Category Archives: Jurisprudence
Aug 5, 2016 Barbara LevenbookJurisprudence
William Baude & Stephen E. Sachs,
The Law of Interpretation, 130
Harv. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2017), available at
SSRN.
“Interpretation,” as used by Baude and Sachs, names the process that starts with legal texts and ends with their contribution to antecedent law. This is not the same activity as uncovering full linguistic meaning (though this may be necessary to determine legal contribution), nor is it extending or repairing antecedent law.
This article presents Baude and Sachs’s case that system-specific law governs interpretation of legal texts. In short, the positive law in particular legal systems generates interpretive principles that shape the legal content established by statutes (and constitutional provisions). The authors’ view rejects any theory of law or legal interpretation that insists, on conceptual grounds, that the materials for interpretation are common to legal systems or that mandates a standard of interpretation for parts of our system (e.g., the Constitution) based on conceptual claims alone (such as “the purpose” of a written constitution). Some of the examples Baude and Sachs offer of system-relative legal standards that I find plausible as governing interpretation are: the Dictionary Act, the “repeal-revival rule” of 1 U.S.C. section 108 (according to which new repeals don’t automatically revive old statutes), the general savings statute (according to which repeal does not erase liabilities arising under the old statute), and some traditional canons of interpretation such as the “Mens Rea Canon” and the presumption against retroactivity. Continue reading "Taking Interpretive Statutes Seriously"
Jul 11, 2016 Kenneth HimmaJurisprudence
Stefan Sciaraffa,
Constructed and Wild Conceptual Necessities in Contemporary Jurisprudence, 6
Jurisprudence 391 (2015), available at
SSRN.
Stefan Sciaraffa’s Constructed and Wild Conceptual Necessities in Contemporary Jurisprudence is a review of a fine collection of essays edited by Luís Duarte d’Almeida, James Edwards, and Andrea Dolcetti, entitled Reading HLA Hart’s ‘The Concept of Law,’ published by Hart Publishing in 2013. While the volume contains many provocative and insightful pieces by leading theorists in conceptual jurisprudence, I want to focus on an important – and frequently overlooked – point made by Sciaraffa on the nature of the relevant sense of necessity in conceptual theories of law.
Sciaraffa’s essay makes a number of distinctions of theoretical importance, including the distinction between “constructed” and “wild” concepts of law; however, the most illuminating one, as it pertains to conceptual jurisprudential methodology, is between metaphysical and conceptual necessity. Sciaraffa defines “metaphysical necessity” as “concerned with identifying and explicating those features an object has by virtue of itself and irrespective of the way we conceptualise or talk about the object” (P. 392). He explains “conceptual necessity” as concerned with identifying “features that are true of law by virtue of the way we talk about or conceptualise the law” (Id.). Continue reading "Conceptual and Metaphysical Modalities in Jurisprudence"
Jun 13, 2016 Robin KarJurisprudence
For philosophers of private law, a central puzzle is to explain how people’s voluntary acts of promising and contracting can produce genuine obligations. One popular class of answers points to personal autonomy—or the capacity, real or hypothetical, to bind one’s will through free acts of self-legislation. For those who believe in personal autonomy and its value, there may seem to be relatively few puzzles about promise or contract. Indeed, promise and contract might seem to offer easy cases.
These initial impressions can, however, be misleading. Whether promise and contract can be grounded in concern for personal autonomy will ultimately depend on what personal autonomy is, why it is valuable, and how promise and contract work. While autonomy-based accounts of promise and contract have proven enormously popular in the legal literature, this popularity has not always been matched by sufficiently close attention to these foundational questions. One of the things I appreciate most about Dori Kimel’s work in Personal Autonomy and Change of Mind in Promise and Contract is that he offers an uncommonly rich description of personal autonomy and its value. Rather than exaggerating the ease with which personal autonomy can be used to explain various details of promise and contract, Kimel faces the difficulties head on. Continue reading "The Art of Promise and Power of Contract"
May 11, 2016 Brian BixJurisprudence
Robert Alexy is one of the foremost contemporary legal theorists of this generation. His work has been very influential, both in analytic legal philosophy (e.g., A Theory of Legal Argumentation (Oxford, 1989) and The Argument from Injustice: A Reply to Legal Positivism (Oxford, 2002)) and in constitutional theory (A Theory of Constitutional Rights (Oxford, 2002)). He is a German theorist; while most of his important works were written first in German, many (like those just listed) have been translated into English, and many shorter articles have appeared originally in English, including the subject of the current jot.
