Aleksa's Book Review: Companion to the Philosophy of Law
Boy, this took a while to get through. As my time studying law in Austria often reminds me, morality does not equal legality and vice versa. This book hammers that point home with inexorable force. I think of myself as a man grounded in ethics and that which is good, but when the time comes for legal theory, I must admit I am figuratively up a gum tree without a paddle.
The book's first chapter does a good job of lining out the fundamentals of property theory, and how property does not have to be in the freehold format most westerners think of it as. Just a smidgen of time is spent touching on national sovereignty, but it seems books stay away from that subject like the proverbial plague that it is. In either instance, the first half of the book is quite excellent in its detail.
The latter half goes into legal intricacies and the lifeboat scenarios that so many legal students are greeted with: does a cognisant father with a genetic disease which causes the painful death of his 10-year-old child stand guilty of manslaughter, for example. Does a man who buys a stolen item without knowing its history acquire just property over the item is also a classic.
In closing, this takes me back to my days in Vienna where I sat in a dinghy basement reading about the legal profession, whose manifold complexities perturb me constantly. That's a good thing, as nowhere did I grow as much as I did there, and nowhere was I as challenged. This is a fundamental read for anybody interested in private law.
8/10
