Schauer on Law as a Malleable Artifact

Frederick Schauer, University of Virginia School of Law, is publishing Law as a Malleable Artifact in Law as an Artifact (Lukas Burazin, Kenneth Einar Himma, and Corrado Roversi, eds., Oxford University Press, 2018 Forthcoming). Here is the abstract.

Within contemporary analytic philosophy of law, most of the scholars who understand themselves to be engaged in conceptual analysis of the concept of law perceive that project to be analytic and descriptive, but not normative. But the concept of law is itself a human creation, and what humans can create humans can also re-create. And thus there is a different project of conceptual prescription or conceptual revision, one in which the goal is to reflect on (and to prescribe, at times) on how a society ought to understand the very idea of law – what concept of law a society ought to have. This project, which under one reading may have informed both H.L.A. Hart and Lon Fuller in their 1958 debate, need not displace the analytic/descriptive project of conceptual analysis of the concept of law, but, given its provenance going back at least as far as Jeremy Bentham, nor should it be dismissed from what John Austin labeled “the province of jurisprudence.”

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Hunt on The Law in Plato's Laws @radfordu

Luke William Hunt, Radford University, has published The Law in Plato's Laws: A Reading of the 'Classical Thesis' at 35 Polis 102 (2018).

Plato’s Laws include what H.L.A. Hart called the ‘classical thesis’ about the nature and role of law: the law exists to see that one leads a morally good life. This paper develops Hart’s brief remarks by providing a panorama of the classical thesis in Laws. This is done by considering two themes: (1) the extent to which Laws is paternalistic, and (2) the extent to which Laws is naturalistic. These themes are significant for a number of reasons, including because they show how Laws might be viewed as a sophisticated forerunner of natural law theory. The upshot is that Plato's metaphysical commitments about legal ontology allow him to base the truth of legal propositions on the way they relate to the truth of corresponding moral propositions.

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Kramer on Hart and the Metaphysics and Semantics of Legal Normativity @cambridgelaw

Matthew H. Kramer, University of Cambridge Faculty of Law, has published Hart and the Metaphysics and Semantics of Legal Normativity as University of Cambridge Faculty of Law Research Paper No. 18/2018. Here is the abstract.

A number of philosophers in recent years have maintained that H.L.A. Hart in "The Concept of Law" propounded an expressivist account of the semantics of the legal statements that are uttered from the internal viewpoint of the people who run the institutions of legal governance in any jurisdiction. Although the primary aim of this article is to attack the attribution of that semantic doctrine to Hart, the article will begin with some metaphysical matters – the matters of reductionism and naturalism – that often lie behind the development of expressivist approaches to the semantics of normative discourse. After briefly exploring those metaphysical concerns (to which I will return later), the article will begin its main discussion by rehearsing the distinction between the semantics and the pragmatics of utterances. It will then delineate the doctrine of expressivism which the aforementioned philosophers have in mind when they ascribe that doctrine to Hart. Although I will make reference to a few such philosophers, I will focus chiefly on an article by Kevin Toh that has been the fountainhead of all the subsequent attributions of expressivism to Hart. As will be argued herein, Toh and like-minded philosophers have gone astray in imputing to Hart a semantic version of expressivism. Notwithstanding that Hart’s theory of law can aptly be characterized as expressivist, that characterization is appropriate only when expressivism is understood as an account of the pragmatics of legal statements rather than as an account of their semantics.

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New From Hart Publishing: Christoph Kletzer, The Idea of a Pure Theory of Law (2018) @hartpublishing @c_kletzer

New from Hart Publishing: Christoph Kletzer, The Idea of a Pure Theory of Law: An Interpretation and Defence (2018). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

Most contemporary legal philosophers tend to take force to be an accessory to the law. According to this prevalent view the law primarily consists of a series of demands made on us; force, conversely, comes into play only when these demands fail to be satisfied. This book claims that this model should be jettisoned in favour of a radically different one: according to the proposed view, force is not an accessory to the law but rather its attribute. The law is not simply a set of rules incidentally guaranteed by force, but it should be understood as essentially rules about force. The book explores in detail the nature of this claim and develops its corollaries. It then provides an overview of the contemporary jurisprudential debates relating to force and violence, and defends its claims against well-known counter-arguments by Hart, Raz and others. This book offers an innovative insight into the concept of Pure Theory. In contrast to what was claimed by Hans Kelsen, the most eminent contributor to this theory, the author argues that the core insight of the Pure Theory is not to be found in the concept of a basic norm, or in the supposed absence of a conceptual relation between law and morality, but rather in the fundamental and comprehensive reformulation of how to model the functioning of the law intended as an ordering of force and violence.

