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Law In Flux: Philosophical Hermeneutics, Legal Argumentation And The Natural Law Tradition, Francis J. Mootz Iii

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Peter Goodrich describes the plight of contemporary legal theory with concise accuracy: We have abandoned natural law foundations originally constructed in ecclesiastical venues only to find that the project of developing a secular legal language capable of transforming the management of social conflict into questions of technical rationality is doomed to failure. The ascendancy of analytic legal positivism has purchased conceptual rigor at the cost of separating the analysis of legal validity from moral acceptability, but retreat from this stale conceptualism and a return to traditional natural law precepts appears wildly implausible. The irrelevance of the natural law tradition in …