[Revised entry by Emad Atiq, Andrei Marmor, and Alexander Sarch on April 29, 2025.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
Lawyers tend to raise questions about the content of the law or about what the law requires on this or that issue. These are always local questions, answers to which are bound to differ depending on the jurisdiction. By contrast, philosophy of law is interested in a general question: what is law? This question presupposes that there are certain characteristics that law exhibits by its very nature, or essence, as law, whenever and wherever it happens to exist, characteristics that may be discernible through philosophical analysis….

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