Category Archives: Jurisprudence

The Transformation in Kelsen’s Last Works

Mar 28, 2018 Brian BixJurisprudence

Brian Bix

Though Hans Kelsen is arguably the best-known and most influential legal philosopher of the 20^th century world-wide, he is not especially well known among American scholars, and when his work is discussed in this country, it is often misunderstood.¹ One scholar who has worked tirelessly for decades to make Kelsen better known and better understood on these shores is Stanley L. Paulson. He has (with the help of Bonnie Litschewski Paulson) translated Kelsen’s works,² written numerous articles summarizing and evaluating Kelsen’s work, and translated and compiled other significant commentaries on Kelsen.³ Paulson’s most recent article, “Metamorphosis in Hans Kelsen’s Legal Philosophy,” (a) explains the neo-Kantian approach of most of Kelsen’s works (Pp. 876-880), (b) discerns certain weaknesses in the argument (Pp. 880-881, 893), and (c) investigates when and why Kelsen ultimately abandoned a neo-Kantian approach, and also changed his views about the application of logic to (legal) norms (Pp. 861-865, 882-892).

Anglo-American legal scholars are accustomed to a more empirical and pragmatic approach to philosophy in general, and to the study of law in particular, which is why H. L. A. Hart’s approach has been well received.⁴ What has made Kelsen’s works so difficult for us is that his best-known writings are grounded in a very different approach, one based on Kant’s transcendental argument. As Paulson explains, Kelsen’s neo-Kantian argument goes along the following lines: We need to ask what follows from the fact that we (or “legal science”) view the acts of officials as valid legal norms. The mystery is grounded in the fact that the actions of officials are in the empirical realm (facts about what legislators, judges, administrators, and other officials have done or said), while legal rules are in the normative (non-empirical) realm. A standard philosophical view is that normative conclusions cannot be derived from strictly empirical premises. Continue reading "The Transformation in Kelsen’s Last Works"

A Story of Jurisprudence and True Philosophy

Mar 7, 2018 Andrew HalpinJurisprudence

Andrew Halpin

This is a shaggy dog jot. It starts in the conventional way by identifying a recent piece of work that is recommended for the attention of the reader. However, in the course of justifying that recommendation there is a series of diversions to other works, which distracts from any sustained understanding of where exactly the virtue of the piece is to be found. But, like a shaggy dog story which finally reveals its point, there does eventually emerge a point to the recommendation; although, as with the simile, not the point that might have been anticipated.

The work cited is a response by Gerald Postema to critics in a symposium on the volume covering common-law legal philosophy in the twentieth century he has contributed to Springer’s multi-volume Treatise of Legal Philosophy and General Jurisprudence. Within his coverage of that subject matter, Postema cites an article as a resource for unpacking the notion of true philosophy (vera philosophia) which he then utilizes in his own assessment of the achievements of common-law legal philosophy. This article by Donald Kelley in the 1976 Journal of the History of Philosophy,¹ has not, as far as I am aware, received much attention in mainstream Jurisprudence; and I have failed to uncover any real enthusiasm for it within more exclusive, niche jurisprudential concerns. It is, nevertheless, central to our present concerns. Continue reading "A Story of Jurisprudence and True Philosophy"

A New Blackstone

Jan 16, 2018 Brian BixJurisprudence

Brian Bix

William Blackstone was for a long time one of the central figures of both British and American legal thought. His Commentaries on the Laws of England was the text by which many learned law in England. In the United States, Blackstone was equally authoritative, though often read with additional commentary (e.g., by St. George Tucker¹).