 

Michaels on Law and Recognition: Toward a Relational Concept of Law

Ralf Michaels, Duke University School of Law, is publishing Law and Recognition — Towards a Relational Concept of Law in Pursuit of Pluralist Jurisprudence (Nicole Roughan and Andrew Halpin eds., Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). Here is the abstract.

Law is plural. In all but the simplest situations multiple laws overlap — national laws, subnational laws, supranational laws, non-national laws. Our jurisprudential accounts of law have mostly not taken this in. When we speak of law, we use the singular. The plurality of laws is, at best an afterthought. This is a mistake. Plurality is built into the very reality of law. This chapter cannot yet provide this concept; it can serve only to develop one element. That element is recognition. Recognition is amply discussed in the context of Hart’s rule of recognition, but this overlooks that recognition matters elsewhere, too. My suggestion is that we should accept not one but two rules of recognition in the concept of law. One, well-known, is the rule of internal recognition as developed by H.L.A. Hart — the idea that a developed legal system requires its recognition as law by its officials. The other, much ignored but equally important, is the rule of external recognition — the idea that law is law insofar as it is recognized externally by other legal systems. The rule of internal recognition is an example of a secondary rule. The rule of external recognition is of a different type. It is a tertiary rule. Hart suggested that a legal system is not complete unless it has, in addition to primary, also secondary rules. My suggestion is that, under conditions of legal pluralism, a legal system is not complete without such tertiary rules.

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Schauer on Vagueness In Law

Frederick Schauer, University of Virginia School of Law, is publishing Second-Order Vagueness in Law in Vagueness in Law: Philosophical & Legal Approaches (G. Keil and R. Poscher, eds., Oxford University Press, 2016). Here is the abstract.

Most of the philosophical literature on vagueness starts with the identification of the term whose vagueness is at issue -- tall, short, night, day, bald, tadpole, etc. But in legal interpretation an additional problem arises, because it is not always obvious which term in a legal text, or even which legal text, is the operative one. H.L.A. Hart's idea of a rule of recognition conceptualizes the way in which some second-order rule is necessary to identify which first-order rule is applicable to some form of conduct, but it is often the case that the second-order rule itself exhibits various forms of vagueness. When that is so, vagueness appears as a distinct problem with important but often unrecognized implications.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Bunikowski on the Origins of Open Texture in Language and Legal Philosophies in Oxford and Cambridge

Dawid Bunikowski, University of Eastern Finland Law School, Cardiff University Centre of Law and Religion, and University of the Arctic, is publishing The Origins of Open Texture in Language and Legal Philosophies in Oxford and Cambridge in the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies (2015). Here is the abstract.

The concept of open texture (OT) is often used without explanation of what it really means. I aim to shed some light on its philosophical and legal theoretical background, focusing solely on the pre-Hartian period. While this paper aims to dig more deeply into the concept than has previously been the case, it also examines philosophers’ life stories. I start with the history of the concept, beginning with legal philosopher Herbert Hart and delving back as far as the philosopher of science and language Friedrich Waismann. Certain other important scholars (J.L. Austin, Wittgenstein, McKinnon) from Oxford and Cambridge from the periods both before and after World War II are mentioned in the paper. Records such as in memoriam speeches form an important part of the story presented here. In any event, OT is an extremely important element of both legal practice and science nowadays. It does not matter who first hit upon this concept and it is likely that it cannot be attributed to any sole individual in any case. Hart was involved in the same academic environment and was influenced by J. L. Austin, while the philosophy of that time in the two English strongest philosophical academic communities was also deeply influenced by both the thought and the personality of Wittgenstein. The origins of OT are complicated and sophisticated.

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Legarre on H. L. A. Hart and John Finnis

Santiago Legarre, Universidad Catolica Argentina, Notre Dame Law School, is publishing HLA Hart and the Making of the New Natural Law Theory in Jurisprudence: An International Journal of Legal and Political Though (2016). Here is the abstract.

