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Attaching myself, then, to Giambattista Vico's idea of certainty (although not, of course, from his perspective) throughout this study I shall call "the space of certainty" the theoretical and conceptual construction (which is of both a philological and textual character) stipulated by the legislator in an attempt to control the distinct concepts related to the legal word, its institutional statute and its legal, moral, and cultural hermeneutics. I shall thus attempt to understand the meaning of this space of certainty, in what way it has been constructed, and how it affects legal, political, social, and cultural mechanisms.

The Status of Law in World Society by Friedrich Kratochwil is a sophisticated attempt to reassert the importance of international law in a globalised world by grounding it in the actual practices of legal reasoning. Yet this attempt to ground normativity in practice strikes me as problematic. As I shall argue, what law is cannot be determined with reference to legal practices only, but will depend on the fulfillment of certain background requirements which themselves stand in need of further justification. Thus the recourse to linguistic practice is beset by an ambivalence that stems from the fact that language and law always already are intertwined, an ambivalence that cannot therefore be overcome with recourse to either. If it is the case that law has a language of its own, we must also be prepared to admit that language has its own laws. What then is gained by the recourse to linguistic practice is not so much a resolution but rather a temporary displacement of indeterminacy from the realm of law to that of language.

This book argues that the narrowing focus of the global history of ideas on narratives in historical research, philosophy and political theory neglects the fact that the central concepts of the history of political ideas are articulated in the language of law. Key figures of the history of ideas, like Kant, Hegel and Weber, engaged deeply with the philosophy and sociology of law. This monograph reveals the significance of the legal semantics of the history of ideas.

From a historical perspective, 'law and economics' constituted one of the most influential developments in legal scholarship in the twentieth century; the discipline remains today one of the dominant perspectives on the law, generating a tremendous quantity of new research and discussion. Unfortunately, one consequence of applying the analytical methods of one highly technical field to the historically layered substance of another has been the accumulation of considerable technical overhead, requiring fluency in both the language of economics and the language of the law. Further complicating matters, the field of law and economics has sometimes developed independently, creating new terms, while recasting others from their original economic or legal meanings. In this dictionary of law and economics, Francesco Parisi provides a comprehensive and concise guide to the language and key concepts underlying this fecund interdisciplinary tradition. The first reference work of its kind, it will prove to be an invaluable resource for professionals, students and scholars