Bartosz Biskup

No. Still, Mainstream analytic legal philosophy is tacitly supporting capital while presenting itself as neutral conceptual analysis. That is the charge of this paper. My charge is not normative, but about methodology. Hart (2012), but also Raz (2009) or Shapiro (2011), argued for what I call an “enabler theory.” It says that law is an empty vessel: a meta-institution (cf. Ehrenberg 2016) that confers powers, enables plans, and coordinates social life, without inherent content of its own, and whose particular contents are conventional. And since the institutions are solutions to coordination problems, then the ultimate function of law is to coordinate social life. I argue that this is an ingenious discovery in legal philosophy, but its consequences are understudied because the method that produced it (static, a priori conceptual analysis) stops exactly where the interesting questions begin. The play stops when the joy begins. In this paper, I enjoy studying the consequences of this legal-philosohpical tenet. The trouble starts where the empty vessel is tacitly filled with non-neutral content. The token forms of law that fill the vessel today are capitalist laws with its manifold private law institutions like contract or private property (Pistor 2019, 2025). Private law, contrary to the received view, is coercive: the property law coerces the propertyless into wage labor, standard-form contracts coerce consumers into one-sided terms, and the rules of adjudication put the state’s coercive apparatus behind private titles. Pace Pashukanis (1978), earlier critique of capitalist law, I do not reduce the law to a mechanism of class struggle in my critique. According to Pistor, the modern capitalist law codes assets into capital through three operative mechanisms: private legal empowerment, decentralized access to consolidated coercion, and legal arbitrage. Each of those mechanisms maps onto a feature that mainstream legal philosophy treats as essential to law (power-conferring rules, secondary rules, and an open texture). A theory that describes the features of an unjust token law as the essential features of the kind law and presents this description as content-neutral naturalizes capitalism. Conceptual analysis taken on its face value, with no historical or comparative inputs (e.g., Tamanaha’s (2017) historical genealogy), is a snapshot of a contingent legal form, and it risks naturalizing the very system it describes.

In this provocative book, Bartosz Biskup advocates for a reform of the right to marry, arguing that this right should extend beyond romantic or sexual couples to include any relationship that provides care and support. Through philosophical and legal analysis of the European Convention on Human Rights, Biskup concludes that the right to marry is currently an empty status that neglects to explain why marriage deserves special protection. He adopts an ameliorative legal philosophy to illustrate how relationships should receive legal recognition based on care and vulnerability rather than sexual intimacy. Biskup''s research encompasses various common situations including adult siblings sharing a home, friends who become primary caregivers and chosen families. Rather than abolishing marriage, Biskup outlines how the institution of marriage can be improved to create a more just family law system while still upholding the human right to marry. Laws of Caring provides a novel ontological framework for understanding legal kinds and institutional change through social amendment, making it a valuable resource for scholars and students of legal philosophy, family law and social ontology. It is also highly relevant to human rights practitioners in NGOs and international organizations who focus on family diversity, especially the rights of LGBTQ+ and non-conjugal families.

What is the ethics of belief in the context of social and legal institutions about? In this chapter, after briefly introducing the ethics of belief (a part of traditional, as opposed to naturalized, epistemology), we discuss the object of such ethics: beliefs and belief-related attitudes. We recognize that W. K. Clifford's idea of the ethics of belief is related to society's basic self-understanding (as it facilitates public reasoning). We note that while explaining grounds for the ethics of belief, Clifford makes socio-ontological claims (‘tribal self’). Then we focus on the ethics of the beliefs and attitudes that ground social and legal institutions (as these foundational institutional beliefs and attitudes, including mutual trust, are referred to by social ontologists). We briefly investigate related themes in works by J. Searle, R. Tuomela, and D. Lewis and his followers, although evidence is surprisingly scarce. At the end, we raise four problems that should be analyzed further: the detachment problem, the anatomism problem, the question of evaluation, and the theory-ladenness of evaluated belief structures.

[The file provided is a detailed abstract] Should the answer to the ‘what is marriage?’ question guide us on what we can regulate as marriage? This is important for determining what we want marriage to be and how we can make it more just. Some argue that we should move towards a marriage-free regime where personal relationships are recognized, but the rights are not bundled under the legal institution of marriage. However, the acolytes of the Received View about the right to marry claim that the legal institution of marriage is essential to this right. This raises a philosophical question of whether our normative projects are limited by what legal marriage currently is.

This paper aims to analyse the claims that law is an artefact. There are two different concepts of the artefact in legal–philosophical literature. In some contexts, the concept of an artefact implies that a law is a social kind rather than something similar to a natural kind. Philosophers use the concepts of essentialism, fallibilism, and externalism to juxtapose law with natural kinds. However, in different contexts, the use of ‘artefact’ seems to presuppose some ontologically robust views from the specific field as the philosophy of technical artefacts. This latter use, however, assumes certain ontological presuppositions concerning the examination of law; specifically, the intention of the author and the purposive character of law. I argue that between the thesis that law is an artefact understood as a social kind or social construct and the thesis that law is similar to technical artefacts, there is a conceptual shift. I claim that this shift is unjustified.

