Jul 24, 2018 Dennis Patterson
Legal positivism—or one style of doing positivist legal theory—is dead. Of course, there are different types of legal positivists in the world. For example, some legal positivists take a page out of the book of their opposite number, natural law theorists. But natural law theory —belief in a single right moral answer to legal questions—is going nowhere. To believe otherwise is to evince embarrassingly bad aesthetic judgment. Better to revive/reframe legal positivism. The way to do that is to return to the work of the master, Hans Kelsen, for it is only through a rethinking of Kelsen that legal positivism can be saved from its most ardent supporters in Oxbridge and North America.
This is the opening gambit to one of the most intriguing books in legal theory in recent memory. Alexander Somek—who has written two brilliant books on EU law and an equally impressive book on global constitutionalism —has produced a book every Anglophone legal theorist should read. To be sure, Somek writes in a style most Anglophone legal philosophers will find off-putting. While references to Hegel and Fichte abound, I have never read anyone who has a comparable command of the secondary literature in Analytic Legal Theory. Somek has read everything (in legal theory, analytic philosophy, German philosophy and more) and his analysis of the work of contemporary analytic legal theorists is itself ample reward for the time needed to consider his arguments.
The book is composed of six chapters, each of which contains small subsections denominated by themes (many expressed in one or two words). Like his Anglo-American contemporaries, Somek wants to elucidate the nature of law. Eschewing social facts (Hartian and Razian positivism) and constructive interpretation (Dworkin), Somek maintains that “[l]aw is first and foremost a relation among people.” (P. 20.) Somek defends this claim with accounts of legal knowledge and sources of law that can broadly be described as “Kelsenian” in inspiration, if not style.
“Knowing the law is a business.” (P. 1.) Thus begins Somek’s account of the nature of law. Of course, money and power surround law. But law can be free of their undue or corrupt influence. The vehicle for this, Somek avers, is truth: “[o]nly by virtue of truth can legal knowledge emancipate itself from the undue influence of money and power.” (P. 2.) In addition to truth, there is a fact of the matter about what the law “really is.” (Id.) Thus, objectivity about law is possible but this is attained only if we understand what the law really is about.
Somek believes sources are an important dimension of the nature of law. But his conception of the role of sources in generating a concept of law is rather different from what one usually finds in the literature. Sources of law connect people through creation of a legal relation (e.g., buyer and seller). It is through these relations that agents mediate their presence with the world. Knowledge of the law is subjective (in the sense of individual agency): all sources of law (precedents, statutes, professional commentary) “give rise to law while drawing on other sources.” (P. 7.) While knowledge of the law is law’s knowledge of itself, “[i]ts point is to attain clarity in singular cases.” (Id.) Finally, when we invoke the law we do so through legal relations the categories of which mediate our relationship to others.
Somek describes his approach to legal theory as “constructivist” about law’s objectivity. He wants to convince us that modern Anglophone positivism errs when it conceives of objectivity as a correct understanding of existing legal materials (think of Raz’s account of law’s authority). Knowledge is knowledge “of the law by the law, that is, of a prior source by a later source.” (P. 80.) This view of sources is misleading, for sources are just “devices that permit us to know what the law is.” (Id.) Recall Dworkin: law (principles) is a matter of “a sense of appropriateness developed in the profession and the public over time.” (P. 4, citing and quoting Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (1978).)
Nevertheless, a science of law is possible. A claim to legal knowledge “bearing the stamp of approval by the law necessarily flows from sources of law.” (P. 89.) But legal sources alone are not law, any more than law is the union of primary and secondary rules (according to Hart). Law is more than rules: for one thing, sources require elaboration. Systematic elaboration is as much law as its sources. Elaborations, like cases, require endorsement, specifically the assent of players in the practice: “[j]oined practice is the warrant for the shared belief that is a social fact.” (P. 95.) Not surprisingly, Somek sees the common law not as a system of legal knowledge, but “a system of endorsements.” (P. 104.)
