Essays in Legal Philosophy

Eugenio Bulygin is a distinguished representative of legal science and legal philosophy as they are known on the European continent - no accident, given the role of the civil law tradition in his home country, Argentina. Over the past half-century, Bulygin has engaged virtually all major legal philosophers in the English-speaking countries, including H.L.A. Hart, Ronald Dworkin, and Joseph Raz. Bulygin's essays, several written together with his eminent colleague and close friend Carlos E. Alchourron, reflect the genre familiar from Alf Ross's On Law and Justice, Hans Kelsen's Pure Theory of Law, and Georg Henrik von Wright's Norm and Action. Bulygin's wide-ranging interests include most of the topics found under the rubric of analytical jurisprudence - interpretation and judicial reasoning, validity and efficacy of law, legal positivism and the problem of normativity, completeness and consistency of the legal system, the nature of legal norms, and the role of deontic logic in the law. The reader will take delight in the often agreeably unorthodox character of Bulygin's views and in his hard-hitting arguments in defense of them. He challenges the received opinion on gaps in the law, on legal efficacy, on permissory norms, and on the criteria for legal validity. Bulygin's essays have been wellnigh inaccessible in the past, appearing in specialized journals, often in Spanish or German. They are now available for the first time in an English-language collection.

Eugenio Bulygin, Emeritus Professor of Law, University of Buenos Aires

Eugenio Bulygin was born in 1931 in the city of Kharkov (Russia); his father was an engineer, his mother taught German and French. Two years after the Germans first occupied Kharkov, the family, in 1943, was deported to a labour camp near Linz. It was only after the War that Eugenio Bulygin attended school in Linz on a regular basis; German became his second language The family had no interest in returning to Russia and decided, in 1949, to emigate to Argentina. From 1952 to 1958, Bulygin studied law at the University of Buenos Aires. There he met Carlos E. Alchourron, who became his close friend. Both were appointed as professors at the University of Buenos Aires, and they worked together for decades, until Alchourron's death in 1996, on problems in analytical jurisprudence, logic, and norm theory. Bulygin has lectured and participated in conference around the world. In legal philosophy circles in the Spanish-speaking countries and in Italy, Bulygin is well nigh a household name.