Bojan Spaic

Over a career that spanned for decades, from his influential book Free Speech: A Philosophical Enquiry (1982) to very recent articles, Frederick Schauer developed a nuanced conception of free speech and its limits. This essay offers an overview of Schauer’s approach, by providing a first approximation to the Free Speech Principle (FSP) (§2) and then focusing on his answers to three fundamental questions: what is ‘speech’ (§3), why speech is or must be special (§4), and what type of principle is the FSP (§5). Furthermore, it offers an overview of Schauer’s answer to the possibility of a FSP between free speech absolutism and the denial of a FSP (§6), his analysis of the justification of the FSP (focusing on his criticisms and the arguments he considers most convincing) (§7), and his position on the limits of free speech (§8).

Generative artificial intelligence in the form of chatbots based on large language models (LLMs) has taken the world of law by storm. Philosophy of law is struggling to catch up with the theoretical significance of the advent of technological development and the way it may modify traditionally established understanding of legal phenomena, such as law-creation and authority. In this sense, for the most part, heated philosophical debates have circled around a normative question: ‘_Should_ AI create and interpret law?’. Much less attention has been given to a different, albeit previous, question: ‘C_an_ AI create and interpret law?’ That is, is AI capable of producing outputs that can be deemed as ‘law’ (at least, law as we know it)? Can AI be a ‘legal author’? This paper explores this unattended question and endeavours to provide some provisional answers. In the first part, we define legal authority, legal authorship, and legal interpretation and claim that the intention of a determinate authoritative author is often considered the condition of the possibility of creating and interpreting contemporary legal texts. In the second part, we argue that LLM AI, in general, and ChatGPT, in particular, generate legal texts without having any intention. In the third part, we consider the positions of the authors that downplay or even eliminate intention from the discussions about the legal character of prescriptive texts. 4. Finally, we argue that there are good reasons to side with the second group of authors. The ability of agents without intentions, like ChatGPT, to create legal text is an argument in favour of the thesis that law can be created without intention behind the creation and that nonintentional creation can be interpreted to arrive at legal norms.

The second Yearbook of the Central East European Forum of Young Legal, Political and Social Theorists aims at reassessing some major legacies of jurisprudence and political philosophy, thereby celebrating one hundred years from the publication of the first important theoretical account of Hans Kelsen - Hauptprobleme der Staatsrechtslehre; the fifty-years anniversary of one of the most important contemporary books in legal theory - Herbert Hart's The Concept of Law; as well as the forty-years heritage of the most influential 20th century account of justice - John Rawls's A Theory of Justice. On this occasion fourteen scholars from Eastern and Central Europe gave their accounts and interpretations of jurisprudential and political philosophical problems that persist or emerge anew in contemporary debates.

The paper gives an overview of recent doctrines of legal interpretation that can be subsumed under the common name “institutional turn” in theories of legal interpretation. Among the reviewed theoretical positions are the ones from Jeremy Wаldron, Victoria Nourse, Cass Sunstein, Adrian Vermeule, Scott Shapiro. It is concluded that the institutional turn in legal interpretation offers some significant insights into legal interpretation and interesting perspectives on the appropriate interpretative methodologies. The turn, however, does this by eschewing parts of traditional accounts of legal interpretation that are arguably worth preserving in any theory of legal interpretation.

John Dewey, one of the most important thinkers of pragmatism, elaborated a specific conception of law partially and gradually in the long course of his intellectual career. This part of his broader philosophical outlook is analyzed here through one of its most important segments - application of law - and interpreted in its historical, social and cultural background. The first part of the article concentrates on the 'objective' reasons for giving emphasis to the application of law in his legal philosophy. This domination of the application of law in his legal thought is derived from the needs of a rapidly changing structure of the American society in the first half of the XX century, and theoretically has its place in an all around phenomenon in American intellectual history in general that Morton White terms antiformalism. The second part of the article analyses his legal conceptions and their connection with the general philosophical position of this pragmatist. Dewey formed his conception of application of law as an integral part of his broader philosophical standpoint, and especially on the basis of his radical reinterpretation of logic and truth. Since his understanding of the legal process has roots in his experimentalist conception of logic that encompasses the apprehension of the process of experimentation as the only warrant for the validity of propositions, he regards application as conditio sine qua non of the legality of norms in general. This leads us to the last part of the article that scathes possible lines of critical approach to Dewey's work in this field. The view that the legality of norms is derived from their application is in legal theory often regarded as sociologism, inasmuch as it disregards the normative aspects of the legal process and emphasizes the social ones to the point of making it void of the normative aspects in the totality of the process itself. The proper understanding of possible lines of criticism of Dewey's standpoints in legal philosophy guides us back again to confront his conceptions with their cultural background, with which the article begins. Autor se u clanku bavi koncepcijom primjene prava u filozofiji Dzona Djuija, pragmatiste bez presedana u obuhvatnosti i temeljnosti bavljenja filozofskim problemima, cije je misljenje na ovim prostorima rijetko bilo predmet razmatranja. Zamisljen kao uvodno ispitivanje filozofsko-pravne problematike u Djuijevoj filozofiji, clanak u prvom dijelu razmatra odnos njegove filozofije prava i americkog kulturnog konteksta. U drugom dijelu je izlozeno Djuijevo shvatanje primjene prava i konfrontirano je s njegovim opstim filozofskim tezama, u prvom redu s koncepcijom logike kao 'ispitivanja ispitivanja'. Konacno, autor pokusava da ocrta osnovne smjernice kritickog pristupa Djuijevim rjesenjima filozofsko-pravnih problema.