The Passion for Reason
Moral values play a great role in legal argumentation and decision making. To be sure, both are based on such institutional sources as statutes, precedents, legislative history etc. Yet, even justice is obviously relevant in legal reasoning. This has been the case since times immemorial, e.g. in Rome (where the common law, ius gentium was supposed to express justice), England (law and equity) and also Scandinavia (“lov” and “dom”). In modem law, the statutes are sometimes “read” in the way alien to a layman, in order to obtain reasonable decisions.
Coherence and Systematization in Law
This chapter examines coherentist approaches to the justification of normative judgments in law. First, it provides a survey of the main approaches to normative coherence defended in the literature on legal coherentism and discusses the principal objections that threaten to undermine the coherence theory of legal justification. One problem with coherentism, namely the problem of the coherence bias, has not, however, received enough attention in the literature. This chapter states this problem in detail and argues that a modified version of legal coherentism—namely virtue coherentism—has the resources to address this problem. The chapter then engages in a second-order debate about the relevance of coherence in justification by inquiring into the reasons why coherence is worth pursuing when reasoning in law. Finally, this chapter concludes by assessing the value and limits of coherentist reasoning in the legal domain.
THE NORMATIVE, THE LEGAL, AND THE LAW-JOBS: THE PROBLEM OF JURISTIC METHOD
PEOPLE who get interested in "sociology" "of law," whatever they prove to mean by either term, seem to find themselves caught in a tidal current that runs toward the troubled waters of a Grundlcguing, an "Introduction," a "Foundations," a "Vhat it will be about when I get around to really dealing with it." Max Weber, Ehrlich, Timasheff, de la Grasserie and the strange Jerusalem have all found their published efforts expended on introducing their subject, and only in Weber do the lines of the actual prospective building become at all clear. In part, at least, this is because Law is commonly conceived as a discipline whose very subject-matter is made up of norms for conduct, or imperatives, or rules for conduct, or correct dogmatic propositions, whereas sociology as a pre-science is a discipline which involves as its essential subject-matter sequences and