Category Archives: Jurisprudence
Dec 10, 2014 Connie RosatiJurisprudence
Ronald Dworkin famously claimed, in Law’s Empire, that law is an “interpretive concept.” Dworkin’s argument for this claim appealed to a certain type of legal disagreement, what he called “theoretical disagreement.” Theoretical disagreements, he maintained, are genuine disagreements in which parties share the same concept but differ in their application of the concept because they interpret shared practices differently.
David Plunkett and Timothy Sundell provide a close examination and illuminating critique of Dworkin’s argument for the claim that law is an interpretive concept in Dworkin’s Interpretivism and the Pragmatics of Legal Disputes. Their focus, however, is on Dworkin’s broader discussion of interpretive concepts in Justice for Hedgehogs (JFH) and his disagreement-based argument for intepretivism. Continue reading "Dworkin’s Interpretive Concepts v. Metalinguistic Negotiations"
Nov 12, 2014 W.A. EdmundsonJurisprudence
The planet’s population of wild nonhuman animals has declined by one-third over the past fifty years. Over that same period the human animal population has doubled. (Hereon, I will simply refer to “animals” and “humans.”) The two numbers and the trends they represent are connected. Human activity accounts for much of the decline in wild populations. Non-wild animal numbers have grown, over the same period, but this is due largely to the trebling of meat consumption by humans. This is expected to double again by the year 2050. Something like 56 billion animals are now slaughtered annually for human consumption. Ten of them, approximately, for each one of us; and the ratio is growing. The amount of animal suffering due to purposeful or knowing human conduct is staggering.
There are signs that humans are becoming more thoughtful about, and more sensitized to, the suffering and exploitation of animals. Animal welfare laws have become more common and have begun to address the conditions of animals in factory farms. Nevertheless, the larger picture is depressing: an “Eternal Treblinka” (Zoopolis, P. 2) whose moral and political superstructure remains largely unquestioned. Despite over a century and a half of campaigning, human advocates for better treatment of animals have rather little to show for their efforts. Continue reading "Do Animals Need Citizenship?"
Oct 13, 2014 Daria RoithmayrJurisprudence
By now, many JOTWELL readers will already have read (and re-read, and maybe even already assigned for class) Ta-Nehisi Coates’ stunning article in The Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations.” In this JOTWELL recommendation, then, I write not so much to recommend the article as something we like (though for those readers who have not yet read, I ask, “What are you waiting for?”) but to ask a different question. I write because after reading this journalistic masterpiece, which blurs the line between multimedia reportage, impassioned advocacy and rigorous scholarship, I am provoked to ask, in all seriousness, shouldn’t we scholars be rethinking the form that we use to do what it is that we do? Why aren’t more of us doing what he’s doing?
First, a brief review. Substantively, the article can be divided into four parts (though Coates divides it into ten). In the first part, we are introduced to Clyde Ross whom we meet in 1920s Jim Crow Mississippi. Whites steal land and a horse from the Ross family with impunity. Ross and the story move to 1960s Chicago, where Ross is robbed again, this time fleeced through a scheme in which houses are sold “on contract,” a draconian rent-to-own scheme in which buyers late on their payments can be evicted and left with no property or refunded equity. Finally, through Ross, we are introduced to the debilitation of modern-day North Lawndale Chicago—income and wealth half the rate of white communities, poverty, unemployment and infant mortality at twice the white rates, skyrocketing crime rates and a plummeting population. Continue reading "A Journalist Takes on the History of White Supremacy"
Sep 10, 2014 Michael GreenJurisprudence
That Dworkin waited until the very end of his career to take on international law might seem strange. One of Dworkin’s great insights is that participants in legal practices often disagree about the criteria for identifying law, while nevertheless thinking that their disagreement has a determinate answer. If we are to do justice to these “theoretical disagreements,” as Dworkin called them, we cannot hold a positivist theory, like H.L.A. Hart’s, under which the existence and content of the law are ultimately determined solely by social facts about a community’s legal practices. Only by introducing evaluative considerations can we make sense of practitioners’ commitment to law that transcends these social facts.
