Legal Theory By W Friedmann Review

Friedmann organizes all legal theories under three heads:

Friedmann was one of the first Western scholars to engage seriously with Marxist-Leninist jurisprudence. He dissects Andrey Vyshinsky’s theory that law is simply the will of the ruling class. Friedmann’s rebuttal is devastating: If law is merely a weapon of class oppression, it cannot also serve to organize production, allocate resources, or protect managers from workers. Soviet legal practice, he notes, was constantly forced to abandon its own theory. legal theory by w friedmann

Legal Theory survives because it provides a grammar for that conversation. It teaches us that to be a lawyer is to be a schizophrenic in the best sense: one must be a logician (analytical), a social scientist (sociological), and a moral philosopher (natural law), often in the same hour. To ignore any one of these is not to simplify; it is to mutilate the law. Friedmann organizes all legal theories under three heads: