Gerald J. Postema (NHC Fellow, 1986–87; 2005–06)

Fellowship Work Summary, 2005–06

Gerald J. Postema finished writing two major papers: “Whence Avidity? Hume’s Psychology and the Origins of Justice” for Synthese (vol. 152, no. 3, 2006); and “A similibus ad similia: Analogical Thinking in Law,” which will appear in Common Law Theory, edited by Douglas E. Edlin, in the Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Law series (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2007). He wrote two other papers: “Cemented with Diseased Qualities: Sympathy and Comparison in Hume’s Moral Psychology,” Hume Studies (vol. 31, no. 2, 2005); and “Custom in International Law: A Normative Practice Account,” to be included in The Nature of Customary Law: Legal, Historical and Philosophical Perspectives, edited by James B. Murphy and Amanda Perreau-Saussine (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2007). With colleagues at the University of Bologna and Cambridge University, he continued work on editing and revising several volumes of the 12-volume Treatise of General Jurisprudence and the Philosophy of Law, Treatise of General Jurisprudence and the Philosophy of Law, Treatise of General Jurisprudence and the Philosophy of Law,Treatise of General Jurisprudence and the Philosophy of Law (being published by Springer), for which he is writing volume 11, part 1, Contemporary Philosophy of Law in the Common Law Tradition. He uncovered and transcribed two valuable but unpublished manuscripts on jurisprudential topics by the important seventeenth-century English jurist Sir Matthew Hale that, along with other previously published but largely inaccessible writings by Matthew Hale, will appear in a collection that he edited called On the Law of Nature, Reason, and the Common Law: Selected Jurisprudential Writings of Sir Matthew Hale. He read extensively in preparation for writing a book on Hale and Hobbes and seventeenth-century legal theory.