Even to disagree, we need to understand each other. If I reject what you say without understanding you, we will only have the illusion of a disagreement. You will be asserting one thing and I will be denying another. Even to disagree, we need some agreement.

Vagueness in law can lead to indeterminacies in legal rights and obligations. This book responds to the challenges that those indeterminacies pose to theories of law and adjudication.

The author argues that philosophers' attempts to use philosophy of language to solve problems of jurisprudence have often failed- the most dramatic failure being that of Jeremy Bentham. H.L.A.Hart made some related mistakes in his creative use of philosophy of language, yet his focus on language still yields some very significant insights for jurisprudence: the context principle (that the correct application of linguistic expressions typically depends on context in ways that are important for jurisprudence), the diversity principle (that grounds of (...) correct application of legal language may be diverse), and the importance of vagueness. (shrink)

In fact, law is necessarily very vague. So if vagueness is a problem for legal theory, it is a serious problem. The problem has to do with the ideal of the rule of law and with the very idea of law: if vague standards provide no guidance in some cases, how can the life of a community be ruled by law? The problem has long concerned philosophers of law; the papers at this symposium address it afresh by asking what legal (...) theory may have to learn from (or contribute to) work on vagueness in philosophy of language and philosophy of logic. Here I will not try to state the implications of vagueness for philosophy of law; I will try to set the stage by showing that vagueness is both an important and an unavoidable feature of law. (shrink)

In his book, _Interpretation without Truth_, Pierluigi Chiassoni articulates the sceptical view that the province of legal interpretation is ‘a province without truth’. A misinterpretation is a false interpretation, and I argue that the widespread phenomenon of legal misinterpretation gives us reason to resist the sceptical conclusion. The potential for a legal interpretation to be a false interpretation –a misinterpretation– implies that a legal interpretation can be true. And legal misinterpretations can be understood as interpretations (and not as the product (...) of some activity other than interpretation) because of the grain of truth in the arguments for them. (shrink)

What can a philosophical analysis of the concept of interpretation contribute to legal theory? In his recent book,Interpretation and Legal Theory, Andrei Marmor proposes a complex and ambitious analysis as groundwork for his positivist assault on “interpretive” theories of law and of language. I argue (i) that the crucial element in Marmor's analysis of interpretation is his treatment of Ludwig Wittgenstein's remarks on following rules, and (ii) that a less ambitious analysis of interpretation than Marmor's can take better advantage of (...) those insights about rules. I explore some implications of such an analysis for the role of interpretation in legal reasoning. (shrink)

The author argues that vagueness in law is typically extravagant, in the sense that it is possible for two competent users of the language, who understand the facts of each case, to take such different views that there is not even any overlap between the cases that each disputant would identify as borderline. Extravagant vagueness is a necessary feature of legal systems. Some philosophers of law and philosophers of language claim that bivalence is a property of statements in the domains (...) that concern them (the domain of law in the former case, the whole domain of meaningful discourse in the latter). The author argues that the bivalence claim should be rejected. In philosophy of law, the motivation underlying the bivalence claim is an urge to assert the principle that the law must be capable of standing against arbitrary use of political power. The challenge – once the bivalence claim is rejected – is to articulate the law's opposition to arbitrariness in a way that is compatible with the possibility of indeterminacy in the application of vague laws. (shrink)

No community fully achieves the ideal of the rule of law. Puzzles about the content of the ideal seem to make it necessarily unattainable (and, therefore, an incoherent ideal). Legal systems necessarily contain vague laws. They typically allow for change in the law, they typically provide for unreviewable official decisions, and they never regulate every aspect of the life of a community. It may seem that the ideal can never be achieved because of these features of legal practice. But I (...) ask what counts as a ‘deficit’ in the rule of law, and I argue that none of these features of legal practice necessarily amounts to a deficit. I conclude that communities fail to achieve the rule of law only because of official infidelity to law, and the failure of lawmakers to pursue the ideal (or their decision not to pursue it). The rule of law is not necessarily unattainable. (shrink)

People can be autonomous, if they are subject to authority. In particular, they can be autonomous if they are subject to the authority of law. I defend the first claim through a study of Joseph Raz's compelling account of authority; I claim that his work leads to the conclusion that autonomous judgment is needed to determine the jurisdiction of an authority, and to interpret its directives. I defend the second claim by arguing that law does not claim unlimited jurisdiction, and (...) need not claim unlimited scope for its directives. But the requirements of the rule of law create a standing risk that the law will not adequately recognize the autonomy of its subjects, because of its artificial techniques for controlling its own jurisdiction and for controlling the scope of its own directives. (shrink)

Where the law protects human rights, the executive branch of government does well if it complies with the law, and goes wrong if it does not comply. And then you may think that the paradigmatic fun...