Blackstone’s Commentaries has also played a significant role within legal theory—especially for theorists critical of certain features of the approach to adjudication and judicial reasoning that he espoused and are large parts of Anglo-American tradition. Criticism of Blackstone and his Commentaries is, for example, integral to much of Jeremy Bentham’s writings on law.² Bentham was an opponent of judicial law-making in general and the common law approach in particular. In a small piece called “Truth versus Ashurst” he compared the way that common law judges make law to the way people make laws for their dogs: “When your dog does anything you want to break him of, you wait till he does it, and then beat him for it.”³ This attack on the unpredictability and retroactivity of common law decision-making remains important to the present day. Continue reading "A New Blackstone"

The Return of Habits

Dec 18, 2017 Sean CoyleJurisprudence

Sean Coyle

The article begins by considering two theses from H.L.A Hart: thesis 1) a legal system can be based on official acceptance alone; thesis 2) such a system is particularly conducive to a society that is deplorably sheeplike. The author argues that (2) is correct but (1) is unhelpful or wrong. Hart spells out the sheeplike tendency when he speaks of ‘an unreflecting inherited or traditional attitude, or the mere wish to do as others do.’ The author wants to interrogate the idea of “acceptance”, and to switch the focus from social practices to the habits (patterns of repeated behaviour) that underpin the practices. Hart, it is said, sought to bridge the gap between habits as a social fact and law as social rules, by the concept of acceptance.

The author states that an “emphasis on the necessity to grow out of the habitual through critical reasoning translates a key assumption that structures all non-naturalist accounts of ethical agency: there is a fundamental discontinuity between the natural and the ethical.” She defends a type of moral naturalism that gives a central place to habit. For, quoting Hans Fink, “nature is never mere nature.” There follows an interesting account of the position of habits (or social facts) in the philosophy of thinkers such as Railton, McDowell and Leiter. In short, the account “highlight[s] the extent to which one’s understanding of habit reflects one’s meta-ethical understanding of agency.” For example, if one’s notion of autonomy requires “transcending one’s causal environment,” then habits “belong firmly to the province of sociology.” On the other hand, a naturalist interpretation of human agency will regard habits not only as conditioning but as enabling “normative choices.” Hart himself maintained an “agnostic meta-ethical position” in which he utilized habits only as a means of more clearly opposing them to rule-governed practices. Continue reading "The Return of Habits"

Chevron’s Real Impact

Nov 15, 2017 Edward RubinJurisprudence

Edward Rubin

Empirical studies are often regarded as having less cachet than theory, and the circuit courts certainly have less cachet than the Supreme Court, so an empirical study of the circuit courts might be expected to rank somewhat low in the academic pecking order. But this article belongs at the top. A survey and analysis of all the federal Court of Appeals decisions from 2003 to 2013 that refer to the Chevron doctrine – some 2,272 of them – it reveals the actual operation and significance of this most famous of modern administrative law decisions. The Supreme Court invokes Chevron fairly regularly, of course, but often for the purpose of modifying it. In any case, Supreme Court decisions tend to be so politically charged that they frequently seem sui generis, a characteristic that provided the Court itself, in King v. Burwell, with still one more basis for modifying Chevron doctrine. It is in the circuit courts that the quotidian work of administrative law is carried out, and that is the pudding where the proof of Chevron‘s real impact can be found.

The most basic conclusion that Professors Barnett and Walker reach is that Chevron makes a difference. Contrary to prior empirical studies of Chevron‘s impact in the Supreme Court (“Chevron Supreme,” as the authors call it, since wordplay with the decision’s name is difficult to resist), they find that the win rate for the agencies in a circuit court (“Chevron Regular”) is substantially higher when the court invokes the Chevron doctrine. At 77%, it is fully 20% higher than the win rate when the court invokes Skidmore. To be sure, this is hardly a surprising conclusion, and thus lacks the counter-intuitive allure that some of the best empirical studies offer. But it is a conclusion reached only after a massive amount of careful effort and it represents an important contribution to our knowledge about Chevron’s real impact. Continue reading "Chevron’s Real Impact"

