Form and Function in a Legal System: A General Study

This book addresses three major questions about law and legal systems:

What are the defining and organizing forms of legal institutions, legal rules, interpretive methodologies, and other legal phenomena?

How does frontal and systematic focus on these forms advance understanding of such phenomena?

What credit should the functions of forms have when such phenomena serve policy and related purposes, rule of law values, and fundamental political and related purposes, rule of law values, and fundamental political values, such as democracy, liberty, and justice?

This book seeks of offer general answers to these questions and thus gives form in the law its due. The answers not only provide articulate conversancy with the subject, but also reveal insights into the nature of law itself, the oldest and foremost problem in legal theory and allied subjects.

This book provides a systematic analysis of the concept of form in legal systems.

Robert S. Summers is the William G. McRoberts Research Professor in the Administration of Law at Cornell Law School. He has won international acclaim for his work in contracts and commercial law and authored and coauthored multiple works on contracts, commercial law, jurisprudence and legal theory. His treatise on the Uniform Commercial Code, coauthored with James White, is the most widely cited on the subject. Professor Summers has served as official advisor both to the Drafting Commission for Russian Civil Code and to the Drafting Commission for Egyptian Civil Code. He lectures annually on jurisprudence and legal theory in Britain, Scandinavia, and Europe.