Widespread, deep controversy as to the content of the law of a community is compatible with the view that the law is a system of rules. I defend that view through a critique of Ronald Dworkin's discussion of Riggs v. Palmer 22 N.E. 188. Dworkin raised an important challenge for jurisprudence: to account for the fact that legal rights and duties are frequently controversial. I offer an explanation of the possibility of deep disagreement about the application of social rules, which (...) reconciles controversy as to the content of the law, with the model of a legal system as a system of rules. And I discuss the implications for understanding the role of judicial discretion in law. (shrink)

Vagueness in law leads to indeterminacies in legal rights and obligations in many cases. The book defends that claim and explains its implications for legal theory. Vague language is the book's focus, but vagueness is not merely a linguistic feature of law. Law is necessarily vague. That fact seems to threaten the coherence of the ideal of the rule of law. The book defends a new, coherent articulation of that ideal.

A state is sovereign if it has complete power within a political community, and complete independence. It may seem that the idea of sovereignty is objectionable because of two moral principles, or incoherent because of a paradox. The paradox is that a sovereign state must be capable of binding itself and must also be incapable of binding itself. The moral principles are that no state can justly exercise complete power internally, or complete independence (since complete independence would imply freedom from (...) norms of ius cogens, and from interference with mass atrocities by the state). Through an analogy with human autonomy, I argue that the paradox is only apparent, and that the moral principles are compatible with state sovereignty. So the idea of sovereignty is a coherent idea, and sovereignty, rightly understood, is a valuable feature of states in international law. Sovereignty is to be understood as internal power and external freedom that are complete for the purposes of a good state. (shrink)

It can be compatible with justice and the rule of law for a court to impose new legal liabilities retrospectively on a defendant. But judges do not need to distinguish between imposing a new liability, and giving effect to a liability that the defendant had at the time of the events in dispute. The distinction is to be drawn by asking which of the court's reasons for decision the institutions of the legal system had already committed the courts to act (...) upon, before the time of decision. I explain these conclusions through an assessment of the last episode in the debate between H.L.A.Hart and Ronald Dworkin. (shrink)

The use of vague language in law has important implications for legal theory. Legal philosophers have occasionally grappled with those implications, but they have not come to grips with the characteristic phenomenon of vagueness: the sorites paradox. I discuss the paradox, and claim that it poses problems for some legal theorists (David Lyons, Hans Kelsen, and, especially, Ronald Dworkin). I propose that a good account of vagueness will have three consequences for legal theory: (i) Theories that deny that vagueness in (...) formulations of the law leads to discretion in adjudication (including Dworkin's) cannot accommodate “higher-order” vagueness, (ii) A legal theory should accept that the law is partly indeterminate when it can be stated in vague language, (iii) However, the traditional formulation of the indeterminacy claim, that a vague statement is “neither true nor false” in a borderline case, is misconceived and should be abandoned. (shrink)

In English law, there are various ways in which contracts can be invalid or unenforceable because they are immoral — and yet English lawyers know that many contracts are conclusively binding. The first two sources of legal gaps that Joseph Raz identifies do not seem surprising. Vagueness in the sources of law leads to gaps in borderline cases, and there is a gap if the law includes inconsistent rules, with no way of deciding which is effective. In those situations it (...) seems right to say that the law does not tell people where they stand, so that people may need a court to make a decision. But if Raz is right about the third source of gaps, then judges have discretion whenever the law appeals to moral considerations. This chapter discusses the sources thesis, moral considerations, judicial discretion, the social morality of judges, and contract law. (shrink)

Moral premises are required in sound reasoning to the conclusion that a community does or does not (more or less) attain the rule of law. Those moral premises include, for example, the principle that judges should act with comity toward executive agencies. A failure in that moral requirement of comity is a failure to attain the rule of law. Because the ideal of the rule of law necessarily has a moral content, there is a necessary connection between law and morality– (...) albeit a modest connection that is compatible with deep moral defects in the law. (shrink)

