rights -- 9. The foundation of rights.

Concerning itself with the nature of law and legal reasoning, and with the concepts of justice and individual rights, jurisprudence seeks to set legal ideas in the wider context of moral and political theory. To study jurisprudence properly, you need to read books by such authors as Rawls, Nozick, Hart and Dworkin. It is not, or should not be, a matter of ploughing through a textbook that merely tells you about these books. Nevertheless, a student needs some preliminary orientation. This book aims to provide a brief guide to the major theories and arguments which dominate discussion in jurisprudence. The object is to put the student, as quickly as possible, into a position where he or she can read the original writers with a real understanding of how their theories relate to each other, and of how these theories cluster around certain recurring fundamental issues.