Legislative Intent and Other Essays on Law, Politics, and Morality

Book excerpt: In the last years of his life, Gerald C. MacCallum, Jr. defied illness to continue his work on the philosophy of law. This book is a monument to MacCallum's effort, containing fourteen of his essays, five of them published here for the first time. Two of those previously published are widely admired and reprinted: "Legislative Intent", certainly one of the best papers published on its topic, and "Negative and Positive Freedom", which offered a new way of looking at a distinction that had been canonical for the last two centuries. To complete MacCallum's unfinished pieces, Marcus G. Singer and Rex Martin painstakingly consulted MacCallum's notes for planned revisions. MacCallum discusses legal reasoning, the application of rules, the interpretation of statutes and constitutional provisions, and the relation of these matters to morality and justice. In the last decade of his working life, he became greatly concerned with the interrelated themes of integrity, autonomy, conscience, and violence. He became interested in the relations between competition and morality and between justice and adversarial systems of law. These themes are woven together in Legislative Intent and constitute the main subject of some of the essays. MacCallum was engaged in a constant search for truth and understanding and in his life and work lived up to Emerson's vision of the "American Scholar" as "Man Thinking". These essays are informed by the author's deep curiosity, penetrating intelligence, wide knowledge, and outstanding character. They will be treasured wherever these characteristics and true philosophy are treasured.