On Liberty – John Stuart Mill

Jurisprudence is the study of the philosophy of law (or why and how it exists), and Ronald Dworkin, Herbert Lionel Adolphus Hart, and John Stuart Mill were some of the pre-eminent thinkers in this subject.

Mill believed that the most important thing in society was the liberty of the individual. He said that the only justification for law was to prevent harm to others. His most famous work is an essay called On Liberty.

Hart thought that law was simply a collection of man-made rules, which we created and we can choose to follow or ignore. He wrote The Concept of Law.

Dworkin, meanwhile, felt that law was a product of morality, and that law cannot exist without it. His ideas are therefore directly opposed to those of Hart, and the two authors argued about this for many years (the question remains unresolved). You can find Dworkin’s ideas in his book, Law’s Empire.

The reason I’ve suggested you choose one of these three books is that they’re all very academic. If you’ve ever wondered why we have law and how it works, there’s no better place to answer those questions than through these books. But as this is a very complicated subject, the books are naturally very complicated. I recommend you work out which of the above three ideas you think you agree with and read the corresponding book.

Jurisprudence is the study of the philosophy of law (or why and how it exists), and Ronald Dworkin, Herbert Lionel Adolphus Hart, and John Stuart Mill were some of the pre-eminent thinkers in this subject.