading up to the decriminalization of homosexual acts in the UK in 1967 was a sophisticated version of the position that the only moral limit of the criminal law is harm.

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