In fundamental rights adjudication, should judges defer to the judgment of other decision makers? How can they defer, without betraying the respect that judges ought to accord those rights? How can they refuse to defer, without betraying the respect that judges ought to accord to other decision makers? I argue that only principles of comity justify deference, and their reach is limited. Comity never forbids the judges to take and to act upon a different view of fundamental rights from that (...) of another decision maker. I elaborate this view by reference to the decision of the House of Lords in Adan and Aitseguer [2001] 1 All ER 593. (shrink)

I approach the identification of the principles of legal interpretation through a discussion of an important but largely forgotten strand in our legal heritage: the idea (and at some points in English law, the rule) that the interpretation of legislation is to be done by the law maker. The idea that authentic interpretation is interpretation by the law maker united the Roman Emperors Constantine and Justinian with Bracton, Aquinas, King James I of England, Hobbes, and Bentham. Already in the early (...) 17th century, a new modern approach was emerging in England. The modern approach separates the interpretive power from the legislative power, and allocates the interpretive power to an independent court. I will argue that there are some cogent, general considerations in favour of the modern approach. But it is worth identifying the elements of good sense that made it seem that the interpretive power ought to be reserved for the law maker. And it is worth identifying the drawbacks in the modern approach; they are relevant to the complex question of how judges ought to interpret. (shrink)

Argues that some important problems in the theory of legal interpretation can be resolved with three techniques that John Finnis used in Natural Law and Natural Rights to address a methodological problem in jurisprudence: (1) The analogy principle: The application of a word such as “friendship” or “law” is not based on a set of features shared by each instance, but is based on similarities of a variety of kinds, seen by the people who use the words as justifying the (...) extension of the word. (2) The paradigm (or central case) principle: You cannot understand a word like “friendship” or “law” without seeing what counts as a good instance of friendship or law. (3) The context principle: What counts as a good instance depends on the context in which the word is to be used, and on the concerns and purposes which justify the use of the word. (shrink)

I address four questions that arise out of Nigel Simmonds's book, Law as a Moral Idea : Is politics a moral idea too? Is there any such thing as law making? Is there a right answer to every legal dispute? What justifies a judicial decision? To each question I propose an answer that shares much with Simmonds's views, but diverges. Simmonds is right to call law a 'moral idea', and that implies a connection between law and a moral ideal; in (...) my view, the connection is compatible with a necessary connection between law and the morally non-ideal. (shrink)

Philosophical Foundations of Precedent offers a broad, deep, and diverse range of philosophical investigations of the role of precedent in law, adjudication, and morality. The forty chapters present the work of a large and inclusive group of authors which comprises of well-established leaders in the discipline and new voices in legal philosophy. The magnitude of the resulting project is extraordinary, presenting a diverse array of innovative and creative philosophical investigations of the practice of adhering to past decisions, in law and (...) allied fields of practical reasoning. And by the same token, the contributions elucidate the reasons that courts and other decision-makers may have for departing from what has been done before. The phenomena under investigation include the law and practice of common law and civil jurisdictions around the world. In addition to its fundamental relevance to common law jurisdictions, this work will be of broad and significant interest to theoretically minded audiences in continental Europe, Latin America, and Asia because it involves an extensive study of practices of precedent in civil law systems as well as common law systems. (shrink)

This book comprises essays in law and legal theory celebrating the life and work of Jim Harris. The topics addressed reflect the wide range of Harris's work, and the depth of his influence on legal studies. They include the nature of law and legal reasoning, rival theories of property rights and their impact on practical questions before the courts; the nature of precedent in legal argument; and the evolving concept of human rights and its place in legal discourse.

We are delighted to present four articles that had their inception in a conference at Universidad Carlos III in Madrid in June 2016 on the question, ‘What aspects of justice should not be the law’s...

Suppose that you are wandering across the tundra, and you find an infant, all alone, in the snow. She is incapable of discourse, and yet she has the same human rights as anyone who is capable of discourse. Those rights do not depend on the practices or conventions of your people, or hers. Human discourse and human conventions play no role in human rights. I elaborate these claims through a critique of J.W. Harris’s groundbreaking analytical account of human rights. I (...) conclude that some welfare rights are paradigms of human rights, while rights of freedom of expression, privacy, and assembly, and rights to vote, and rights to independent tribunals are not human rights at all, except in a distantly metaphorical sense. Moreover, human rights can be explained with no reference at all to state authorities (though state authorities may have various special roles in observing and promoting some of them). (shrink)

