State-of-the-art in legal philosophy

What is legal philosophy? What is the purpose of the study of legal philosophy? What is its proper methodology? One view of the task of legal philosophy, explicit or implicit in much of the literature in the discipline, is that it seeks to identify and explain the nature of law, that is, those properties which law, at any time, and in any place, must possess in order to be law, and hence which make it into what it is.1 This is an account of the central task of a certain kind of legal philosophy – that which is sometimes referred to as analytical jurisprudence – which I have adopted myself in some of my writings.2 However, despite regarding identifying and explaining the nature of law as a central task of jurisprudential inquiry, I would also like to think of such inquiry as being broad enough to encompass many different approaches to understanding and evaluating law. For example, considering what effect the existence and character of law have on our moral and other reasons for action, attempting to develop philosophically adequate accounts of the foundations of particular areas of law - eg EU law, tort, contract, criminal law -, and examining the role, if any, of empirical studies of various kinds in confirming or denying certain jurisprudential theses all seem to me to represent fruitful lines of jurisprudential inquiry.