This book is a comprehensive text for both students and teachers of legal theory, jurisprudence and related subjects. It introduces all the traditional schools of legal theory, from natural law to Positivism to Legal Formalism as well as a number of contemporary and interdisciplinary approaches to legal theory including law and economics, law and society, law and literature, critical legal studies, feminism, race theory and post modernism.

In the process of so doing, as well as introducing the reader to established jurists, such as Bentham and Hart, Rawls and Durkin, the text also introduces philosophers such as Plato, Kant and Sartre, economists such as Smith, Keynes and Galbraith, social theorists such as Foucault, Marx and literary theorists such as Derrida and Fish.

This book seeks to perfect the increasing ambition of Legal Theory to reach beyond the narrow confines of traditional jurisprudence and to re-establish itself within the wider intellectual world. This book is not just a text about legal theory, it is also a text which introduces the reader to philosophy, economics, politics, history, literature and social theory. It thus provides not just a critical introduction to legal theory, but an introduction to the entire ambition of law as an intellectual discipline.