The Judicial Application of Law

"The Judicial Application of Law" is an contribution to analytical jurisprudence. It gives an account of all that is involved in the idea of "applying" law as this is carried out by judges. Thus it explores analytically a vital idea for our understanding of legality as a value to which systems of government aspire. This is achieved by the construction and examination of models of the various steps involved in judicial decision making, including elements both of interpretation and of fact finding, and by the exploration of various possible ideologies of the application of law. The book takes as its main material for analysis statute-based legal systems in the form these took within socialist legal systems prior to the recent revolutions, being based principally on the law of Poland up to 1989.