The most intriguing chapter of this interesting book is the fourth one, on The Legal Relation. Somek’s goal in this chapter is to rethink the relationship between morality and law. Through a synthesis of Hegel and John Mackie—together with a clever hypothetical involving proper behavior at classical music concerts—Somek makes some insightful comments on the nature of reasons for action and how best to understand the role of authority in law. In contrast to Raz, whose widely-endorsed “service conception” of authority sees substantive reasons for actions displaced by law’s authority, Somek argues that the authority of law “that emerges from the legal relation is an authority of rights.” (P. 125.) I cannot police the poor conduct of fellow concertgoers because the law prohibits such an intervention. As such, law requires that I yield to another’s reasons for action even as I disdain the perspective which gives rise to it. As Darwall (who is cited and quoted) puts it, second-personal authority is authority to have wants respected. Authority, it turns out, is much more complex (morally and politically) than a technocratic (Somek’s word) account of the concept might indicate.
In the space of such a short review, it is difficult to convey the depth of argument in this engaging book. Somek’s sustained treatment of the secondary literature in contemporary analytic legal theory (Late Legal Positivism) is not to be missed. Somek is a hard-core positivist: there is a fact of the matter about what the law is. As always, his commitment to truth about law sits uneasily with his nod to the work of people like Stanley Fish and his embrace of a skeptical reading of Wittgenstein on rule-following. But these are minor blemishes on an otherwise compelling and engaging work.
Jun 27, 2018 Michael Green
Christopher M. Newman,
Hohfeld and the Theory of In Rem Rights: An Attempted Mediation in
The Legacy of Wesley Hohfeld (forthcoming 2018), available at
SSRN.
Rights come in different types, and the failure to distinguish among them can lead one into errors. So argued Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, who—in two articles published in the Yale Law Journal in 1913 and 1917—offered a highly influential categorization of rights by type. This marvelous collection of essays, edited by Shyam Balganesh, Ted Sichelman and Henry Smith, assesses the Hohfeldian legacy. I’ll largely focus on Christopher Newman’s contribution, which I found particularly helpful. Some property scholars have criticized Hohfeld’s approach as unable to account for the distinctive character of property rights. Newman argues, I think rightly, that the two are compatible.
That Hohfeld was correct to distinguish rights by their type is undisputed. The right that I have to be present on Blackacre by virtue of owning it and the right that I have as a boxer to punch my opponent are clearly different in structure. As Hohfeld would describe it, my right to punch is a privilege only, whereas my right to be on Blackacre includes privileges and claims. X has a privilege with respect to Y that X perform act φ if and only if, by φ-ing, X violates no duty to Y. X has a claim with respect to Y that Y φ if and only if Y has a duty to X to φ. I have a privilege to punch my opponent, because, by punching him, I do him no wrong. But this “right” to punch includes no claim with respect to him: he has no duty to let himself be punched. My right to be on Blackacre, by contrast, includes not only privileges (by being on Blackacre, I violate no duty to you) but also claims (you cannot interfere with my being on Blackacre, for example, by expelling me from it). (For the record, Hohfeld identified two other types of right—powers and immunities—and would say that my rights with respect to Blackacre include them too, but I leave these details aside.)
The cardinal Hohfeldian sin is to assume that a privilege is the same as (or necessarily entails) a claim. Courts really do commit this sin sometimes. Consider the reasoning of the Irish Supreme Court in Fleming v Ireland. (I borrow this example from an excellent article on the Hohfeldian framework by Luis Duarte d’Almeida.) The question the Court faced was whether people can be criminally prosecuted for assisting someone in committing suicide. They cannot be prosecuted if they have a right (read privilege) to assist. But the Court wrongly concluded that no such privilege exists, because if it did it would follow that those possessing the privilege would also have a right (read claim) against the government to defense in their exercise of their privilege. The government would not merely be prohibited from punishing them but also obligated to protect them when they assisted someone’s suicide. Since no such claim existed, the Court concluded that no privilege existed either. But that’s like concluding that a boxer cannot have a privilege to punch his opponent because his opponent has no duty to let himself be punched. That the Court made this mistake does not mean that its conclusion that there is no privilege to assist suicide was wrong, of course. But the conclusion must be justified by substantive arguments, not false claims of deontic necessity.