This article reconstructs a Received View of the right to marry in the European Convention on Human Rights and provides its philosophical interpretation. According to the Received View, the right to marry is a right to a legal institution of marriage. Recent case law from the European Court of Human Rights is analysed, with a focus on the protection and recognition of personal relationships under the law. According to the Fedotova case, the rights pertaining to the protection of conjugal relationships stem from the right to family life. The problem of non-distinctiveness of the right to marry is being discussed. If substantial rights protecting conjugal couples stem from the right to family life, then the right to marry does not offer any additional protection for the couple. The Received View addresses this issue. However, it is politically and morally unjust.

Niniejsza praca ma na celu przedstawienie, w jaki sposób Hartowska koncepcja otwartej struktury prawa może posłużyć dla teoretycznej refleksji nad zjawiskiem ewolucji instytucji prawnych. W pierwszej części artykułu zostanie zaprezentowany sposób, w jaki rozumiane jest pojęcie „otwartej struktury”. Jest to presktyprywna interpetacja propozycji Herberta L.A. Harta, zaproponowana pierwotnie przez Briana Bixa, która „zakłada”, a nie „dowodzi” istnienie otwartej struktury. W drugiej części przedstawię, jak otwarta struktura prawa wyjaśnia aktywizm sędziowski bądź zmiany legislacyjne w stosunku do instytucji prawnych na przykładzie instytucji małżeństwa. Jednym z głównych problemów jest tzw. argument semantyczny, który wskazuje na językowe granice dla dokonywania pewnych zmian prawnych (np. uchwalenia małżeństw jednopłciowych, nadania osobowości prawnej rzekom). Problem semantycznych granic zostanie umieszczony w kontekście podziału na pojęcia odnoszące się do rodzajów społecznych oraz prawnych. Powyższe rozważania zostaną na końcu umieszczone w kontekście polskich przepisów, szczególnie art. 18 Konstytucji RP.

[ENG] The aim of this paper is to analyze the „possibility puzzle” presented by Shapiro (2011) in the context of the debate between conventionalism and non-conventionalism in speech act theory. Conventionalism claims that for every speech act there is a pattern (convention) which determines its illocutionary force. To perform a felicitous speech act is to fulfil necessary and sufficient conditions for this particular speech act. Non-conventionalism criticizes the view that for every speech act there is a conventional pattern and hidden conditions, which are to be fulfilled. This view maintains the conventional thesis for the so-called strict conventional speech acts (e.g. performatives), but negates using universal quantifier for so-called communicative speech acts whose aim is, in short, to express an intention and force someone to act by virtue of this intention. As in (Shapiro 2011), Phil said: in order for someone to have the power to make, change and apply rules, there has to be a rule that empowers someone to do so. This objection concerned „The First Legis- lator” only from the conventional perspective on speech acts. If it can be maintained that The First Legislator’s speech acts may be non-conventional, then Phil’s argument misses the point. Finally, I will emphasize that only lawyers analyze „the very first speech acts” whereas for philosophers, the problem of e.g. „the very first question” is less absorbing. [PL] Celem niniejszego artykułu jest przedstawienie tak zwanej Aporii Phila (possibility puz- zle) przedstawionej przez Shapiro (2011) w kontekście sporu konwencjonalizm–nonkon- wencjonalizm w teorii aktów mowy. Konwencjonalizm utrzymuje, że dla każdego aktu mowy istnieje konwencja, która determinuje moc illokucyjną aktu. Wykonać w pełni for- tunny akt mowy to spełnić wystarczające i konieczne warunki określone dla danego aktu mowy. Nonkonwencjonalizm krytykuje pogląd, że dla każdego aktu mowy istnieje okre- ślona konwencja oraz ukryte warunki, które należy spełnić. Ten pogląd utrzymuje kon- wencjonalną tezę dla tak zwanych stricte konwencjonalnych aktów mowy (na przykład performatywów), ale neguje użycie dużego kwantyfikatora dla tak zwanych komunika- cyjnych aktów mowy, których celem jest, w skrócie, wyrażenie pewnej intencji i zmusze- nie kogoś poprzez jej wyrażenie do określonego postępowania. Phil, bohater historii z książki Shapiro (2011), podkreślił, iż zawsze musi istnieć reguła upoważniająca do two- rzenia prawa. Ten zarzut dotyczący „Pierwszego Legislatora” jest zasadny tylko z per- spektywy konwencjonalizmu. Jeżeli można utrzymywać, że akt mowy Pierwszego Legislatora może być nonkonwencjonalny, wtedy argument Phila jest nietrafny. Na końcu scharakteryzowany jest następujący fenomen: tylko prawnicy analizują „pierwsze akty mowy”, natomiast dla filozofów problem „pierwszego pytania” nie jest tak absorbujący.