International law would appear to be a poster child for the Dworkinian theory of law. Theoretical disagreements about international law are common, and those seeking to resolve them commonly appeal to evaluative considerations. What is more, it appears that international law, by its very nature, transcends social facts about the legal practices of a particular community. The principles of international law seem to stand above and bind the American, French, or Uzbek communities. Continue reading "International Law and Dworkin’s Legal Monism"
Jul 29, 2014 Barbara LevenbookJurisprudence
This is a provocative and important essay that has implications Solum doesn’t spell out for some positions on meaning, communication, statutory interpretation, and the understanding—sometimes called the “construction”—of statutory texts. Solum is interested in communicative content, principally of directives. Most of his examples are of legal directives, or as he prefers to describe them, legal rules.
Solum begins with an important distinction between communicative content, the kind of meaning he is interested in discussing, and legal meaning, the legal contribution a text makes in its particular legal system. It is not uncommon for discussion of statutory interpretation to conflate the two or to focus entirely on the latter, but this is a mistake. In some legal systems, such as in the United States, the communicative content of a statute can cause it to fail to make any legal contribution (because, for example, the statute is unconstitutional). So getting clear on communicative content is a prolegomena to getting clear on much of statutory interpretation. Solum aims to make a significant contribution to this task by illuminating the lack of connection between communicative content, intention, and the mental states of individual legislators. Continue reading "Meaning, Intention, and Mental States"
Jun 4, 2014 Brian TamanahaJurisprudence
Jeremy Waldron,
What is Natural Law Like?,
N.Y.U. Working Paper Series (2012), available at
SSRN.
Seldom do I come across a jurisprudence article that uses a simple shift in framing to place an old topic in a completely new light. “What is Natural Law Like?” by Jeremy Waldron prompted questions about natural law that had not occurred to me in two decades of following the subject. The standard ways of discussing the topic cover the natural law tradition, starting with Aquinas and moving to the present; take up what qualifies a theory as “natural law,” usually a claim of objective principles; elaborate on the debate between natural law and legal positivism; and lay out the positions of various “natural law” theorists, including John Finnis, Ronald Dworkin, and others. Much of this territory is familiar and well-worn.
Waldron starts with a standard question, “what is a law of nature?”, but immediately adds a twist by positing, “we should expect natural law to be law-like. It should be like law.” This seems innocuous as he states it, but it quickly produces unusual implications. Continue reading "Treating Natural Law as Law"
May 5, 2014 Brian BixJurisprudence
In legal philosophy, as in many scholarly areas, there is a “good and original” problem: the work that is very good tends not to be particularly original (usually being rather a careful modification of existing ideas), and the work is truly original tends not be very good at all. There are occasional exceptions, and one of these in the area of legal philosophy is the work of Mark Greenberg, who in recent years has developed, through a series of articles, a significant, and significantly novel approach to the nature of law. As will be described, Greenberg’s theory is distinctive and refreshingly heretical.