Although most everyone agrees that Hohfeld’s work is an important starting point in thinking clearly about rights, there is plenty of room for criticism. To bring up one that has always bothered me: Should a privilege be defined purely negatively, as the absence of a duty? The negative definition makes it impossible to distinguish between Jane, who has no legal duties with respect to anyone because she is subject to the legislative jurisdiction of no lawmaker, and Martha, who has no legal duties with respect to anyone because she has been privileged by a lawmaker to act however she wants. In addition, the negative definition makes certain normative conflicts impossible. Nothing about the Hohfeldian framework excludes conflicts of duties (and their correlative claims). Joe can have a duty with respect to Fred to wash Fred’s car and a duty with respect to Fred to not wash Fred’s car. (Perhaps a lawmaker obligated Joe to do both.) But the negative definition of privileges makes conflicts of duties and privileges impossible. If Joe has a duty with respect to Fred to wash Fred’s car, it simply can’t be that Joe has a privilege with respect to Fred to not wash Fred’s car, for the privilege is defined as the absence of the duty. But if duties can conflict with other duties, why can’t they conflict with privileges? Why can’t there be a normative conflict because a lawmaker put a duty on Joe to wash Fred’s car and gave Joe a privilege not to?
Property scholars have focused their criticism on two aspects of the Hohfeldian framework. The first is the granularity of property rights for Hohfeld—the fact that property rights can be individuated into countless privileges, claims, powers, and immunities. This appears to give support to the bundle-of-rights approach to property, which is sometimes understood as the view that the bundle is fundamentally arbitrary. The second is the correlativity of rights under Hohfeld’s framework—the idea that a person’s claim is necessarily correlated with another person’s duty, a person’s privilege with another person’s no-claim, and so on. The property scholars argue that this ignores the way that property rights are in rem, that is, focused on everyone’s relationships to things, instead of individuals’ relationships to one another.
Newman argues that the granularity of rights for Hohfeld can be defended if we understand him as not seeking to offer any account of why rights hang together normatively. To say that property is a bundle of rights is not to say that the bundle is arbitrary. There can be a good story about why those rights belong together (indeed, Newman offers such a story).
Newman’s response concerning Hohfeld’s correlativity thesis is similar. It is unquestionably true that Hohfeld was a vocal opponent of the idea that property rights are directed at things. Like all rights, property rights hold only between individual rights-bearers. To speak of a right in rem is simply a misleading way of describing “a large class of fundamentally similar yet separate rights, actual and potential, residing in a single person (or single group of persons) but availing respectively against persons constituting a very large and indefinite class of people.”
But Newman argues that the in rem character of property rights is actually compatible with the Hohfeldian approach, because it concerns the normative grounding of property rights. It is indeed true that property rights serve a distinctive function, different from the in personam rights of contract or tort. It is essential to have legal rules whose existence and content can be decided simply by looking at things rather than individuals’ relationships to one another. Property rights serve this role. Hohfeld can accept this normative grounding while still insisting that the rights it justifies always involve relationships between individuals.
Thanks to Luís Duarte d’Almeida, Christopher Newman, and James Stern for helpful comments.
Cite as: Michael Green,
Hohfeld and Property, JOTWELL
(June 27, 2018) (reviewing Christopher M. Newman,
Hohfeld and the Theory of In Rem Rights: An Attempted Mediation in
The Legacy of Wesley Hohfeld (forthcoming 2018), available at SSRN),
https://juris.jotwell.com/hohfeld-and-property/.
May 30, 2018 Brian Tamanaha
Jurisprudence usually changes gradually and imperceptibly, with large-scale shifts recognizable only with the benefit of hindsight. Seldom does it occur that a single piece signals a dramatic turn in the field. A prime example of a transformation-signaling piece is Karl Llewellyn’s A Realistic Jurisprudence—the Next Stop, announcing the emergence of legal realism. Llewellyn’s article did not itself produce the transformation; rather, he identified a generational shift in jurisprudential thought that was already taking place, and he sought to bring attention to this shift and the themes around which it revolved. The article (and its follow-up, Some Realism About Realism: Responding to Dean Pound) served to crystallize and give a label to what theretofore had been an inchoate development. Following this article, legal realism would be criticized, debated, and elaborated. A new school of jurisprudential thought thus was born.
