Law and Morality: Readings in Legal Philosophy. 2nd ed.

Henry R. Pallard is a professor in the Department of Law and Justice at
Laurentian University.

This book has grown by more than 275 pages since the first edition
appeared five years ago. Most of the growth is attributable to new or
more current material in certain areas where the Supreme Court of Canada
has intervened.

Expanded from 40 to 185 pages, Chapter 7, “The Limits of the Legal
Order,” has mostly new material that flows from the Supreme Court of
Canada’s 1998 decision on whether Quebec could unilaterally secede
from Canada. Following a substantial extract of the Court’s decision,
the editors present an article by Sujit Choudhry and Robert Howse that
questions our conventional understanding of the legitimacy of
constitutional adjudication. This article is followed by two
articles—one by John Burrows and the other by Peter Macklem—on the
particular challenges that claims by First Nations Peoples pose to
traditional theories of constitutionalism and the legitimization of
power. Taken together, these articles testify to the gulf that exists
between the exercise of legal power—which operates on a different
plane and within a different set of parameters based on the assumptions
stemming from liberalism—and the theoretical critique of legal power,
which deconstructs liberalism.

To keep the book topical, there are new extracts from Delwin Vriend vs.
Alberta on the protection of sexual orientation by provincial human
rights codes, Little Sisters on pornography, freedom of expression and
the right of customs officers to seize gay and lesbian materials at the
border, and Winnipeg Child and Family Services on the right to detain a
pregnant woman in order to protect the fetus.

Women scholars have a more prominent place in this edition, with
contributions in areas of traditional feminist scholarship (pornography,
family, abortion), as well as theoretical or philosophical articles such
as “Taking the Law into Our Own Hands: Kant on the Right to
Revolution,” by Christine Korsgaards, and “Democracy and the Rule of
Law,” by Jean Hampton.