Triantafyllos Gkouvas

This book advances a philosophical account of a substantive, albeit less elaborated, variant of jurisprudential disagreement about which kinds of non-legal facts determine the content and the normative force of the law. At the most abstract level legal philosophers disagree about the proper methodology of jurisprudence. Opinions are divided as to whether the proper method of philosophical inquiry about law consists in refining our description of what a legal practice is or, conversely, in justifying the practice of law from a normative vantage point. Further downstream, the bulk of jurisprudential controversy centres on the concept or the nature of law. Debates in this domain are usually cast in modal or essentialist terms such that the main question becomes whether legal validity can be attributed to norms promulgated by morally wicked governments or whether by its essence law serves a moral aim. Without suppressing the relevance of formal disputes about the methodology of jurisprudence or the nature of law, the content of the book focuses on what makes the grounds of facts about legal content and legal normativity philosophically contestable. For instance, two judges may converge in their interpretation of a particular statute or precedent but disagree about ‘the content of the law’ because they diverge in their beliefs about whether statutes and precedents are the sole determinants of legal content. Perhaps less commonly, disagreement may also erupt about the ‘force of the law’, namely, about what makes legal authority or a particular institutional arrangement practically compelling. Philosophers of both a positivist and anti-positivist persuasion commonly refer to instances of this type of dispute about the grounding of a class of facts as ‘theoretical disagreements’. Theoretical disagreement about the content and the force of the law is used as a term of art to be contrasted with empirical and doctrinal conceptions of legal disagreement commonly encountered in the context of legal advocacy, administrative and judicial practice about whether a legal rule applies to a particular circumstance. Whereas the latter type of disagreement is resolvable by consulting the appropriate legal materials (statutes, court rulings, executive decrees etc), the former type of disagreement invites us to inquire into what grounds the fact that a legal rule or principle is applicable in a given context or, respectively, what makes it the case that this rule or principle has a binding effect on its addressees.

Appeals to metaphysics have lately come to ascendancy in analytic legal philosophy. Over the last 20 years or so, a new discourse framework has emerged in analytic legal metaphysics that focusses on the explanatory question of how law is made. By any measure the most influential refinement of this question is to be found in Mark Greenberg's seminal 2004 article How Facts Make Law. This essay tries to exert some pressure on this familiar question by posing the categorial question of what type of entities different theories of law take up as ontologically basic for their inquiry. The essay singles out four exemplary avenues for answering the categorial question. Introducing a categorial instead of explanatory lens is an overdue step in the process of updating the metaphysical toolbox of contemporary analytic theories of law. The categorial question of what kind of entity law is ismeant to complement the explanatory question of how law is made in a way that makes disagreements about the metaphysical-explanatory demands of theories of law more tractable or amenable to principled adjudication.

Legality is a monograph scoring distinct contributions across the board of jurisprudential discourse. Among the most prominent arguments marshalled in this book is an impressively robust defence of reductionism about legal norms. The concept of a plan is invoked in the service of delivering a formidable task, that of disembarrassing the legal philosopher of the quest for what makes legal norms metaphysically distinct. The answer is simple, yet relies on an intricate chain of arguments: talk of legal norms is just a linguistic convention for referring to a metaphysically more versatile kind of object, namely, plans. This essay aims to record and evaluate the metaphysical implications of this reductionist turn. More precisely, it shall locate two defensible, yet sharply divergent, variants of plan positivism which Shapiro’s dense analysis appears to conflate at the expense of his theory’s explanatory ambitions. The concern this essay intends to raise regards an...

Even though the acknowledgment of the possibility of disagreement about the grounds of legal facts tends to acquire the shell of a mainstream view, the available regimentations of grounding disagreements in law limit their scope to two mutually exclusive jurisprudential variants. Ronald Dworkin’s original conception of theoretical disagreement as being about the responsibilities of government vis-à-vis its citizens is distinctly evaluative thereby excluding legal positivists from meaningful participation. An alternative descriptive variant has been recently defended by Scott Shapiro which replicates, nonetheless, the same exclusive function. The paper addresses this problem by locating its roots in the positivist elaboration of the idea that legal statements are inherently perspectival. After critically rejecting the perspectival model it proposes an alternative regimentation of legal statements as carrying metaphysical information about the constitution of legal content and explains how this non-perspectival model makes grounding disagreements in law maximally inclusive and meaningful.

El propósito de este trabajo es defender la opinión que Kant ha propuesto sobre la teoría internalista de la motivación moral. En particular, argumentaré que la adopción de Kant de internalismo se evidencia en su afirmación de que la relación de la razón pura de la voluntad se basa en una práctica una proposición sintética a priori. Lo que se pretende demostrar es que Kant trata la sinteticidad práctica como un concepto fundamental para su relato de lo que significa ser motivados por los principios de la razón pura. En mi conceptualización de la teoría motivacional de Kant, la relación entre las máximas universalizables y el interés moral de actuar sobre ellos es necesaria pero no tautológica, ya que violaciones de los derechos son lógicamente posibles a pesar de que tengamos una razón moral de actuar. Lo que impide que este último argumento colapse en una cuenta casi externalista de la motivación moral es que el impacto de motivación de las máximas como la ley, es en última instancia, la premisa de una concepción normativa de nosotros mismos como agentes libres.