In analytical legal philosophy, Alexy is best known for his “anti-positivist” views—views critical of the legal positivist theories associated with H. L. A. Hart, Joseph Raz, and others. His theory is nicely summarized in the short article being reviewed. Alexy argues that law has a dual nature: (1) a “real” or “factual” dimension, and (2) an “ideal” side. The real or factual dimension is associated with “authoritative issuance and social efficacy”; the ideal dimension is connected with “the element of correctness of content.” (P. 441.) Alexy argues that it is part of the nature of law that it claims to be (morally) correct. And following the German legal theorist of an earlier generation, Gustav Radbruch (in the works he wrote just after World War II), Alexy argues that a rule that is sufficiently unjust loses its status as valid law (the “Radbruch formula”). For Alexy, the claim of correctness and its correlate, the Radbruch formula, display necessary connections between law and morality, thus showing that legal positivism (which claims a separation between moral content and legal validity) is mistaken. Continue reading "Alexy’s Anti-Positivism"
Apr 8, 2016 Sean CoyleJurisprudence
Of the many reviews and critical notices that greeted the publication of Natural Law and Natural Rights [NLNR] in 1980, one of the most influential, and thus far unchallenged, was that by the distinguished American theologian Ernest Fortin, entitled The New Rights Theory and the Natural Law. In it, Fortin set out many of the principal criticisms that readers oppose to NLNR’s doctrines to this day: the book’s appearance of distance from traditional Aristotelian-Thomist concerns and modes of explanation; its focus on natural right in place of natural law (and the differences between the two concepts); the absence of the virtues from the book’s moral philosophy; its apparent surrender to liberal individualism.
In the years since 1980, John Finnis has amplified — sometimes considerably — upon these matters, including in the 2011 ‘Postscript’ to the second edition of NLNR, but until now had not directly replied to Fortin’s review. This long essay incorporates that reply. Whilst that Postscript served as an opportunity to comment upon and clarify the intention of many of the book’s passages, the present essay is closer in character to the ‘Postscript’ written by Hart for the second edition of The Concept of Law, focusing on the position of one critic in particular. Continue reading "Rights, Virtues, and Natural Law"
Mar 15, 2016 Robin WestJurisprudence
Scott Allen Anderson,
Conceptualizing Rape as Coerced Sex, Univ. of British Colombia (2015), available at
SSRN.
Scott Anderson’s article Conceptualizing Rape as Coerced Sex, in my view, is the best philosophical or legal piece on the subject of rape that has appeared in many years. Its basic insight is powerful, and persuasively argued. Rape, Anderson argues, should be understood neither as “forced nonconsensual sex,” as it is traditionally defined, nor as non-consensual sex, as most reformers today typically urge, but rather as coerced sex. Coercion, in turn, is “best understood as a use of asymmetric power that one sort of agent may hold over another sort based in the former’s ability to inhibit broadly the ability of the latter to act, by means such as killing, injuring, disabling, imprisoning, or drugging…. [thereby placing the former] in a position to threaten another with such harms or constraints in order to induce compliance with demands he might make.” So understood, rape is the criminal act of “either creating or taking advantage of pre-existing differentials in the ability and willingness to use force or violence,” toward the end of obtaining sexual gratification from the victim. The power differentials that render the pressure “coercive” are quintessentially created through direct force, violence, or threats of violence, but might also include taking physical advantage of another who is mentally or physically incapacitated because of intoxicants or cognitive or mental impairment. Most important, though, the power differentials at the core of the “coerciveness” that renders sex rape might be facilitated not by direct threats, but by drawing upon “the link between the threatener and others of a similar kind who have used similar powers in the past.” When sex is “coerced” in any of these ways, such that the victim is not able to “usefully or reasonably ignore, deflect, evade, or work-around the enforcement of the threat,” then the sex that results should be understood as rape.
Note that on Anderson’s account the victim’s consent or non-consent is not part of the definition of the crime (although it may enter as a defense). Rather, the definition focuses squarely on the assailant’s acts and mental states, rather than those of the victim: did the assailant create or take advantage of pre-existing differentials in the ability and willingness to use force or violence” to obtain sex. Nor does it require direct force: rather, the “differentials” in power that facilitate the rape may pre-exist the act itself, and may be as much a function of the similarity between the agent and others similarly situated, as anything the agent himself does in the particular encounter. This coercion-based account, Scott argues, would avoid both the under-inclusiveness of definitions of rape that center on force, and the possible over-inclusiveness of definitions of rape that center on consent. More significantly, it would better capture both what is distinctively harmful about rape, why rape is overwhelmingly (but not universally and certainly not by definition) a crime committed by men upon women, and why rape is a constitutive aspect of gender subordination to women’s detriment. Continue reading "On Rape, Coercion and Consent"
Feb 16, 2016 Kenneth HimmaJurisprudence
Frederick Schauer,
The Force of Law (
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015).
Some of the most difficult problems in legal and political philosophy concern the state’s use of coercive enforcement mechanisms. The problem of justifying state authority, for example, is an important moral problem precisely because the state characteristically employs enforcement mechanisms that coercively restrict the freedom of law subjects – coercion being presumptively problematic. Without such mechanisms, authority does no more than “tell people what to do” – a practice that seems presumptuous and rude but not one that would give rise to any serious moral problem that warrants a great deal of philosophical attention.
