I bought a whole stack of books on law and philosophy during the several months before I actually started law school (in fall 2000, at the age of 37). Most of them were just for "personal use"; as you can tell from my other reviews, I have a longstanding interest in philosophy anyway. But I waited until I completed a semester before reviewing them, so that I could plug the ones I found most useful.

This is one of them. It's an expensive book, but it's worth it if you have any involvement (professional or student) in legal theory and philosophy of law. It consists mostly of papers presented at a conference held at Bowling Green State University a bit over a decade ago, and every item in it will be of tremendous interest to lawyers and law students investigating the philosophical foundations of their field.

Two items are of particular interest, at least to me: Randy Barnett provides an update of his "consent" theory of contracts, and Ernest Weinrib offers a carefully reasoned piece that summarizes the outlook on which he would later expand in his brilliant 1995 work, _The Idea of Private Law_.

The Barnett piece is, so far as I know, the only source for Barnett's theory of contracts apart from back issues of law journals and excerpts in law textbooks. Since some of Barnett's older pieces _are_ in fact excerpted in my own contracts text, I thought other law students might like to know about Barnett's essay in this book.

The Weinrib piece is a terrific introduction to the man's thought in general. In fact I had read _The Idea of Private Law_ before I read this volume, but this essay nicely complements Weinrib's essay on "legal formalism" in Dennis Patterson's _Companion to Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory_ (also highly recommended, by the way).

The collection overall covers contracts, torts, and punishment. In this last area, the volume includes a piece by the late Jean Hampton, and in general some of these essays link nicely to the collection _Incomparability, Incommensurability and Practical Reason_ (Ruth Chang, ed.).

(In case you're curious: one _other_ really useful collection is _Philosophical Foundations of Tort Law_, edited by David Owen. I've reviewed that one too.)