Renouncing the attempt versus perpetration distinction

Legal and moral luck goes against the basic principle of criminal law that responsibility ascriptions are based on the mental state of the perpetrator, rather than merely the outcome of her action. If outcome should not play a decisive role in responsibility ascriptions, the attempt versus perpetration distinction becomes more difficult to justify. One potential justification is that we never know whether the attempter would not have resigned from pursuing her criminal intent even at the last moment. However, this paper argues that resigning from criminal intent and trying to stop the criminal outcome, which is called the renunciation defense, can be just as subject to outcome luck as the attempt versus perpetration distinction. And yet the availability of the renunciation defense in court is outcome dependent. I show with a series of experiments (N = 479) that outcome dependence for the renunciation defense is perceived as unjust and discuss the implications for the renunciation defense as well as attempt versus perpetration distinction. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11229-022-04000-6

Minimal semantics and legal interpretation

In this paper I will tackle three issues. First, I aim to briefly outline the backbone of semantic minimalism, while focusing on the idea of ‘liberal truth conditions’ developed by Emma Borg in her book ‘Minimal Semantics’. Secondly, I will provide an account of the three principal views in legal interpretation: intentionalism, textualism and purposivism. All of them are based on a common denominator labelled by lawyers ‘literal meaning’. In the paper I suggest a novel way of viewing this common denominator as almost identical to the Borgian ‘liberal truth conditions’, at least at a conceptual level. In the third section I will focus on the conceptual similarities between the two ideas. I intend to depict that, although legal theorists do not admit it explicitly, they treat literal legal meaning as minimal propositional content that can be ascribed liberal truth conditions. There are two main objections to liberal truth conditions: their under-determinacy and unintuitive character. Both objections can be applied to ‘literal meaning’. However, the idea of liberal truth conditions gives an adequate account of what lawyers call literal meaning and is helpful in explaining the mechanism of understanding of provisions and reasons leading to the necessity of statutory interpretation

Marmor kontra Kelsen, czyli kto kogo i dlaczego próbuje zredukować?

Autorka niniejszego opracowania próbuje przyjrzeć się argumentom A. Marmora, który w swojej książce „Philosophy of Law” omawia wizję prawa H. Kelsena. Omawiając poszczególne elementy zastanawia się czy tworzą one spójną całość.Udostępnienie publikacji Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego finansowane w ramach projektu „Doskonałość naukowa kluczem do doskonałości kształcenia”. Projekt realizowany jest ze środków Europejskiego Funduszu Społecznego w ramach Programu Operacyjnego Wiedza Edukacja Rozwój; nr umowy: POWER.03.05.00-00-Z092/17-00

Pragmatic Maxims and Presumptions in Legal Interpretation

The fields of linguistic pragmatics and legal interpretation are deeply interrelated. The purpose of this paper is to show how pragmatics and the developments in argumentation theory can contribute to the debate on legal interpretation. The relation between the pragmatic maxims and the presumptions underlying the legal canons are brought to light, unveiling the principles that underlie the types of argument usually used to justify a construction. The Gricean maxims and the arguments of legal interpretation are regarded as presumptions subject to default used to justify an interpretation. This approach can allow one to trace the different legal interpretive arguments back to their basic underlying presumptions, so that they can be compared, ordered, and assessed according to their defeasibility conditions. This approach allows one to understand the difference between various types of interpretive canons, and their strength in justifying an interpretation

Dlaczego pragmatyka lingwistyczna jest istotna dla teorii prawa?

Bibliogr. s. 64Grice founded his theory on the assumption that the speaker conveys not only what he says, but also what he pragmatically implicates. This is possible because of the context shared by the utterer and the hearer as well as some common rule-like assumptions called maxims of conversation. Grice’s theory concentrated on a communication oriented at the exchange of information between speaker and hearer. The main objections against it were that it is narrow, as the in- formatively oriented communication occurs rarely in human interactions. Consequently, the content of maxims as designed by Grice could not apply in many legal contexts. This paper aims at considering only one of the multiple contexts in the realm of law – the relations between the legislature and the judicial powers