From Newton's sleep

by Joseph Vining

What does the presence of law say of the beliefs of individuals in a society - their actual beliefs, about language, themselves, the world around them? In this strikingly original work, Joseph Vining invites us to utterly reconsider what we think we know about law. For a century now, certainly since 1897 when Oliver Wendell Holmes insisted that law must finally be reducible to a phenomenon in quantitative relations to its causes and effects, the conception of law as consisting essentially of rules or processes has dominated analysis in the Anglo-American world. Vining takes vigorous issue with this and all other forms of mechanical reductionism, particularly in the sciences, where he opposes the materialist attempt to see life as mere physical process, expressible by a single mathematical description of forces. But he is equally concerned to combat the post-structuralist contention, in the humanities, that valid truth claims are illusory, and that legal behavior is to be explained as a