New Essays On The Nature Of Legal Reasoning

This is the first book to bring together distinguished jurisprudential theorists, as well as up-and-coming scholars, to critically assess the nature of legal reasoning. The volume is divided into 3 parts: The first part, General Jurisprudence and Legal Reasoning, addresses issues at the intersection of general jurisprudence - those pertaining to the nature of law itself - and legal reasoning. The second part, Rules and Reasons, addresses two concepts central to two prominent types of theory of legal reasoning. The essays in the third and final part, Doctrine and Practice, delve into the mechanics of legal practice and doctrine, from a legal reasoning perspective.

This original collection of jurisprudential essays furthers our understanding of the nature of rights. In Part 1, Halpin considers the value of Hohfeldian neutrality when theorising about law in general, and legal rights in particular, and Kurki focuses on Hohfeld's operative notion of power. In Part 2, Kramer rebuts Wenar's objections to his Interest Theory of rights, and May provides a comparative defence of the Interest Theory against Wenar's Kind-Desire theory of claim-rights. Penner then pursues legal doctrine, focusing on whether judges hold the powers of their office as rights, an issue over which Wenar and Kramer have clashed. Sreenivasan, utilising a novel test case involving pure public goods, argues that the third party beneficiary objection to the Interest Theory is fatal. McBride builds on Sreenivasan's Hybrid Theory of claim-rights to construct his new Tracking Theory of rights. Cruft then argues that the best extant versions of the Interest and Will Theories of rights cannot avoid a form of circularity, and Van Duffel argues that meeting four adequacy constraints, which he proposes, counts in favour of any theory of rights. In Part 3, Andersson proposes a tie breaking procedure for rights conflicts in the applied realm of politics, and Steiner concludes by alleging that Kant's principle of right, a standard of corrective justice, has distributive implications. 'A fine collection of cutting-edge essays on the most important normative concept of modernity.' Professor Leif Wenar, King's College London 'This important collection proceeds much beyond the famous 1998 A Debate Over Rights which sets the stage for the debates concerning rights since then. It explores three aspects of rights. First it re-examines the Hohfeldian classification and highlights its importance and relevance. Second it investigates and develops the debates between the interest and the will theory. It includes essays by the main established proponents of these two positions as well as essays by newcomers to this field. The different essays in this part address each other in ways which sharpen and clarify the disagreements and provide new original arguments for the contending views. Last, it provides a new perspective on the debates concerning conflicts of rights and the ways to overcome them. This collection will no doubt dominate the future conceptual discussions concerning the nature of rights and their role in political theory.' Professor Alon Harel, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

This book considers the seminal debate in jurisprudence between Ronald Dworkin and Stanley Fish. It looks at the exchange between Dworkin and Fish, initiated in the 1980s, and analyses the role the exchange has played in the development of contemporary theories of interpretation, legal reasoning, and the nature of law. The book encompasses 4 key themes of the debate between these authors: legal theory and its critical role, interpretation and critical constraints, pragmatism and interpretive communities, and some general implications of the debate for issues like the nature of legal theory and the possibility of objectivity. The collection brings together prominent legal theorists and one of the protagonists of the debate: Professor Stanley Fish, who concludes the collection with an interview in which he discusses the main topics discussed in the collection.

This collection contains studies on justice, juridical reasoning and argumenta tion which contributed to my ideas on the new rhetoric. My reflections on justice, from 1944 to the present day, have given rise to various studies. The ftrst of these was published in English as The Idea of Justice and the Problem of Argument (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1963). The others, of which several are out of print or have never previously been published, are reunited in the present volume. As justice is, for me, the prime example of a "confused notion", of a notion which, like many philosophical concepts, cannot be reduced to clarity without being distorted, one cannot treat it without recourse to the methods of reasoning analyzed by the new rhetoric. In actuality, these methods have long been put into practice by jurists. Legal reasoning is fertile ground for the study of argumentation: it is to the new rhetoric what mathematics is to formal logic and to the theory of demonstrative proof. It is important, then, that philosophers should not limit their methodologi cal studies to mathematics and the natural sciences. They must not neglect law in the search for practical reason. I hope that these essays lead to be a better understanding of how law can enrich philosophical thought. CH. P.

What is the role and value of virtue, emotion and imagination in law and legal reasoning? These new essays, by leading scholars of both law and philosophy, offer striking and exploratory answers to this neglected question. The collection takes a holistic approach, inquiring as to the connections and relations between virtue, emotion and imagination. In addition to the principal focus on adjudication, essays in the collection also engage with a variety of different legal, political and moral contexts: eg criminal law sentencing, the Black Lives Matter movement and professional ethics. A number of different areas of the law are addressed (eg criminal law, constitutional law and tort law) and the issues explored include: the benefits and limits of empathy in legal reasoning; the role of attention and perception in judicial reasoning;, the identification of judicial virtues (such as compassion and humility) and judicial vices (such as callousness and partiality); the values and dangers of certain imaginative devices (eg personification); and the interactive and social dimensions of virtue, emotion and imagination.

La 4e de couverture indique : "Legal reasoning : collected essays includes four essays written over a twenty-year span that present a comprehensive and original account of legal reasoning as done by judges, lawyers, and legal academics. In a work that is likely to become the definitive introduction to critical legal theory by a leading theorist of the critical legal studies movement, the author has been the first to put together in a systematic way the insights of American legal realism with continental phenomenology and semiotics. His version of legal reasoning presents it as "work in a medium" deploying a set of "argument-bites" analogous to the words of a language. The result is simultaneous freedom and constraint. Kennedy then turns his approach to a critique of current European legal theory, with an essay on Hart and Kelsen and another on the approach of the European jurists pre-occupied with "coherence" and with the "European social model" in the current process of harmonization of European law."