In Pursuit of Pluralist Jurisprudence (2017), edited by Nicole Roughan and Andrew Halpin, might turn out to be another transformation-signaling piece in jurisprudence, though its impact will not be known until a generation has passed. There are several reasons to think it might achieve this stature. For one, like Llewellyn’s piece, this book has a catchy descriptive title that dubs the nascent field “pluralist jurisprudence.” Furthermore, the volume contains ambitious original essays by established, as well as rising, jurisprudential figures from different parts of the world: Nicole Roughan and Andrew Halpin (Introduction and The Promises and Pursuits of Pluralist Jurisprudence), Roger Cotterrell (Do Lawyers Need a Theory of Legal Pluralism?), Maksymilian Del Mar (Legal Reasoning in Pluralist Jurisprudence), Cormac Mac Amhlaigh (Pluralising Constitutional Pluralism), Ralf Michaels (Law and Recognition—Toward a Relational Concept of Law), Sanne Takema (The Many Uses of Law), Joseph Raz (Why the State?), Detlef von Daniels (A Genealogical Perspective on Pluralist Jurisprudence), Stefan Sciaraffa (Two Conceptions of Pluralist Jurisprudence), Neil Walker (The Gap Between Global Law and Global Justice), Margaret Davies (Plural Pluralities of Law), Kirsten Anker (Postcolonial Jurisprudence and the Pluralist Turn), and Martin Krygier (Legal Pluralism and the Value of the Rule of Law). As their titles indicate, the essays cover a range of topics in relation to legal pluralism.
A central organizing theme of the collection, write Roughan and Halpin, is the contrast between monist and pluralist jurisprudence:
[T]raditional jurisprudence is municipal or state-centric jurisprudence. Even if it touches upon international law, it does so from a state centric-Westphalian perspective of viewing international law through the agency or authority of states. It remains, in that sense, monist. By contrast, pluralist jurisprudence involves the recognition of non-state law in a way that is independent of both the agency and the authority of states.
Pluralist jurisprudence recognizes the co-existence of multiple legal forms in social arenas with various sorts of relationships to state law and other forms of law, from integration, to mutual recognition, to fully autonomous and independent co-existence, to outright conflict, and further variations. In addition to state law, these co-existing forms of law mainly include indigenous or customary law, religious law, international law, transnational law, and human rights law.
Another reason to think this volume might signal a transition in jurisprudence is that, like Llewellyn’s piece, it has been preceded by a significant body of jurisprudential work focused on plural legal phenomena. Concepts of Law (2015), edited by Sean P. Donlan and Lukas Heckendorn Urscheler, focuses on legal pluralism from comparative, jurisprudential, and social scientific perspectives. Two recent jurisprudential works that discuss legal pluralism in connection with transnational law are Nicole Roughan’s Authorities: Conflict, Cooperation, and Transnational Legal Theory (2013) and Detlev von Daniels’s The Concept of Law from a Transnational Perspective (2010). Works on the topic by analytical jurisprudents include Keith Culver and Michael Giudice’s Legalities Borders: An Essay in General Jurisprudence (2010) and Emmanuel Melissaris’s Legal Theory and the Space for Legal Pluralism (2009). Early social legal theory works on legal pluralism include William Twining’s Globalisation and Legal Theory (2000) and my book, A General Jurisprudence of Law and Society (2001). To the foregoing list of books can be added several dozen theoretical articles on legal pluralism published in the past three decades.
A further reason to think In Pursuit of Pluralist Jurisprudence is a transformation-marking piece is that, like Llewellyn’s article, the topics taken up within pluralist jurisprudence relate to pressing contemporary legal, political, economic, cultural and social problems and phenomena. Previous generations of Western legal theorists arguably could disregard or overlook religious law, customary law, and indigenous law as marginal legal phenomena not worthy of serious jurisprudential attention—through these are primary forms of law in many parts of the world—but major legal transformations wrought by contemporary globalization can no longer be ignored. A pluralistic jurisprudence is better equipped to deal with the issues of the day than a jurisprudence built exclusively around the state.
Perhaps the most telling indication that this collection reflects a shift in jurisprudence is Joseph Raz’s contribution, Why the State? Raz acknowledges other forms of law, including “international law, or the law of organizations like the European Union, but also Canon Law, Sharia law, the law of native nations, the rules and regulations governing the activities of voluntary associations, or those of legally recognized corporations, and more[.]” Jurisprudence heretofore has focused almost exclusively on state law, he asserts, because until recently the state has been “the most extensive law-like system that is independent or free from external constraints.” Today, however, state law is increasingly subject to external legal constraints by intrusions from transnational law, international law, and human rights law. Raz concludes: the “exclusive concentration on state law was, it now turns out, never justified, and is even less justified today.” This essay represents a remarkable turnaround for Raz, who for decades has advanced a universalistic theory of law built on the state law model.
