Thomas Bustamante

Gerald Postema raised a powerful challenge to Ronald Dworkin’s theory of interpretation. By allowing each interpreter to make her own judgment about the content of a social norm, Dworkinian interpretation becomes insufficiently intersubjective and insufficiently political. In previous work, I argued that this criticism must be rejected because Postema’s own account of law, analogical reasoning, and the rule of law requires one to make a reflected judgment and hold other actors accountable to the law. Nevertheless, a powerful objection claims that protestant interpretation is incompatible with the first person-plural reasoning that an intersubjective social practice requires. In response to the objection, I argue that no such incompatibility exists. On closer examination, protestant interpretation is part of the attitude that a rational agent must adopt if she is to acquit her moral responsibilities as a participant in a social practice.

In this chapter, I address some of the criticisms of Dworkin that Waluchow raised in his book Inclusive Legal Positivism—in particular, (i) the response to Dworkin’s methodological contention that jurisprudence should be regarded as a first-order interpretation of the law and (ii) the contention that Dworkin’s “law as integrity” provides a deficient description of the practice of precedent, inasmuch as it does not distinguish between theories of law and theories of adjudication and creates a set of puzzles that cannot be resolved with Dworkin’s interpretive account of the legal practice. In response to Waluchow, I argue that, regardless of their methodological disagreements, law as integrity and inclusive legal positivism are similar descriptions of the social practice of law, and that the former can also provide a sound theory of precedent and adjudication. The chapter is followed by an Appendix in which I consider Waluchow’s more recent accounts of constitutional interpretation and political morality. In the Appendix, I offer a pragmatic-inferentialist interpretation of Waluchow’s common law constitutionalism and argue that Waluchow may have reasons for dropping the distinction between first-order and second-order judgments about moral norms.

Wilfrid Joseph Waluchow (or W.J. Waluchow) is one of the most important legal philosophers of our time. His insightful and original scholarship, expressed especially in his books Inclusive Legal Positivism (1994) and A Common Law Theory of Judicial Review: The Living Tree (2007), developed a powerful approach to legal and constitutional practice, shedding light on the theoretical commitments of legal positivism and the tension between fundamental rights and democracy in contemporary societies. Under the influence of H.L.A. Hart’s jurisprudence, Professor Waluchow understands philosophy of law as an inquiry on how to understand, based on conceptual analysis, the implicit commitments that we undertake as participants of legal practice in constitutional communities.

In The Force of Law, Frederick Schauer maintains that in order to analyze the normative force of the law, one should adopt a particular strategy to ‘isolate’ the effect of laws in determining the behavior of citizens and legal officials. To understand the law’s capacity to motivate human behavior, one should look only at the cases where the law conflicts either with a person’s best moral judgment or her own self-interest in the matter at stake. In these situations, according to the argument developed in the book, it is an empirical fact that people very rarely obey the law merely by deference to its authority. My point in this paper is to discuss and criticize this methodological assumption and draw some implications about the study of the normativity of law. Firstly, I think that Schauer’s argument only makes sense if we accept from the start his own conception of legality, which takes for granted the concept of law defended by exclusive positivism, and the undemonstrated empirical assumption that the people in general and the legal officials also share this conception of legal validity. To counter these hidden assumptions, I argue that exclusive positivism is just one of the plausible forms of explaining the nature of law, and that Schauer’s own reservations against philosophical essentialism provide a reason to resist the conclusion that the law must always be defined in a content-independent way. Secondly, I advocate that Schauer’s strategy to ‘isolate’ the effect of law leaves the ‘core cases ’ of legal provisions out of the realm of jurisprudence. To understand the effect of the law and its capacity to motivate the action of citizens and officials, jurisprudence should neither focus on the individual attitudes towards a legal rule, as Schauer appears to be doing in his book, nor concentrate in the cases where the law comes into conflict with one’s interests or moral convictions.

