description
Among the mainstream legal academia, Nietzsche has long been considered a nihilist that serious philosophy of law and legal practice have nothing to do with. Humanist scholars claim Nietzsche categorically rejects the most important values of liberal legal and political thought and that, as a result, his critical reflection upon law is no more than negative jurisprudence. A closer look at Nietzsche's works, however, shows that his writings address some of the most fundamental questions of philosophy of law and legal science. He focuses on most of the core categories of political and legal thought, i.e., the social contract, state, de-mocracy, liberalism, equality, etc. Moreover, this Prussian philosopher discusses some of the key legal concepts, such as justice, crime and the criminal, freedom and free will, debt, guilt, responsibility, punishment, victims, criminal justice, causation, and so forth. His contribution to the philosophy of law is no less than a welcome stimulus for critical questioning and reconstruction of some of the generally accepted legal doctrines and concepts, as well as for the search of new answers to several key questions of the contemporary legal theory and policy. His interventions in jurisprudence, either positive or negative, shall, at least to those legal theorists who are not kept at bay by the sharp air of Nietzsches writings, shed light on some of the shortcuts and deviations of the modern legal thinking and open new perspectives on the eternal and seemingly unproblematic truths of the liberal legal ideology.