This article considers HLA Hart’s influence in the making of John Finnis’s book Natural Law and Natural Rights. In the style of an intellectual biography it traces the history of the interaction between the two Oxford legal philosophers using their correspondence as a starting point. It also delves into Finnis’s years in Africa —a period of his life both crucial for the writing of the book and utterly unknown. It argues that Hart’s role was significant not only insofar as he was behind the idea of the book but also (and this has been little known as of yet) because of the restrained way in which he freely chose to conduct his role as editor despite the extent of the reservations he had regarding Finnis’s work, fully revealed here. Given the importance of Natural Law and Natural Rights for what has been called the ‘new natural law theory’ the article concludes by awarding Hart his due credit in the making of one of that theory’s main sources of inspiration.

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A Review of Mariano Croce's "Self-Sufficiency of Law"

Andrew Halpin, National University of Singapore (NUS), Faculty of Law, has published The Search for Law at 5 Jurisprudence 410 (2014). Here is the abstract.

This review essay of Mariano Croce’s Self-Sufficiency of Law takes the opportunity to reflect on the wider jurisprudential enterprise while examining Croce’s stimulating book. Croce’s basic pursuit of a distinctive subject matter of law, and the theory to accompany it, explores a rich variety of sources and offers key observations on the distinguishing characteristic of law, the relationship between legal and social normativity, and the use of analytical legal theory. Croce makes his task more arduous by confronting legal and social pluralism, and offers as his own solution a composite theoretical position drawing in particular on Hart, Wittgenstein, classical Italian legal institutionalism, and Hoebel. The position is crowned by Croce’s understanding of transsectionality, which claims both empirical and analytical virtues in distinguishing law’s distinctive form of social normativity. In the course of providing a critical assessment of Croce’s position, more general questions are raised about the strategic uses of other theorists’ work, different possible views of how to approach the diversity of theoretical perspectives, and whether the search for law should conclude or start with a body.

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The Basis of Law

Damiano Canale, Bocconi University Department of Law, has published Is Law Grounded in Joint Action? as a Bocconi Legal Studies Research Paper. Here is the abstract.

One of the central theses in contemporary jurisprudence is that law is grounded in a social practice. It is far from being clear, however, what the characteristics of this practice would be. Starting from the discussion of the social practice thesis recently provided by Carlos Bernal-Pulido, this article critically considers whether the practice at the foundation of law can be seen as a form of joint action based upon collective intentionality and common knowledge. The paper reconstructs the idea of law as a social practice in the works of John Austin, Herbert Hart and Scott Shapiro, and shows that an accurate reading of these works leads us to cast doubt on the persuasiveness of Bernal-Pulido’s proposal. The practice at the foundation of law, if any, cannot be seen as a form of joint action without making several aspects of law puzzling or unaccountable. Finally, the article tries to shed some light on the contemporary debate about the normativity of law by distinguishing the different theoretical problems that this debate actually tackles.

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The Influence of Robert M. Cover

Roy Andrew Partain, Soongsil College of Law, has published Ecologies of Paideic Law: Environmental Law and Robert M. Coverʼs Jurisprudence of 'Nomos and Narratives' , at 24 Hanyang Law Review 423 (2013). Here is the abstract.

This article provides an extensive introduction to the legal philosophy of Robert M. Cover and begins a discussion on how his principles of jurisgenesis could be applied in environmental law. This article suggests that a deeper appreciation of Cover’s jurisprudence could better assist in the development of climate change legislation.
Robert M. Cover was a legal scholar at Yale Law School who died in 1986, tragically early in his career, leaving many aspects of his innovative jurisprudence incomplete. Despite those circumstances, he has become one of the top-most cited legal scholars in American jurisprudence. In particular, he is best known for his “Nomos and Narratives” theory of law. Cover’s legal philosophy holds that the laws and narrative traditions of a culture cannot be critically separated, that they must be understood to operate intertwined. Further, he argued certain aspects of the narrative cultures must be included in the concept of law, in the corpus juris, alongside more explicit forms such as constitutions, legislations, and judicial decisions. Thus, Cover argued, legal scholars have been overly focused on one type of law to the neglect of other types of law.