This book provides a critical outlook on, and an inquiry into the practical implications of, the works of Professor W.J. Waluchow, one of the most important jurisprudence scholars of the early twenty-first century, while also reflecting on the interconnections between his legal theory and his theory of constitutional interpretation. It also features an interview with Waluchow, in which he responds to some of the chapters and shares a first-person perspective on his main philosophical ideas, how they emerged, and how they can be further developed and applied. The book makes a valuable contribution to contemporary legal philosophy by asking and providing different answers (from prominent legal philosophers and newer scholars in the field) to questions such as ‘How does Waluchow’s jurisprudence relate to his theories of legal reasoning and constitutional interpretation?’, ‘On what terms should we understand inclusive legal positivism?’, ‘Can inclusive legal positivism be reconciled with an interpretivist theory of adjudication?’, ‘How does it compare with Raz’s model of legal authority?’, ‘Can Waluchow’s notion of “community constitutional morality” be applied to contexts such as international law, pluralist legal communities, and indigenous laws?’, and ‘Is Waluchow’s methodology equipped to provide interpretive directives in unstable and extremely unequal legal systems?’. The chapters, all written by experts on jurisprudence (including some of the scholars who helped develop the tradition known as inclusive legal positivism), offer a unique analysis of Waluchow’s most complex and intriguing theses, providing not only a valuable exegetical analysis of his work but also a range of answers to the challenge of interpreting legal and constitutional values, as well as practical resolutions to persisting controversies in the philosophy of law.

Ronald Dworkin’s philosophy of law, in its mature version, is grounded in at least two central claims: first, a thesis about law and morality, which we might call the One-System Thesis; second, a thesis about how moral and legal propositions can be said to be true or false, which we might call the Interpretive Thesis. While the One-System Thesis holds that law and morality form a single system, the Interpretive Thesis makes two distinct claims: first, truth of interpretive propositions—such as moral and legal propositions—must be established from within the practice in which they figure; second, the soundness of an interpretive proposition is related to the purpose of the practice under consideration. Mark Greenberg’s Moral Impact Theory of Law accepts the One-System Thesis while rejecting the Interpretive Thesis. The Moral Impact Theory is a metaphysical theory of how moral facts rationally determine the content of the law. Its main contention is that the actions of legal institutions have an impact on the moral obligations people have in a polity, and the content of the law is made up of the moral obligations that result from the actions of such institutions. Greenberg assumes that moral facts pre-exist and have some metaphysical priority in relation to legal facts. Moral facts must be prior and independent from legal practice in order to play a part in the rational determination of the content of the law. The point of this paper is to offer a response to Greenberg. I argue that the One-System Thesis only should be supported if the Interpretive Thesis is correct, and that without the latter the former becomes an implausible version of natural law jurisprudence.

This edited collection includes contributions from expert philosophers of law and considers the work of one of the most important legal philosophers of our time, Professor Gerald J Postema. The chapters dig deep into important camps of Postema's rich theoretical project including: - the value of the rule of law; - the ideal of integrity in adjudication; - his works on analogical reasoning; - the methodology of jurisprudence; - dialogues with Ronald Dworkin, Joseph Raz, Frederick Schauer and HLA Hart. It includes an original article by Professor Postema, in which he develops his conception of the rule of law and replies to some objections to previous works, and an interview in which he provides a fascinating and unique insight into his philosophy of law.

This book considers the seminal debate in jurisprudence between Ronald Dworkin and Stanley Fish. It looks at the exchange between Dworkin and Fish, initiated in the 1980s, and analyses the role the exchange has played in the development of contemporary theories of interpretation, legal reasoning, and the nature of law. The book encompasses 4 key themes of the debate between these authors: legal theory and its critical role, interpretation and critical constraints, pragmatism and interpretive communities, and some general implications of the debate for issues like the nature of legal theory and the possibility of objectivity. The collection brings together prominent legal theorists and one of the protagonists of the debate: Professor Stanley Fish, who concludes the collection with an interview in which he discusses the main topics discussed in the collection.

The volume comprises a selection of papers delivered at the 24th IVR World Congress. All papers address the challenge of the construction of a Global Ethics in the context of fragmented and pluralist societies, in which the idea of an Ethical Space seems to be an unachievable project, but also an indispensable device for cooperation between individuals, communities and states.The idea of a Global Ethics is to be constructed from within different traditions and environments with a mutual understanding and exchange of opinions. In this volume, we combine the ideas of Harmony (typical of the traditional Chinese legal philosophy) and of the Rule of Law (as it is understood in Western societies) to new ideals. By acknowledging the potential that these ideals have on a global scale, the papers of the first section, Ethical Dimensions of the Rule of Law address some of the key ethical problems in today's world. In a second section, some of the leading legal philosophers in China propose a way to incorporate the values of Harmony and of the Rule of Law into the Chinese Law and Society.