In The Force of Law, Frederick Schauer discusses a variety of problems that arise in legal theory because of the law’s characteristic use of coercive enforcement mechanisms. The book’s treatment of the role of coercion in law spans the entire spectrum of these philosophical problems, encompassing issues that are conceptual, normative, and empirically descriptive in character. It is an unrelentingly fascinating discussion that demonstrates Schauer’s impressive mastery of a literature on coercion that crosses many discipline lines. The book succeeds in bringing the problems associated with coercion back to the forefront of debates about the nature of law; it is, for this and many other reasons, a must-read. Continue reading "Coercion and the Conceptual Force of Law"
Jan 18, 2016 Michael GreenJurisprudence
This article exemplifies — in a very clear and accessible way — a new position that appears to be emerging among philosophers of law in the anti-positivist tradition. Previously one would have described positivists and anti-positivists as providing different answers to the following question: What grounds the existence and content of legal norms? For positivists, the answer was social facts. For anti-positivists, the answer was a combination of social and evaluative (particularly moral) facts. No one doubted that there are distinctively legal norms (legal rights, obligations, privileges, powers) that together constitute the law of a community — and that these norms are different from the norms of morality and prudence.
Notice that even though anti-positivists considered the existence and content of legal norms to depend on the confluence of social and moral facts, they generally treated legal norms as distinct from moral norms. Consider Ronald Dworkin’s anti-positivist theory of law, as presented in Law’s Empire. Under this theory, the law of a jurisdiction is the set of norms that would be accepted after a process in which “the interpreter settles on some general justification for the main elements of [legal] practice” and then reforms it by “adjust[ing] his sense of what the practice ‘really’ requires so as better to serve the justification” (P. 66). In particular, the interpreter attempts to come up with a justifying connection between past political decisions and present coercion (P. 98). Continue reading "The New Eliminativism"
Dec 8, 2015 Edward RubinJurisprudence
Freedom of speech can be regarded as the product of the modernization process that occurred in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As people moved out of the narrow confines of their rural villages, and the population of the towns expanded beyond the narrow limits of craft guilds and commercial families, a public culture developed within and among the rapidly expanding urban centers of the Early Modern era. In these settings, the gradual relaxation of the legal sanctions against various types of speech was accompanied by a parallel attenuation of the social sanctions that constrained such speech. The shaming and shunning that could occur in a village or small town ceased to function in the burgeoning urban context. People expressing dissident views could find like-minded individuals with whom to socialize and achieve a degree of anonymity in the more mobile and pluralistic world of broad boulevards, large financial or industrial organizations and bureaucratized public institutions.
As Ronald Krotoszynski points out in a recent article that I like lots, the advent of modern communication technology places both sources of our hard-won freedom of expression at risk. It reintroduces shaming and shunning penalties by enabling those who are offended by a particular statement to generate condemnations that will be permanently attached to an individual’s Net presence and thus publicized throughout society. In addition, the government’s access to big data enables it to impose indirect threats to free speech in the form of wide ranging, coordinated surveillance of the individual’s activities. Even if the legal system continues to prohibit direct criminalization of speech, the possibility of prosecution for other crimes, or the government’s unauthorized but untraceable disclosure of sensitive information, may well produce a chilling effect that rivals the force of criminal penalties. Continue reading "Privacy and Freedom of Speech in the Internet Era"
Nov 6, 2015 W.A. EdmundsonJurisprudence
Jeremy Waldron,
Immigration: A Lockean Approach,
NYU School of Law, Public Law Research Paper No. 15-37 (2015), available at
SSRN.
Approximately eleven million people currently reside in the United States as undocumented aliens. Most of these are so-called “economic” immigrants, who do not qualify for political asylum. Due to armed conflicts in the Middle East, approximately 350,000 migrants illegally entered countries of the European Union in the first eight months of the current year. Many of these will qualify for political asylum, but many will not; for from a legal perspective they, like the vast majority of US “illegals,” have immigrated primarily for economic reasons. Not to pillage and plunder, but to seek a better life by taking up opportunities for work in these wealthier and more stable countries. In other words, they come and keep coming mainly in order to bargain freely with legal residents who will pay for their labor.
The nations of Earth claim the right to exclude non-citizens from their territories, and many actively do so. Except in extraordinary circumstances, would-be immigrants have no recognized human right to be admitted or to remain. Illegal immigration, then, can present a complex set of policy questions whose answers involve balancing a range of reasons, both for and against policies such as amnesty, adjustment of legal status, management of quotas, enhanced border enforcement, construction of physical barriers, and deportation. The reasons going into the mix include public attitudes, human hardship, monetary costs of many kinds, impacts on wages, crime rates, demand for public services, and intangibles such as community homogeneity and “quality of life.” Jeremy Waldron rightly rejects the view that the question is essentially one of policy or the application of a settled ethics of national sovereignty. Waldron has rarely shied from the role of public intellectual, and here he seems poised to embrace it with uncommon vigor. Continue reading "Long Shadows and Clubbable Democracies"