Cover introduced the concept of paideic jurisgenesis and of jurispathic judges to counter the legal theories of H.L.A. Hart, Hans Kelsen, and Ronald Dworkin. Cover’s theory provides a more complete framework to answer Dworkin’s question of how judges resolve ‘hard’ legal cases. A ‘hard’ case exists when both sides of an adversarial courtroom can provide sound legal support for their arguments; Dworkin posited that jurisprudence is simply the investigation of how judges resolve that conflict. Whereas Hart, Kelsen and Dworkin saw a shortage of law, of a need to explain how law was created by judges, Cover concluded to the contrary that law actually existed in over-supply and that judges act to eliminate surplus laws to resolve ‘hard’ problems.

Cover balanced the development of paideic laws, i.e. narratively evolved laws, with the controls of imperial, i.e. governmental, legislation and jurispathic judges. Cover named this universe of legal meaning and context-rich interpretations ‘nomos’, borrowing from the Greek language for ‘law’. Cover proposed that social groups created laws via social cohesive narratives of obligations, coercion, and socially-endorsed enforcement. But this organic process of legislation could create too many overlapping legal systems as each society contains multiple social groups. Legislatures were seen by Cover as providing a democratic process to select Kelsenian Grundnormen to better align the diverse legal narratives of multiple social groups. Cover then saw the key role of judges as jurispathic, to eliminate legal chaos when too much law exists.

A legal scholar, in Cover’s world, has two roles. First, to observe and appreciate the organic and paideic narratives that create the laws in the legal scholar’s nomos-verse. Second, to provide the legal scientific understandings necessary to support the judiciary’s jurispathic duties. In both cases, a legal scholar has the opportunity to engage and interact in the development of law. A legal scholar can become engaged in the development of the paideic narratives and social dialogs that create paideic law. A scholar can assist in the development of the imperial legal structures that provide stability and unity to the social group. Cover was particularly interested in the development of Human Rights and Civil Rights laws, but his theories and techniques have found applications in many other areas of law.

This article provides a preliminary example of Cover’s theories in regards to the development of climate change legislation. The article takes notice of the historical problems to develop and enforce climate change legislation. The article examines Cover’s theories to uncover the practical legal and policy tools suggested by his theories of jurisprudence. The article suggests a list of methods wherein Cover’s theories could be applied to climate change legislation.

Donwload the article from SSRN at the link. 

H. L. A. Hart and Human Nature

Péter Cserne, University of Hull, has published Between 'Metaphysics of the Stone Age' and the 'Brave New World': H.L.A. Hart on the Law's Assumptions About Human Nature, in Jurisprudence and Political Philosophy in the 21st Century: Reassessing Legacies 71 (Miodrag Jovanović and Bojan Spaić eds., Frankfurt: Peter Lang 2012).

This paper analyses H.L.A. Hart’s views on the epistemic character of the law’s assumptions about human nature. Hart suggests that the assumptions behind legal doctrines typically combine common sense factual beliefs, moral intuitions, and philosophical theories of earlier ages with sound moral principles, and empirical knowledge. An important task of legal theory is to provide a ‘rational and critical foundation’ for these doctrines. This does not only imply conceptual clarification in light of an epistemic ideal of objectivity but also involves legal theorists in ‘enlightenment’ about empirical facts, ‘demystification’ of metaphysical obscurities, and substantive normative, including moral reasoning. Hart also argued, in a way that is somewhat surprisingly similar to Fuller's, that embedded in legal doctrines of causation and responsibility are assumptions about human agency and personhood that are potentially in conflict with naturalistic theories about human behaviour.

The full text is not available from SSRN.  

The Nature of Law

Frederick Schauer, University of Virginia School of Law, has published  On Open Texture of Law as Virginia Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper No. 2011-35. Here is the abstract.
   

This paper, prepared for the University of Frankfurt Symposium on Defeasibility in Epistemology, Ethics, law and Logic, addresses the claim of H.L.A. Hart and others that law is open-textured. It is in the nature of law, they say, that it necessarily possesses an open texture going beyond the open texture of the language in which legal rules are written. But when we examine the question of open texture in light of Hart’s claim that the open texture of law entails the necessary defeasibility of legal rules, we discover that Hart and his followers are mistaken. Both the alleged open texture of law qua law (as opposed to the open texture occasioned by the open texture of the language used by law) and the defeasibility of legal rules are contingent features of certain legal rules in certain legal regimes, but neither are necessary components of the nature of law or the nature of rules.

 Download the paper from SSRN at the link.