Law as a Social Artifact

Oct 6, 2017 Kenneth HimmaJurisprudence

Kenneth Himma

It seems clear that, on any plausible general theory of law, the institutions and content of law are manufactured by human beings for the purpose of regulating human behavior and are, thus, properly understood as social artifacts. Positivism, of course, is committed to the idea that the existence and content of law owes entirely to human social activity. But it is not unreasonable to think that law is an artifact on even the strongest natural law view. According to this view, the law consists of those properly enacted norms that conform to objective moral requirements. Although there are, thus, necessary moral constraints on what counts as law, it nonetheless seems reasonable to characterize law, on this view, as an artifact. The construction and operation of more familiar concrete artifacts, such as clocks, are constrained by laws of physics yet are paradigmatically artifacts; the situation seems not much different, from the standpoint of legal theory, with socially constructed law that is constrained by moral norms.

Despite its conspicuous theoretical significance, the artifactual nature of law has not, until comparatively recently, received a great deal of attention from legal theorists. In Can There be an Artifact Theory of Law, Luka Burazin sets out to remedy this omission by giving a brief outline of an artifact theory of law. Burazin attempts to identify the implications of the claim that law is an artifact, as well as sketch what an adequate “artifact theory of law” might look like. Burazin’s analysis in this excellent paper is concerned only with law qua legal system (as opposed to law qua norm) presumably because the normative output of an institutional artifact, like a legal system, must also be artifacts. Continue reading "Law as a Social Artifact"

The Ends of Jurisprudence: A Guide to the Perplexed

Sep 8, 2017 Barbara LevenbookJurisprudence

Barbara Levenbook

This article is a guide to the perplexed about general jurisprudence. Many people assume that general jurisprudence is either entirely devoted to answering the question, “What is the nature of law?” or at least centered on that question. That is, they think that general jurisprudence is devoted to, or centered on, a metaphysical question. The most famous recent debate about this metaphysical question is the Hart-Dworkin debate, which many legal theorists find frustrating, sterile, or deeply confused (at least in its presuppositions). As a consequence, there is a tendency among some to abandon this debate, turning to matters they regard as outside of general jurisprudence. Plunkett and Shapiro provide a more capacious understanding of the enterprise, according to which general jurisprudence, which concerns law in general, is not limited to, and may not be centered on, metaphysics. From their elegant, precise, clear and compelling account, it follows that those who think they should abandon general jurisprudence may not have reason to do so, and those who think they are abandoning general jurisprudence might not be doing so. For example, theorists who (a) think it is a universal truth about law that it has legislation and (b) give an account of the meaning of statutes are actually engaged in general jurisprudence.

Plunkett and Shapiro’s thesis is that general jurisprudence comprises investigation in a number of philosophical fields – metaphysics, of course, but also philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and epistemology. These investigations are unified by a comprehensive explanatory project. That project is to show how, in the words of the authors, universal “legal thought, talk, and reality fit into [the wider] reality.” A theorist may enter this project at any point, may do only some of this work, but it remains true that this theorist is engaged in general jurisprudence. Continue reading "The Ends of Jurisprudence: A Guide to the Perplexed"

Faulty Knowledge About Law

Aug 8, 2017 Brian TamanahaJurisprudence

Brian Tamanaha

Theories about law frequently assume that people know what the law is. Theoretical accounts of the rule of law by Lon Fuller, Joseph Raz, and Friedrich Hayek, for example, emphasize that law must be prospective, clear, public, and stable, because it must be capable of guiding behavior.¹ The assumption that people know what law is shows up in H.L.A. Hart’s assertion that a necessary condition for law is that valid “rules of behavior” promulgated by the legal system “must be generally obeyed.”² This assumption is also manifested in theoretical claims that criminal laws deter crime and tort liability creates incentives for behavior. These and other discussions about the supposed consequences of law often take for granted that people have a correct understanding of what law requires.

Professor Arden Rowell’s recent article, “Law, Belief, and Aspiration,” casts doubt on this assumption. This empirical study, though not itself a work in jurisprudence, has significant theoretical implications and should be read by jurisprudents. Continue reading "Faulty Knowledge About Law"

Was Foucault a Liberal and Should We Care?

