-
46Review of Mathew H. Kramer, Objectivity and the Rule of Law (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (3). 2008.
-
Action in Law’s Empire: Judging in the Deliberative ModeCanadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 29 (2): 431-456. 2016.Dworkin advances the view that judges decide legal cases according to constructive interpretation. The aim of constructive interpretation is to justify the coercion of the State. A trivial implication of this view is that officials and citizens will comply with the law because of the justification that has been advanced by judges in their exercise of constructive interpretation. Consequently, neither officials nor citizens comply with the law because they have been coerced or because they have b…Read more
-
58Handbook of Legal Reasoning and Argumentation (edited book)Springer Verlag. 2011.This handbook offers a deep analysis of the main forms of legal reasoning and argumentation from both a logical-philosophical and legal perspective. These forms are covered in an exhaustive and critical fashion, and the handbook accordingly divides in three parts: the first one introduces and discusses the basic concepts of practical reasoning. The second one discusses the main general forms of reasoning and argumentation relevant for legal discourse. The third one looks at their application in …Read more
-
Bernard Williams on Law and Jurisprudence: From Agency and Responsibility to Methodology (edited book)Hart. forthcoming.
-
9Melissa Lane’s Of Rule and Office: Plato’s Idea of the Political as contribution to legal philosophyHistory of European Ideas. forthcoming.I would like to locate the thought-provoking ideas advanced by Lane’s Of Rule and Office: Plato’s Idea of the Political within the context of contemporary intellectual legal philosophy and constitu...
-
What makes a transnational rule of law? understanding the logos and values of human action in transnational lawIn Kenneth Einar Himma, Miodrag A. Jovanović & Bojan Spaić (eds.), Unpacking Normativity - Conceptual, Normative and Descriptive Issues, Hart Publishing. 2018.
-
Practical Normativity. Essays on Reasons and Intentions in Law and Practical Reason (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2015.
-
5Reasons and Intentions in Law and Practical Agency (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2015.This collection of new essays explores in depth how and why we act when we follow practical standards, particularly in connection with the authority of legal texts and lawmakers. The essays focus on the interplay of intentions and practical reasons, engaging incisive arguments to demonstrate both the close connection between them, and the inadequacy of accounts that downplay this important link. Their wide-ranging discussion includes topics such as legal interpretation, the paradox of intention,…Read more
-
100The Methodological Problem in Legal Theory: Normative and Descriptive Jurisprudence RevisitedRatio Juris 19 (1): 26-54. 2006.Legal philosophers share the same phenomenology of legal practice. Yet, they differ in its explanation. For normativists, descriptivists got it wrong and vice versa. This controversy between normativists and descriptivists will be called “the methodological problem” in legal theory. Normativists such as Dworkin and Perry argue that descriptivists need evaluation. By contrast, descriptivists such as Coleman argue that normativists need the methods of descriptivism such as conceptual analysis and …Read more
-
338Towards a Concept of Human Rights: Inside and Outside GenealogyArchiv für Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie 98 (3): 346-359. 2012.Raymond Geuss asserts that there are fragmented views on what human rights are and that there is no unifying principle underlying such notion. I think that this view has its merits. It conveys the particularity of our perspectives, attitudes, desires and selfunderstandings. It rejects abstractness and is committed to a thick, perspectivist, historical understanding of personhood. To understand who we are, is to understand how we arrive at being who we are. By contrast, the notion of human rights…Read more
-
50Social and Justified Legal Normativity: Unlocking the Mystery of the RelationshipRatio Juris 25 (3): 409-433. 2012.Can Hart's non-cognitivism be reconciled with his rejection of the predictive and sanction-based explanations of law? This paper analyses Hart's notion of the internal point of view and focuses on the notion of acceptance of a rule along the lines of a non-cognitivist understanding of intentional actions. It is argued that a non-cognitivist analysis of acceptance of rules is incomplete and parasitic on a more basic or primary model of acceptance that does not involve mental states. This basic or…Read more
-
119Review: Brian Leiter: Naturalising Jurisprudence: Essays on American Legal Realism and Naturalism in Legal Philosophy (review)Mind 117 (468): 1091-1094. 2008.
