Part I: The Nature of Law
1:The Nature of Legal Philosophy
2:On the Concept and the Nature of Law
3:The Dual Nature of Law
4:Law, Morality, and the Existence of Human Rights
5:An Answer to Joseph Raz
6:The Ideal Dimension of Law
7:Gustav Radbruch's Concept of Law
Part II: Constitutional Rights, Human Rights, and Proportionality
8:The Construction of Constitutional Rights
9:Balancing, Constitutional Review, and Representation
10:The Existence of Human Rights
11:The Weight Formula
12:Formal Principles: Some Replies to Critics
13:Ideal 'Ought' and Optimization
14:Human Dignity and Proportionality
15:Proportionality and Rationality
16:The Absolute and the Relative Dimension of Constitutional Rights
Part III: Argumentation, Correctness, and Law
17:A Discourse-Theoretical Conception of Practical Reason
18:Problems of Discourse Theory
19:Legal Argumentation as Rational Discourse
20:Jürgen Habermas's Theory of the Indeterminacy of Law and the Rationality of Adjudication
21:Law and Correctness
Law's Ideal Dimension provides a comprehensive account in English of renowned legal theorist Robert Alexy's understanding of jurisprudence, as expanded upon from his publications A Theory of Legal Argumentation (OUP 1989), A Theory of Constitutional Rights (OUP 1985), and The Argument from Injustice (OUP 1992).
The collection is divided into three parts. Part One concerns the nature of law: it explores its real and ideal dimensions and how the ideal dimension of law is sometimes employed but does not play a systematically important role. Part Two discusses constitutional rights, human rights, and proportionality. It defends the construction of constitutional rights as principles against objections raised by the rule construction and elaborates on the nature of constitutional rights as well as the mathematical balancing of those rights. Part Three concerns the relation between argumentation, correctness, and law. The author concludes this volume with a biographical reflection.