Jul 24, 2017 Martin KrygierJurisprudence

Martin Krygier

Foucault and Rights is intriguing and impressive at two levels: one exegetic; the other political. They can only be separated analytically, and they overlap and are interwoven in this book, but beyond a brief characterization of the exegetical virtues of the work, I will focus on politics, for two reasons. The first is simply that I am not a specialist on Foucault’s oeuvre. So I will not pretend to provide for Golder what he does so well for Foucault: an immanent exegetical critique. I will just say that Foucault and Rights is a masterly account and meticulous excavation of some of the deeper layers of Michel Foucault’s thought, postulating and persuasively arguing for underlying coherences in the face of apparent surface inconsistencies. It is exemplary immanent critique: immanent because the aim is primarily to explore the internal theoretical resources of Foucault’s thought to situate what he has to say about rights; and critique in a classical sense that does not immediately imply disagreement, still less hostility but is compatible with deeply sympathetic archaeological recovery and reconstruction; to use Golder’s phrase from another context, ‘critical affirmation’. The exegesis is assured, authoritative, intimately versed.

A second reason to think separately about the political concerns of this work is that they are important and unconcealed motivators – not determinants but motivators – of the interpretation Golder arrives at. For Foucault’s late invocations of rights present not merely an apparent problem of intellectual coherence, given his early critiques of what many have taken to be the metaphysical grounds of liberalism generally, and rights talk more specifically, but an apparent source of both political embarrassment to adepts and disciples of the earlier Foucault, and unembarrassed glee mixed with Schadenfreude to erstwhile liberal critics, who are pleased he had come to his senses at last.

People of a certain age, and alas I am one, might have a feeling of déjà vu all over again, confronted with this predicament. We have been here before. There was Althusser’s strenuous and Stalinist insistence on an ‘epistemological break’ in Marx’s thought, to avoid being sucked into his political embarrassing critical philosophy. Later, and at the darkest extreme, they will remember the discomfort of many of Heidegger’s philosophical admirers or those of Paul de Man, when their political allegiances were revealed. Altogether less sinister, and closer to our subject, is the furore that that doyen of Marxist historians, E.P.Thompson, caused when in Whigs and Hunters, a book which for 258 of its 269 pages would have raised no controversy on the Marx-inspired Left, ended with an eloquent paean to the rule of law as a ‘cultural achievement of universal significance’. There would not have been much of a fuss, or even notice, if Hayek had written such a coda, but it was deeply disquieting to many who considered themselves to have been on Thompson’s team. Many of his erstwhile supporters found these eleven pages in a life’s work inexplicable, and if explicable unforgivable. He had gone over to the Dark Side. My own feelings in 1976 were a bit different. I became fond of Thompson precisely at that time, and for that reason, and have remained so. Reading Golder’s account, it’s beginning to happen again with Foucault. Continue reading "Was Foucault a Liberal and Should We Care?"

Law and Theory of Human Action

Jun 28, 2017 Dennis PattersonJurisprudence

Dennis Patterson

Every once in a while a book comes along that completely changes the way scholars think about their field. In the realm of what is referred to as “Action Theory,” Elizabeth Anscombe’s Intention was such a book. Together with Ludwig Wittgenstein and Gilbert Ryle, Elizabeth Anscombe pioneered a revolution in philosophical thought that replaced the Cartesian paradigm of inner reflection with an emphasis on thought and meaning grounded in intersubjective practices and public criteria of meaning.

John Hyman works in the tradition of analytic philosophy of mind just described. His previous work has been in aesthetics (he is Professor of Aesthetics at Oxford) but, over the years, he has developed a position in action theory that is informed by the work of philosophers in the tradition mentioned above. In the book under review, Hyman works through the work of the philosophers just mentioned and advances a new way of thinking about human agency. His book should be of special interest to lawyers as it contains illuminating discussions of many topics found in law (e.g., will, action, act and knowledge). Continue reading "Law and Theory of Human Action"