Naturalism in Jurisprudence

Legal philosophers distinguish between a static and a dynamic interpretation of law. The former assumes that the meaning of the words used in a legal text is set at the moment of its enactment and does not change with time. The latter allows the interpreters to update the meaning and apply a contemporary understanding to the text. The dispute between these competing theories has significant ramifications for social and political life. To take an example, depending on the approach, the term (...) “cruel punishment” used in the US Constitution will be given an 18th century meaning or a contemporary one. -/- The philosophy of language seems to provide greater support to the static approach to legal interpretation. Within this approach the lawmaker is perceived as a speaker and legal texts are interpreted as utterances. As a consequence, interpretation is a quest for the speaker/lawmaker’s intention or the public meaning that prevailed at the time of enactment. Neither the intention nor the public meaning are considered to have changed in time. -/- In this paper I argue that the philosophy of language provides the dynamic approach with an equally robust support as the static one. This support comes from an externalist perspective in semantics, rooted in philosophical pragmatism and supported by Ruth Millikan’s concept of meaning as proper function. Grounding the dynamic approach in a well-founded linguistic philosophy rises to the challenge presented by the originalists’ declaration that “it takes a theory to beat a theory”. (shrink)

Criminal juries make decisions of great importance. A key criticism of juries is that they are unreliable in a multitude of ways, from exhibiting racial or gendered biases, to misunderstanding their role, to engaging in impropriety such as internet research. Recently, some have even claimed that the use of juries creates injustice on a large-scale, as a cause of low conviction rates for sexual criminality. Unfortunately, empirical research into jury deliberation is undermined by the fact that researchers are unable to (...) study live juries. The indirect sources of evidence used by researchers suffer from various problems, the most important of which is dubious levels of ecological validity. Real jury research—studying live jury deliberation—is controversial. However, as I argue, the objections to it are unconvincing. There is in fact a moral imperative to facilitate real jury research. (shrink)

Attempts to establish a quantitative framework for policy-making in the criminal justice system in recent decades have coalesced around the problem of the standard of proof and Kaplan’s influential 1968 paper. The central thread of work continues to use an equation he put forward while abandoning some of his foundational assumptions, an approach I call ‘Kaplanism’. Despite a growing awareness of deficiencies, elements of this school of thought, such as the parsing of concerns into the two categories of ‘error reduction’ (...) and ‘error distribution’, have entered the general jurisprudential discourse. Here I launch a methodological attack and claim to kill this approach. This allows me to refute Laudan and other ‘consequentialist’ approaches to the standard identified by Walen, Walen’s own approach and an important part of Stein’s underpinnings. The same tools allow me to also refute Laudan’s earlier m/n meta-epistemology, Lippke’s ‘adage’, Stewart’s formalisation of Dworkin, Dahlman’s Bayesian work and (at least in criminal law) Kaplow’s law and economics approach. I also refute Hamer’s ‘conventional rationale’ for the current standard, Lillquist’s approach to the same and what Epps reports as ‘the Blackstone principle’. The law is left with no epistemic basis for policies, which, I argue, leaves it struggling for public trust in the modern era. (shrink)

Attempts to establish a quantitative framework for thinking about the criminal justice system have been made at least since Kaplan’s influential 1968 article. Here I avoid the probabilistic approaches that Kaplan inspired and instead characterise the law’s underlying problem as one of measurement. I then exploit statistical techniques developed in recent years in other disciplines to evaluate systems that also face the challenge of ‘binary classification’ to solve it. This approach entails the mathematisation of the criminal justice system’s core epistemic (...) concern of distinguishing the guilty from the innocent with Van Rijsbergen’s F-measure and empirical measurements of effectiveness. Once one adopts the perspective of a sovereign, it yields a meta-meta-epistemology that allows traditional arguments like those that refer to Blackstone’s ratio to be made rigorous. This provides a clearer relationship between values and policies and, in a narrowly epistemic sense, a complete answer to questions of evidence and procedure. (shrink)

Speech and thought about what the law is commonly function in practical ways, to guide or assess behavior. These functions have often been seen as problematic for legal positivism in the tradition of H.L.A. Hart. One recent response is to advance an expressivist analysis of legal statements (Toh), which faces its own, familiar problems. This paper advances a rival, positivist-friendly account of legal statements which we call “quasi-expressivist”, explicitly modeled after Finlay’s metaethical theory of moral statements. This consists in a (...) descriptivist, “rule-relational” semantics combined with a pragmatic account of the expressive and practical functions of legal discourse. We argue that this approach is at least as well-equipped as expressivism to explain the motivational and prescriptive features of “internal” legal statements, as well as a fundamental kind of legal disagreement, while being better positioned to account for various “external” uses of the same language. We develop this theory in a Hartian framework, and in the final part of the paper argue (particularly against Toh’s expressivist interpretation) that Hart’s own views in The Concept of Law are best reconstructed along such quasi-expressivist lines. (shrink)

