Public Legal Reason

This essay develops an ideal of public legal reason--a normative theory of legal reasons that is appropriate for a society characterized by religious and moral pluralism. One of the implications of this theory is that normative theorizing about public and private law should eschew reliance on the deep premises of deontology or consequentialism and should instead rely on what the author calls public values--values that can be affirmed without relying on the deep and controversial premises of particular comprehensive moral doctrines. The ideal of public legal reason is then applied to a particular question--whether welfarism (a particular form of normative law and economics) provides the sort of reasons that appropriate for legal practice. The answer to that question is no--to the extent that welfarism contends that the normative assessment of legal policies should rely exclusively on information about individual preferences, welfarism relies on deep and controversial premises of consequentialist moral theory that fail the test of public reason. The essay also investigates the thesis--advanced by Louis Kaplow and Steven Shavell--that any fairness principle (a nonwelfarist method of policy assessment) can violate weak Pareto (making everyone worse off). Whatever the implications of Kaplow and Shavell\u27s argument, it does not show that welfarism can provide public legal reasons. The essay concludes that law\u27s justifications should rely on normative principles that are accessible to reasonable citizens, whether they are theists or atheists, deontologists or consequentialists, moral philosophers or economists. Law\u27s deliberations should be shallow and not deep. Law\u27s reason should be public

Global Legal Pluralism

Some challenges of legal globalization closely resemble those formulated earlier for legal pluralism: the irreducible plurality of legal orders, the coexistence of domestic state law with other legal orders, the absence of a hierarchically superior position transcending the differences. This review discusses how legal pluralism engages with legal globalization and how legal globalization utilizes legal pluralism. It demonstrates how several international legal disciplines---comparative law, conflict of laws, public international law, and European Union law---have slowly begun to adopt some ideas of legal pluralism. It shows how traditional themes and questions of legal pluralism---the definition of law, the role of the state, of community, and of space---are altered under conditions of globalization. It addresses interrelations between different legal orders and various ways, both theoretical and practical, to deal with them. And it provides an outlook on the future of global legal pluralism as theory and practice of global law

Global Legal Pluralism

Some challenges of legal globalization closely resemble those formulated earlier for legal pluralism: the irreducible plurality of legal orders, the coexistence of domestic state law with other legal orders, the absence of a hierarchically superior position transcending the differences. This review discusses how legal pluralism engages with legal globalization and how legal globalization utilizes legal pluralism. It demonstrates how several international legal disciplines---comparative law, conflict of laws, public international law, and European Union law---have slowly begun to adopt some ideas of legal pluralism. It shows how traditional themes and questions of legal pluralism---the definition of law, the role of the state, of community, and of space---are altered under conditions of globalization. It addresses interrelations between different legal orders and various ways, both theoretical and practical, to deal with them. And it provides an outlook on the future of global legal pluralism as theory and practice of global law

International law - a constitution for mankind? : an attempt at a re-appraisal with an analysis of constitutional principles

One of the current trends in international law scholarship is the question of which influences specific legal cultures have on the understanding of international law. This contribution will trace the conditions of a German perspective and analyse the debate against the background of positive law. We will try to assess what the debate adds to the general theory of international law, how it fits into demands of legitimacy of international governance, and whether it contributes to a sensible reconstruction of current law. Furthermore, we try to develop our own perspective that matches the system of international law and is plausible in terms of international legal theory. For that purpose, we will first take It is probably in this context that the contention has to be understood that the ongoing debate on the constitutionalisation of public international law is particularly European, if not German. Whether or not this is the case is difficult to investigate with a lawyer’s tools. However, the idea that international law is the constitution of mankind has found many adherents in German legal writings. This contribution will trace the conditions of a German perspective and analyse the debate against the background of positive law. We will try to assess what the debate adds to the general theory of international law, how it fits into demands of legitimacy of international governance, and whether it contributes to a sensible reconstruction of current law. Furthermore, we try to develop our own perspective that matches the system of international law and is plausible in terms of international legal theory. For that purpose, we will first take up the debate and find its place in the landscape of international legal theory. In this context, we try to shed light on the central concepts used or presupposed when constitutionalisation is discussed by German-speaking scholars (see below, section B). Furthermore, we will discuss structures in positive law which are used as arguments in the debate (section C). Finally, we will try to give an account of constitutionalisation in terms of both sources doctrine and legal theory (section D), before drawing conclusions from the discussion (section E)

Damned to the Inferno? A New Vision of Lawyers at the Dawning of the Millennium

This Article seeks to explain the negative perception the legal profession and lawyers have in the eyes of the American public. Disregarding common answers such as the disproportionate amount of influence lawyers have or high salaries and extravagant lifestyles, this Article argues that a cultural shift has led many Americans to see the law as an arbitrary device. Consequently, this belief is reinforced by lawyers and and perpetuated by law schools, leading to the negative perception of the legal profession. In the process, the Article addresses five main issues: the definition and purpose of the law, the republican theory of lawyering, the realities and effectiveness of modern day law school, whether a republican theory of lawyering is in line with American realities, and prescriptions for the future

The place of philosophy of law between justice and efficiency

A discussion regarding the complex relationship that exists between the concepts of efficiency and justice goes a long way back and raises several relevant arguments. One of them, and it must be rejected in advance, is that justice is in the realm of public law, while efficiency in that of private law. Is it unacceptable that the balance between public and private law leads to the belief of a divided legal system; one system, one set of laws, one legal system. Legislators and judges are responsible for determining a balance and no theory can postulate that the balance will always be found with a simple cut between public and private law to distinguish when the criterion should be justice or when it should be efficiency. It is reductionist to confine the discussion to single goals of efficiency and justice, when human dignity and human rights should also be considered when one is discussing law. Moreover, a discussion limited to only the concepts of justice and efficiency, relies on a belief that the terms are mutually exclusive. Posner has said that the economic analysis of law has limits and philosophy of law plays an extremely important role in this discourse, which must be interdisciplinary. There can be no goal other than the realization of human rights and there can be no justice if not shared by all of mankind