John Finnis says that central cases of the concepts of social theory (such as the concept of law) fully instantiate certain characteristic values (which are instantiated in more-or-less watered-down ways in peripheral cases). Yet the instances of some such concepts (such as the concepts of slavery, of tyranny, and of murder) do not instantiate any value. I propose a solution to this puzzle: the central cases of such concepts focally instantiate certain ills. The central case of a concept essential to (...) social theory may excel in some specific good or in some specific ill, or in neither, or in both. What about law? The central cases of a legal system, or of a law, involve goods that Finnis ascribes to them; I argue that the central cases also involve certain ills. That is the irony of law. Law secures essential goods for a community, and also (and, in fact, by the same token) it incurs certain ills that are necessarily involved in its specific techniques for securing those goods. (shrink)

Are there human rights to a good such as social welfare, which depends on circumstances, and on the needs of a putative right-holder? Is justice constituted by rights? Does it take belief in God to understand the grounds of human rights? The essay responds to Nicholas Wolterstorff’s answers to these questions.

The meaning of a word is given by a customary rule for its use. I defend that claim and explain its implications by a comparison with customary rules in law. I address two problems about customary rules: first, how can the mere facts of social practice yield a norm? Secondly, how can we explain disagreement about the requirements of a custom, if those requirements are determined by the shared practice of the participants in a community? These problems can be resolved (...) in a way that illuminates customary rules, and helps to explain the relation between the meaning of a word and the customary rule for its use. The meaning of a word is the usefulness that it has because of the customary rule for its use. (shrink)

Preface to a Symposium on Vagueness and Law at Columbia University Law School on September 24 and 25, 1999. The purpose of the seminar was to provide an opportunity for philosophers of law, philosophers of language, and philosophers of logic to discuss problems about vagueness that are currently under debate in all three areas.

Brian Bix, Damiano Canale, Timothy Endicott, Alessio Sardo, Frederick Schauer, and Giovanni Tuzet did me the honour of reading and critically commenting Interpretation without Truth (in the followi...

It is natural to think that law ought not to be vague. After all, law is supposed to guide conduct, and vague law seems poorly suited to do that. Contrary to this common impression, however, a number of authors have argued that vagueness in the law is sometimes a good thing, because it is a means to achieving certain valuable legislative ends. In this article, I argue that many authors—including Timothy Endicott and Jeremy Waldron—wrongly associate vagueness with instrumental (...) roles that are really played by a closely related semantic phenomenon. (shrink)

These are the answers I gave to Brian Bix, Peter Koller, Ralf Posher, Torben Spaak, Timothy Endicott, and Jan Sieckmann at the end of a splendid conference day in 2018. The critique given to me concerned important aspects of three main themes in my work: the claim to correctness, human and constitutional rights, and the ideal dimension of law. In the last decades I have attempted to connect these themes systematically. The result is the idea of democratic constitutionalism (...) as an institutionalization of practical reason. (shrink)

Timothy Williamson gives an original and provocative treatment of deep metaphysical questions about existence, contingency, and change, using the latest resources of quantified modal logic. Contrary to the widespread assumption that logic and metaphysics are disjoint, he argues that modal logic provides a structural core for metaphysics.

The volume brings together a collection of original papers on some of the main tenets of Joseph Raz's legal and political philosophy: Legal positivism and the nature of law, practical reason, authority, the value of equality, incommensurability, harm, group rights, and multiculturalism. James Griffin and Yael Tamir raise questions concerning Raz's notion of group rights and its application to claims of cultural and political autonomy, while Will Kymlicka and Bernhard Peters examine Raz's theory of multicultural society. Lukas Meyer investigates the (...) applicability of the notion of harm in the intergenerational context. Other papers are devoted to fundamental theoretical tenets of Raz's work. Hillel Steiner and Andrei Marmor examine Raz's account of value pluralism and incommensurability in light of what these authors consider to be goods whose equal distribution must be valued for its own sake. Robert Alexy and Timothy Endicott discuss traditional issues of jurisprudence and legal philosphy with special attention to Raz's contribution. Rüdiger Bittner, Bruno Celano, and J. E. Penner discuss and criticize aspects of Raz's theory of practical reason. Jeremy Waldron presents a critique of Raz's interpretation of authority.This volume concludes with a chapter by Joseph Raz in which he responds to arguments in the foregoing essays. (shrink)

