Virtue Jurisprudence

Abstract

Recently, legal scholars have brought renewed attention to the question of what modern law may have to learn from Aristotle specifically, and from virtue ethics generally. This new virtue jurisprudence movement is situated in the debate over normative legal theory, yet it has taken on a decidedly practical question: What would happen if virtue ethics were transplanted into normative legal theory? This chapter offers a taxonomy of the new literature along two different axes. The first axis identifies three different impacts of analyzing law through the lens of virtue jurisprudence). The second axis demonstrates two different ways of applying virtue jurisprudence. These include a substantive application (proposing law reforms to include more “virtuous” standards), and a procedural, or process-based, application (examining how law affects an individual’s own efforts to realize a good life, where the individual is responsible for her own habits, behaviors, and choices to that end).