Law's ontology and practical reason

The thesis is an attempt to reconcile law's dual nature, its factual dimension (its facticity) and its normative/evaluative dimension (its normativity), in a non-reductive manner. The tension between those two dimensions appears particularly acute when we try to discern some object of reference for our normative talk/discourse. Then the possibility of absence of such objects poses a high threat to the meaningfulness of the enterprise of law tout court. Faced with this danger lawyers usually end up reducing legal referents to physical, nonnormative entities. Palpable for our senses as those entities may be, they do not seem to eliminate the threat of meaninglessness posed to the legal enterprise, as they end up eliminating law's normativity. In contrast I argue that legal and broader practical norms can be reconstructed as abstract objects that are available to knowledge. The method employed, relies predominantly on a semantic explication of the 'objecthood' of norms along the lines of a neo-Fregean theory of mental content. Further, I employ an analysis of the meaning of legal expressions in order to show that a semantic account of legal 'objecthood' will be demarcated by the pragmatic-normative requirements that support the relevant practices in which legal meaning is generated (as is specified by some version of Wittgenstein's 'meaning as use' theory of meaning). I proceed to argue that those pragmatic requirements include some transcendental pragmatic norms which specify an ultimate practical or moral point of view against the background of which practical meaning is possible. Later, this point of view is specified as a Super-norm or Principle of Autonomy. This norm bestows an evaluative element upon the meaning of all practical expressions/sentences and, via the semantic explication of ontology, into the normative objects (rules, properties and so on) that correspond to them. Finally, it is claimed that legal norms are a species of practical norms, to the extent that both fall under the same criteria of validity that are specified by the point of view of the Norm ofAutonomy

Reactive Semantic Planning in Unexplored Semantic Environments Using Deep Perceptual Feedback

This paper presents a reactive planning system that enriches the topological representation of an environment with a tightly integrated semantic representation, achieved by incorporating and exploiting advances in deep perceptual learning and probabilistic semantic reasoning. Our architecture combines object detection with semantic SLAM, affording robust, reactive logical as well as geometric planning in unexplored environments. Moreover, by incorporating a human mesh estimation algorithm, our system is capable of reacting and responding in real time to semantically labeled human motions and gestures. New formal results allow tracking of suitably non-adversarial moving targets, while maintaining the same collision avoidance guarantees. We suggest the empirical utility of the proposed control architecture with a numerical study including comparisons with a state-of-the-art dynamic replanning algorithm, and physical implementation on both a wheeled and legged platform in different settings with both geometric and semantic goals. For more information: Kod*la

Global Law as Intercontextuality and as Interlegality

Since the 1990s the effects of globalization on law and legal developments has been a central topic of scholarly debate. To date, the debate is however marked by three substantial deficiencies which this chapter seeks to remedy through a reconceptualization of global law as a law of inter-contextuality expressed through inter-legality and materialized through a particular body of legal norms which can be characterized as connectivity norms. The first deficiency is a historical and empirical one. Both critics as well as advocates of ‘non-state law’ share the assumption that ‘law beyond the state’ and related legal norms have gained in centrality when compared with previous historical times. While global law, including both public and private global governance law as well as regional occurrences such as EU law, has undergone profound transformations since the structural transformations which followed the de-colonialization processes of the mid-twentieth century, we do not have more global law relatively to other types of law today than in previous historical times. The second deficiency is a methodological one. The vast majority of scholarship on global law is either of an analytical nature, drawing on insights from philosophy, or empirically observing the existence of global law and the degree of compliance with global legal norms at a given moment in time. While both approaches bring something to the table they remain static approaches incapable of explaining and evaluating the transformation of global law over time. The third deficiency is a conceptual-theoretical one. In most instances, global law is understood as a unitary law producing singular legal norms with a planetary reach, or, alternatively, a radical pluralist perspective is adopted dismissing the existence of singular global norms. Both of these approaches however misapprehend the structural characteristics, function and societal effects of global law. Instead a third positon between unitary and radical pluralist perspectives can be adopted through an understanding of global law and its related legal norms as a de-centred kind of inter-contextual law characterised by inter-legality

Vilhelm Lundstedt’s ‘Legal Machinery’ and the Demise of Juristic Practice

This article aims to contribute to the academic debate on the general crisis faced by law schools and the legal professions by discussing why juristic practice is a matter of experience rather than knowledge. Through a critical contextualisation of Vilhelm Lundstedt’s thought under processes of globalisation and transnationalism, it is argued that the demise of the jurist’s function is related to law’s scientification as brought about by the metaphysical construction of reality. The suggested roadmap will in turn reveal that the current voiding of juristic practice and its teaching is part of the crisis regarding what makes us human

Judging Inter-Legality

Peer reviewe

Redrawing the legal relation

No abstract available