In this book, I present the results of an investigation which began with an extended stay at Oxford's Balliol College during the first half of 1995. My visit to Oxford was made possible by a grant from the Spanish Ministerio de Educaci6n y Ciencia. My sincere thanks go to Joseph Raz who served as my supervisor in Oxford. For several points of the present study, conversations with Timothy Endicott in Oxford were also of great help. The book is (...) part of a larger project of investigation, directed by Albert Calsami glia, which is a joint effort of a group of legal philosophers from the Universitat Pom peu Fabra and the Universitat de Girona, and which also receives financial support from the Spanish Ministerio de Educaci6n y Ciencia. An earlier version of the manuscript was presented in June 1996 to the selection committee for a tenured professorship in Legal Philosophy at the Universitat de Girona. The members of the committee were Francisco Laporta, Albert Calsamiglia, Gregorio Peces-Barba, Camilo J. Cela Conde, and Francesca Puigpelat. I am grateful to all of them for their comments, which have been extremely useful in preparing the final ver sion of this book. (shrink)

In "The Value of Vagueness," Timothy Endicott argues that vague law can be better than precise law. I think he is in many respects correct, but will suggest that we modify and supplement his framework in order to get a firmer grip on what I call the Lawmakers' Challenge: the scenario in which lawmakers find themselves when they must determine whether the consequences of precision are worse than the consequences of vagueness. This will allow us to identify several (...) points of actual and possible disagreement regarding the value of vagueness for law, each of which could affect Endicott's claim that vagueness is sometimes preferable to precision. The framework will also allow us to compare positions that seem - on the face of it - hard to compare, due to the fact that they rest on different theories of value and/or different theories of law. (shrink)

What does 'if' mean? Timothy Williamson presents a controversial new approach to understanding conditional thinking, which is central to human cognitive life. He argues that in using 'if' we rely on psychological heuristics, fast and frugal methods which can lead us to trust faulty data and prematurely reject simple theories.

Assertions are praised as true, informative, relevant, sincere, warranted, well-phrased, or polite. They are criticized as false, uninformative, irrelevant, insincere, unwarranted, ill-phrased, or rude. Sometimes they deserve such praise or criticism. If any respect in which performances of an act can deserve praise or criticism is a norm for that act, then the speech act of assertion has many norms. So has almost any act; jumps can deserve praise as long or brave, criticism as short or cowardly. But it is (...) natural to suppose that some norms are more intimately connected to the nature of asserting than any norm is to the nature of jumping. One might suppose, for example, that someone who knowingly asserts a falsehood has thereby broken a rule of assertion, much as if he had broken a rule of a game; he has cheated. On this view, the speech act, like a game and unlike the act of jumping, is constituted by rules. Thus, not all norms for assertion are on a par. Norms such as relevance, good phrasing, and politeness are just applications of more general cognitive or social norms to the specific act of assertion. Perhaps the norm of informativeness results from a more complex interaction between a general norm of cooperativeness and the nature of assertion as a source of information. But on this view, not all norms for assertion derive from more general norms; otherwise nothing would differentiate it from other speech acts. (shrink)

On method, discursive logics, and epistemology -- Questions of medieval discursive practice -- From the middle ages to the (w)hole of Utopia -- Kepler, his Dream, and the analysis and pattern of thought -- Campanella and Bacon: concerning structures of mind -- The masculine birth of time -- Cyrano and the experimental discourse -- The myth of sun and moon -- The difficulty of writing -- Crusoe rights his story -- Gulliver's critique of Euclid -- Emergence, consolidation, and dominance of (...) a discourse. (shrink)

What we call “the evidential argument from evil” is not one argument but a family of them, originating (perhaps) in the 1979 formulation of William Rowe. Wykstra’s early versions of skeptical theism emerged in response to Rowe’s evidential arguments. But what sufficed as a response to Rowe may not suffice against later more sophisticated versions of the problem of evil—in particular, those along the lines pioneered by Paul Draper. Our chief aim here is to make an earlier version of skeptical (...) theism more responsive to the type abductive atheology pioneered by Draper. In particular, we suggest a moderate form of skeptical theism may be able to resist Draper’s abductive atheology. (shrink)

Most of our knowledge is inexact, and known by us to be so. An example of such known inexactness will be described in some detail. The description seems to entail a contradiction. However, the paradoxical reasoning rests on an assumption. It will be suggested that the description is correct and this assumption false. Its failure will be explained by means of a picture of inexact knowledge in which the notion of a margin for error is central. This picture suggests diagnoses (...) of other paradoxical arguments: Surprise Examinations, backwards inductions about Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, and the Heap. (shrink)