This book provides theoretical tools for evaluating the soundness of arguments in the context of legal argumentation. It deals with a number of general argument types and their particular use in legal argumentation. It provides detailed analyses of argument from authority, argument ad hominem, argument from ignorance, slippery slope argument and other general argument types. Each of these argument types can be used to construct arguments that are sound as well as arguments that are unsound. To evaluate an argument correctly one must be able to distinguish the sound instances of a certain argument type from its unsound instances. This book promotes the development of theoretical tools for this task.

This volume critically discusses the relationship between democracy and constitutionalism. It does so with a view to respond to objections raised by legal and political philosophers who are sceptical of judicial review based on the assumption that judicial review is an undemocratic institution. The book builds on earlier literature on the moral justification of the authority of constitutional courts, and on the current attempts to develop a system on "weak judicial review". Although different in their approach, the chapters all focus on devising institutions, procedures and, in a more abstract way, normative conceptions to democratize constitutional law. These democratizing strategies may vary from a radical objection to the institution of judicial review, to a more modest proposal to justify the authority of constitutional courts in their "deliberative performance" or to create constitutional juries that may be more aware of a community's constitutional morality than constitutional courts are. The book connects abstract theoretical discussions about the moral justification of constitutionalism with concrete problems, such as the relation between constitutional adjudication and deliberative democracy, the legitimacy of judicial review in international institutions, the need to create new institutions to democratize constitutionalism, the connections between philosophical conceptions and constitutional practices, the judicial review of constitutional amendments, and the criticism on strong judicial review.

¿Puede la tesis del reemplazo de Raz sobrevivir en el contexto de una teoría dworkiniana del derecho y de la adjudicación? Judging Positivism, de Margaret Martin, fornece una de las mejores reconstrucciones y una de las más interesantes críticas ya planteadas contra la influyente filosofía del derecho de Joseph Raz. En uno de los pasos centrales de su argumento, Martin desafía una sumisión central de Raz, que es el intento de combinar la tesis del reemplazo con la tesis de la justificación normal. Mientras la primera exige que ciudadanos y oficiales excluyan de la deliberación cualesquiera razones de primer orden para la acción, la ultima invita consideraciones sobre legitimidad que no se puede examinar con independencia de las razones de primer orden que la tesis del remplazo pretende excluir. En este comentario crítico, yo acepto la crítica de Martin según la cual esas dos tesis no pueden ser aceptadas como argumentos conceptuales. Sin embargo, sugiero que aún existe un espacio para armonizarlas si se las acepta por razones normativas. Si hay un buen argumento para tratar razones jurídicas como un nivel intermedio de razones para la acción, entonces puede haber buenos argumentos circunstanciales para tratar razones institucionales como remplazantes en el sentido que Raz defiende en su teoría del derecho.

Jair Bolsonaro, the current President of Brazil, has made himself into one of the most influent advocates of COVID-19 denial. His health policy and his political doctrine are partly based on an implicit moral claim, which is neglected by contemporary political theory. Bolsonarism’s rhetoric raises a moral claim to freedom without responsibility, which relieves its followers from the burdens that emerge from liberal accounts of liberty or from basic goods accepted in a political community. In opposition to liberal or communitarian accounts, Bolsonarism endorses a Hobbesian concept of freedom that describes it as the absence of ‘impediments to motion’. Nonetheless, it differs from Hobbes because it treats this liberty as endowed with moral value and non-negotiable through a social contract.

The paper examines the challenge that Ronald Dworkin poses to positivism when he asserts that legal discourse often comprises theoretical disagreements about the foundations of law, as well as Scott Shapiro’s answer that these disagreements, although legitimate, can be reconstructed as meta-interpretive disagreements about the proper interpretation of the legal system. Though Shapiro’s answer is partly correct, if we distinguish between ‘conceptual’ and ‘meta-interpretive’ theoretical disagreements it becomes clear that this answer fails to save positivism from Dworkin’s objection because it is unaware of the existence of theoretical disagreements of the ‘conceptual’ kind. Positivism is wrong, therefore, because it misses this important connection between legal philosophy and legal practice.