Greenberg’s approach is in sharp contrast with what he calls “the Standard Picture,” a view he believes to be assumed or accepted, but rarely argued for, in connection with most of the currently popular theories of the nature of law. Under the Standard Picture, when legislators enact a statute, they directly and straightforwardly add to our law(s). At the same time, as Greenberg points out, lawyers, legal theorists, and law students – and everyone else who has looked seriously at the process of statutory interpretation in actual cases – know that the way statutes add to the law(s) is not that direct or that clear. This is shown indirectly in the way that competent judges and practitioners, acting in good faith, often disagree about the legal effects of a statute (in application to actual or hypothetical sets of facts), with disagreements often occurring at a basic level (e.g., should we focus on the plain meaning of the statute’s text, or should we focus on what the lawmakers intended to do). As the article points out, judges who disagree about statutory interpretation rarely come equipped with arguments about why some factors are relevant and others are not, or why some factors should be given greater weight than other (relevant) factors. As Greenberg indicates, any such argument would likely be in terms of why – and when — the actions of legal officials affect our moral rights and duties. Continue reading "A Truly Different Understanding of Law and Morality"
Apr 1, 2014 Michael CedroneJurisprudence
Linda Edwards’ article is a thoughtful examination of the hidden and unexplored role of narrative in legal decisions. The article raises fundamental questions about the nature and boundaries of legal discourse and demonstrates that narrative theory and cognitive study can bridge the distance between what one may call ‘traditionalist legal analysis’ and its ‘oppositionist’ critique. The article is a delight. It joins an arresting image to an elegant argument, and it is beautifully written.
Edwards’ arresting image evokes an ancient, walled city. Life proceeds vibrantly inside the walls, where people deliberate and decide questions within a common cultural frame. Outside the walls, prophets shout toward the people, but their voices are lost in the vast plains. Occupants of the city occasionally lob verbal assaults—“Be quiet; stop whining; leave us alone”—but the city largely ignores the prophets. For Edwards, this metaphor captures the relationship between judges and traditionalist legal scholars and critical theorists. Continue reading "On Narrative, Legal Discourse, and Yaser Esam Hamdi"
Mar 3, 2014 Mortimer SellersJurisprudence
There is an innovative, very influential, and deeply pernicious tradition in English law and jurisprudence equating liberty with license and the rule of law with legal despotism. The beauty of this short chapter by T.R.S. Allan lies in its full implicit refutation of this shared misconception, as found in Thomas Hobbes, John Austin, and H.L.A. Hart, and its shorter explicit repudiation of their gentle contemporary apologist, Joseph Raz. Allan embraces traditional conceptions of the rule of law, demonstrates their central position in British jurisprudence, and makes sense of the doctrines of A.V. Dicey, often misstated as mere legal formalism.
“The rule of law and not of men” in its original, best, and most coherent sense is the antithesis of arbitrary power. This is both a political ideal and a constitutional doctrine: law and government are only legitimate when they serve justice and the common good of their subjects. To legislate, adjudicate, or execute the laws to any other end is contrary to the proper purposes of law, and therefore corrupt. “Liberty” consists in subjection to just laws, made for the common good — not (as some would have it) the simple license to do what one wants. Continue reading "Liberty, Equality, and the Rule of Law"
Jan 29, 2014 W.A. EdmundsonJurisprudence
The moral arc of the universe is long. But how long is it? If we measure from the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome, it is long enough to bring into the fully human fold whole categories that had once been denied equal moral status: notably slaves, women, and people of color, who had sometimes been regarded as hardly more significant, morally and legally, than (non-human) animals. It may be an exaggeration to say that Roman law adhered to a rigid, exhaustive and mutually exclusive bifurcation between rights-holding persons and non-rights-holding things, but the eminent Kant scholar Christine Korsgaard does not deny that Kant was “consciously following” precisely that view (P. 630, emphasis original). In this superb paper, she takes up the task of showing that Kant’s thought contains elements that undermine what she calls “the legal bifurcation” (P. 629) of the world into persons, on one hand, and things, on the other. That task is instrumental to her aim of showing that Kant might consistently have adopted a more respectful view of the moral status of animals, and that the framework of Kant’s thought indicates an attractive way of understanding what that third status—of neither person nor mere thing—might be.
Working within Kant’s general account of rationality, agency, and personhood, Korsgaard proposes that we recognize a third category of morally significant being: that of creatures who are not mere things, and yet are not persons either. The tantalizing suggestion is that at least some animals populate this third category, and that they are not apt objects of ownership, at least not in the usual sense. This of course is contrary to Kant’s statement in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View: Continue reading "Animals, Rights, and Legal “Bifurcation” In Kant"