Some Anglophone legal theorists look to analytic philosophy for core presuppositions. For example, the epistemological theories of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Willard Quine shape the theories of Dennis Patterson and Brian Leiter, respectively. These epistemologies are anti-foundational since they reject the kind of certain grounding that is exemplified in Cartesian philosophy. And, they are coherentist in that they seek to legitimate truth-claims by reference to entire linguistic systems. While these theories are insightful, the current context of information and communication technologies (ICT) (...) has created new informational concepts and issues. As a result, the analytic epistemologies are increasingly challenged by alternative perspectives. One such alternative is Structural Realism (SR), which is influential among the natural sciences, and especially physics. “Informational Structural Realism,” (ISR) is a variant of SR that was introduced by Luciano Floridi. Unlike the coherentist theories, ISR promotes examination of the connections among types of information and informational structures. It is an important shift for legal theory today, since the challenges that the ICT presents have to do with pattern recognition across vast domains of diverse data. An informational jurisprudence is now required to understand the issues emerging from the ICT. (shrink)

Methodological and metaphilosophical disputes in the contemporary philosophy of law are very vivid. Basic issues remain controversial. The purpose of the book is to confront approaches of Anglo-Saxon and continental philosophy of law to the following topics: the purpose of legal philosophy, the role of disagreement in legal philosophy, methodology of legal philosophy (conceptual analysis) and normativity of law. We see those areas of legal metaphilosophy as drawing recently more and more attention in the literature. The authors of particular chapters (...) are internationally recognised scholars rooted in various traditions: Anglo-Saxon (Gerald Postema, Dennis Patterson, Kenneth Ehrenberg, Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco); Southern-European (Riccardo Guastini, Manuel Atienza); Nordic (Torben Spaak); German (Ralf Poscher); and Central-European (Jan Wolenski, Tomasz Gizbert-Studnicki, Adam Dyrda). They represent different approaches and different backgrounds. The purpose of the volume is to contribute to the cross-cultural discussions of fundamental issues of philosophy of law. (shrink)

Law and Authority Under the Guise of the Good, by Rodriguez-BlancoVeronica. Oxford : Hart Publishing, 2014. Pp. 215.

W artykule analizowane są normatywne kryteria dopuszczalności dowodów naukowych w polskim systemie prawnym, ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem dowodów neuronaukowych. W pierwszej kolejności zostaną przedstawione metody neuroobrazowania mózgu ze wskazaniem rodzaju spraw, w których zostały one wykorzystane. W drugiej kolejności omówione zostaną kryteria dopuszczalności dowodów naukowych w polskim i amerykańskim systemie prawnym. Następnie zidentyfikowanych zostanie szereg zagrożeń, których źródłem może być niezrozumienie natury i niewłaściwe posługiwanie się dowodami neuronaukowymi. Ostatnia część pracy zawiera szereg sugestii o charakterze normatywnym i pozanormatywnym, mających na celu (...) zmianę prawa dowodowego w celu wypracowania mechanizmów pozwalających na rzetelną ocenę dowodów neuronaukowych. -/- The paper discusses the problem of admissibility of scientific, and especially neuroscientific, evidence in Polish legal system. In the first part of the paper, methods of neuroimaging and its uses in legal proceedings are discussed. Then, we focus on the criteria of admissibility of scientific evidence in Polish and American legal systems. In the next part, we try to identify threats of misuse of neuroimaging evidence in the courtrooms. The last part contains a set of suggestions how to change Polish legal system in order to prepare it for neuroscientific evidence. (shrink)

Sometimes the fact that something is the law can be justified by the law. For example, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act is the law because it was enacted by Congress pursuant to the Commerce Clause. But eventually legal justification of law ends. The ultimate criteria of validity in a legal system cannot themselves be justified by law. According to H.L.A. Hart, justification of these ultimate criteria is still available, by reference to social facts concerning official acceptance - facts about what Hart calls (...) the "rule of recognition" for the system. -/- Drawing upon criticisms of sociological accounts of the law that can be found in the writings of Hans Kelsen, I argue in this essay that Hart's approach cannot account for statements about the law that assert the independence of legal validity from rule of recognition facts. I offer as an alternative a legal quietist approach, which can account for such statements. For the quietist, legal justification exhausts the possible justification for law. If our judgments about the law are fundamental, in the sense that they cannot be justified by other judgments about the law, then they have no justification (which is not to say that they should be abandoned). I argue that legal quietism is exemplified - if somewhat imperfectly - in Kelsen's writings, and I end the essay by exploring some difficulties that the quietist approach must face. (shrink)

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 (...) answer to this puzzle lies in the notion of nonambitious conceptual analysis. The theorist analyzes concepts but accepts the limitations of conceptual analysis and therefore uses empirical knowledge and substantive arguments to explain, refine, or perhaps refute initial insights provided by intuitions. This is the conclusion that this paper arrives at as an argumentative strategy to defend Hart's legal theory from the criticisms of Stavropoulos and Dworkin. The latter argues that Hart's legal theory cannot explain theoretical disagreements in law because he relies on a shared criterial semantics. Stavropoulos aims to show that Hart's semantics is committed to ambitious conceptual analysis and relies on the usage of our words as a standard of correctness. Both attacks aim to show that the semantic sting stings Hart's legal theory. This essay refines both challenges and concludes that not even in the light of the most charitable interpretation of these criticisms is Hart's legal theory stung by the semantic sting. This study defends the view that Hart's methodological claims were modest and that he was aware of the limits of conceptual analysis as a philosophical method. He was, this study claims, far ahead of his time. (shrink)