-
130Objectivity in lawPhilosophy Compass 5 (3): 240-249. 2010.In the first part of this paper, I discuss the different kinds of objectivity; general and legal objectivity more specifically. In the second part, I endeavour to explain the two main views that have been advanced to answer four core questions on legal objectivity. The first is whether moral and legal values are objective. Second, what is the nature of the relationship between legal and moral values? The third is whether, due to the specific nature of law, we should consider a domainspecific con…Read more
-
64If You Cannot Help Being Committed to It, then It Exists: A Defence of Robust Normative RealismOxford Journal of Legal Studies 32 (4): 823-841. 2012.This review article examines David Enoch’s recent book Taking Morality Seriously and focuses on ‘the deliberative indispensability of irreducibly normative truths’ which is a central argument of the book. I will show that this important and original argument as it stands fails. I will also argue that if Enoch had embraced all the consequences of his argument, then he would have opened up a more promising line of argument via which to defend the robust realism of normative truths. I will, therefo…Read more
-
87Is Finnis wrong?Legal Theory 13 (3-4): 257-283. 2007.Judges and lawyers believe that international law, customary law, and legal systems such as the Third Reich or apartheid law in South Africa are law. But how do we explain the fact that there is one concept of law when there are different conceptions of law with a variety of different features? Finnis, inspired by the Aristotelian notion of central case, adumbrates the idea that the concept of law might be unified by a primary concept which is the concept of “law as practical reason”; that is, l…Read more
-
90From Shared Agency to the Normativity of Law: Shapiro’s and Coleman’s Defence of Hart’s Practice Theory of Rules ReconsideredLaw and Philosophy 28 (1). 2009.Colemanand Shapiro have recently advanced a second at- tempt to reconcile Hart’s practice theory of rules and the idea of the normativity of law; i.e., the idea that legal rules qua social rules give reasons for actions and, in some circumstances create and impose duties and obligations. Their argumentative strategy is to resort to elements in Bratman’s work on shared agency and planning, though they introduce important and substantive modifications to Bratman’s own explanation. Bratman d…Read more
-
70Does Kelsen’s Notion of Legal Normativity Rest on a Mistake?Law and Philosophy 31 (6): 725-752. 2012.Kelsen advanced a sophisticated naturalist conception of intention and adumbrated a methodological strategy that would enable the transformation of the sophisticated naturalist conception of ‘intention’ into a cognizable object of legal science while simultaneously providing an explanation of the legal ‘ought’. The methodological strategy is the ‘inversion thesis’ which establishes that legal norms enable us to objectively identify and determine the ‘will’ or the intention of legal authority. Co…Read more
-
3Book Review: Margaret Martin’s Judging Positivism , ISBN 9781849460996 (review)Law and Philosophy 35 (4): 425-433. 2016.
-
46A Symposium on the Nature of Legal and Political Authority: Accountability or PreemptionJurisprudence 2 (1): 99-102. 2011.An introduction by Veronica Rodriques-Blanco to A Symposium on the Nature of Legal and Political Authority
-
148A defence of Hart's semantics as nonambitious conceptual analysisLegal Theory 9 (2): 99-124. 2003.Two methodological claims in Hart's TheConceptofLaw have produced perplexity: that it is a book on 1 and that it may also be regarded as an essay in 2 Are these two ideas reconcilable? We know that mere analysis of our legal concepts cannot tell us much about their properties, that is, about the empirical aspect of law. We have learned this from philosophical criticisms of conceptual analysis; yet Hart informs us that analytic jurisprudence can be reconciled with descriptive sociology. The answe…Read more
-
10Law and authority under the guise of the goodHart Publishing. 2014.The received view on the nature of legal authority contains the idea that a sound account of legitimate authority will explain how a legal authority has a right to command and the addressee a duty to obey. The received view fails to explain, however, how legal authority truly operates upon human beings as rational creatures with specific psychological makeups. This book takes a bottom-up approach, beginning at the microscopic level of agency and practical reason and leading to the justificatory …Read more
-
Practical reason in the context of lawIn George Duke & Robert P. George (eds.), The Cambridge companion to natural law jurisprudence, Cambridge University Press. 2017.
-
9The Normativity of Law: Ancient and Contemporary PerspectivesAncient Philosophy Today 4 (Supplement): 1-1. 2022.
-
17Dignity in the legal and political philosophy of Ronald Dworkin (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2018.Well-known for his contribution to the juristic world, Professor Ronald Dworkin was an outstanding legal philosopher of his generation. This volume celebrates the thoughts of Ronald Dworkin on dignity. The contributors have critically engaged with different perspectives of Dworkin's thoughts on dignity. The aim is to shed light on juridical and moral contemporary conundrums such as the role of dignity in constitutional contexts in India, and the understanding of dignity as either a foundation of…Read more
-
Dworkin's dignity under the lens of the Magician of KönisbergIn Salman Khurshid, Lokendra Malik & Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco (eds.), Dignity in the legal and political philosophy of Ronald Dworkin, Oxford University Press. 2018.
-
IntroductionIn Salman Khurshid, Lokendra Malik & Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco (eds.), Dignity in the legal and political philosophy of Ronald Dworkin, Oxford University Press. 2018.
-
1Tracing Finnis's criticism of hart's internal point of view : instability and the 'point' of human action in lawIn Torben Spaak (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Legal Positivism, Cambridge University Press. 2021.
-
22The Law of Negligence, Blameworthy Action and the Relationality Thesis: A Dilemma for Goldberg and Zipursky’s Civil Recourse Theory of Tort LawLaw and Philosophy 41 (1): 63-82. 2021.In this paper, I discuss Goldberg and Zipursky’s Recognizing Wrongs and argue that there is a tension between their philosophy of action as applied to the law of negligence and the idea that the directive-based relationality thesis is central and, therefore, the action and conduct of the defendant should not be part of the core explanation of the tort of negligence.