The Jurisprudential Turn in Legal Ethics

When legal ethics developed as an academic discipline in the mid-1970s, its theoretical roots were in moral philosophy. The early theorists in legal ethics were moral philosophers by training, and they explored legal ethics as a branch of moral philosophy. From the vantage point of moral philosophy, lawyers’ professional duties comprised a system of moral duties that governed lawyers in their professional lives, a “role-morality” for lawyers that competed with ordinary moral duties. In defining this “role-morality,” the moral philosophers accepted the premise that “good lawyers” are professionally obligated to pursue the interests of their clients all the way to the arguable limits of the law, even when doing so would harm third persons or undermine the public good. More recent scholarship in legal ethics has rejected the moral philosophers’ premise that lawyers’ ethical duties demand instrumentalist partisan interpretation of the “bounds of the law.” In what I call the “jurisprudential turn” in legal ethics, legal scholars are now increasingly looking to jurisprudential and political theory to explore the interpretive stance that it is appropriate for lawyers to take with respect to the “bounds of the law” that limit their partisan advocacy. Just as jurisprudential theories of adjudication ground judges’ duties of legal interpretation in the role of judges in a democratic society, jurisprudential theories of lawyering ground lawyers’ interpretive duties in analysis of the role lawyers play in a democratic system of government. This Article critically examines the emerging uses of jurisprudential theory in legal ethics. It argues that jurisprudential theory presents an attractive alternative to moral theory in legal ethics because it provides a rubric for limiting lawyers’ no-holds-barred partisan manipulation of law that springs directly from the lawyer’s professional duties rather than competing with them. It critiques the two major schools of thought in the “jurisprudence of lawyering” based on Dworkian and positivist jurisprudence. And it questions the common framework within each jurisprudential school, which assigns lawyers a role as case-by-case lawmakers, suggesting that this framework imposes an inappropriately lawyer-centered focus on assessments of the legitimacy of law that more properly belong to clients

Public hearings as proceduralization of popular sovereignty policies in supreme courts : an intersubjective approach

This paper aims to discuss in which sense public hearings in supreme courts of democratic rules of law can be seen as proceduralization of popular sovereignty policies. These policies constitute expressions of a normative claim for a wider “publicization of law” by democratic states’ institutional powers and organs; a claim that becomes evident when one undertakes an intersubjective interpretation of law. This theoretical argument will be presented in the first section of the paper through a new articulation of Jürgen Habermas’ discursive theory of law and his most recent studies on the concept of political public sphere. The theoretical section gives normative and procedural criteria for the second section of the paper, which consists on a critical analysis of the procedures and practical cases of public hearings held at the Brazilian Supreme Court, constituting the first scientific study to date on the Court’s use of this legal instrument

The Questions of Authority

In 1992, Professor, Frederick Schauer of Harvard University, delivered the Georgetown Law Center’s twelfth Annual Philip A. Hart Memorial Lecture: Two Cheers for Authority: Should Officials Obey the Law?. Frederick Schauer is a David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Virginia. Previously he served for 18 years as Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, where he has served as academic dean and acting dean, and before that was a Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Law of Obscenity (BNA, 1976), Free Speech: A Philosophical Enquiry (Cambridge, 1982), Playing By the Rules: A Philosophical Examination of Rule-Based Decision-Making in Law and in Life (Clarendon/Oxford, 1991), Profiles, Probabilities, and Stereotypes (Belknap/Harvard, 2003), and Thinking Like a Lawyer: A New Introduction to Legal Reasoning (Harvard, 2009). He is also co-editor of The Philosophy of Law: Classic and Contemporary Readings (1996) and The First Amendment: A Reader (1995), and author of numerous articles on constitutional law and theory, freedom of speech and press, legal reasoning and the philosophy of law. Schauer is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has held a Guggenheim Fellowship, has been vice-president of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy and chair of the Committee on Philosophy and Law of the American Philosophical Association, and was a founding co-editor of the journal Legal Theory. He has also been the Fischel-Neil Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, Ewald Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Virginia, Morton Distinguished Visiting Professor of the Humanities at Dartmouth College, Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Toronto, and Distinguished Visitor at the New York University School of Law. His work on rules, legal reasoning, constitutional theory and freedom of speech has been the subject of a book Rules and Reasoning: Essays in Honour of Fred Schauer (Hart, 1999) and symposia in Politeia, the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, and the Notre Dame, Connecticut, and Quinnipiac law reviews. In 2007-08 Schauer was the George Eastman Visiting Professor at Oxford University and a fellow of Balliol College. A graduate of Dartmouth College, the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration, and Harvard Law School, Schauer was the recipient of a university-wide Distinguished Teacher Award from Harvard University in 2004

The creation of the rule of law and the legitimacy of property rights : the political and economic consequences of a corrupt privatization

How does the lack of legitimacy of property rights affect the dynamics of the creation of the rule of law? The authors investigate the demand for the rule of law in post-communist economies after privatization under the assumption that theft is possible, that those who have"stolen"assets cannot be fully protected under a change in the legal regimetoward rule of law, and that the number of agents with control rights over assets is large. They show that a demand for broadly beneficial legal reform may not emerge because the expectation of weak legal institutions increases the expected relative return to stripping assets, and strippers may gain from a weak and corrupt state. The outcome can be inefficient even from the narrow perspective of the asset-strippers.Legal Products,Economic Theory&Research,Corruption&Anitcorruption Law,Public Sector Corruption&Anticorruption Measures,Governance Indicators