Whether this collection marks a genuine shift in jurisprudence cannot be known until some time has passed. The contours of what a pluralistic jurisprudence might or should look like are unclear and the contributions to this collection raise many complex questions that go unresolved. Upon completing this volume, a reader may well be left with a disorienting sense of conceptual messiness that recognition of legal pluralism brings, and instead long for the relative clarity of the focus on state law. Discarding this longstanding dominant focus sets jurisprudents adrift with no obvious replacement or mooring. Rather than new approaches, it may turn out, existing jurisprudential theories (like legal positivism) can account for legal pluralism with relatively minor adjustments. Or perhaps entirely novel jurisprudential frameworks must be developed. Whatever occurs, this collection leaves little doubt that jurisprudents must now seriously consider and account for other coexisting legal forms besides state law.
Apr 26, 2018 W.A. Edmundson
This concise and lucid book “is a summary of our current collective understanding of the method by which some societies decide who would govern them.…” (P. VIII.) The author is a professor of politics and economics at NYU, and an esteemed authority in the field of political economy. The book could not be timelier: many of us simply cannot understand how elections got us to where we are now. Bafflement can beget both anger and apathy. Much of the collective social-scientific understanding Przeworski relates will be deflating even for those who have already cast aside illusions. Nonetheless, he urges us to keep on bothering.
The book begins with a reminder that “elections are a modern phenomenon.” (P. 13.) The first national legislative election was held in 1788, to the United States Congress. Since then, elections have become an almost universal norm: today, “all but a handful of countries have legislatures elected by universal [qualified] suffrage and chief executives either elected in popular elections or indirectly by elected parliaments.” (P. 17.) The elections boom was accompanied by, and surely to some degree motivated by, the Rousseavian aspiration to reconcile humankind’s innate freedom with the fact that coercive government is here to stay. This yearning for self-government finds its expression in the rituals of popular elections.
Election rituals vary widely in their forms. Przeworki explains the differences between parliamentary, presidential, and “semi-presidential” electoral systems, and between proportional representation and first-past-the-post methods of composing a legislative assembly. The latter rules tend to determine how many political parties are viable: according to “Duverger’s Law,” presidential systems tend to be two-party, and parliamentary systems to be multi-party. The United States is unusual in using first-past-the-post in a presidential system, and unique among presidential systems in its indirect mode of electing presidents. The upshot is the permanent possibility of a divided government in which a legislative majority opposes a president, and the further possibility that such a president lacks the support of a popular plurality even when elected.
Madison wrote, in Federalist #10, that “the dangers to the holders of property can not be disguised, if they are undefended against a majority without property,” or even against a majority with less property than it thinks fair. This, Przeworki adds, is one thing on which conservatives and socialists have long agreed. Election systems have been devised in various ways to defang the threat while preserving the myth of popular —rather than propertied—sovereignty. The obvious expedient of excluding the unpropertied from the franchise has almost disappeared. Over the two and a half centuries of the electoral era, universal adult suffrage has steadily become the norm all across the globe. But economic inequality persists, and increases, even as formal political equality has become the norm. Why?
Various devices, such as indirect rather than direct election of representatives, tend to entrench incumbents and, with them, the status quo. Counter-majoritarian institutions—such as the presidential veto and judicial review— dampen majority power. The historical trend is toward constitutional judicial review and central-bank independence of the electorate. Another device is a super-majoritarian voting requirement, which bicameralism, in effect, is. Przeworski reports an estimate that congressional legislation needs to have 75% support across the two chambers in order to succeed. (Compare Article V’s requirement a valid constitutional amendment must be ratified by that three-quarters of the states.) With caveats, Przeworski offers “a conjecture about the mechanisms that drive this history. Given the extant trenches, those in power make concessions either when they face a foreboding threat from without or when some of them expect to improve their competitive position by finding allies among those currently excluded [and] whenever particular trenches are conquered, the elites find substitutes to protect their interests. These cycles are repeated over and over.” (Pp. 45-46.) Przeworski does not mention mass incarceration, penal disenfranchisement, and voter ID laws as instances of these obstacles, but he does note the curious fact that of the modern industrialized nations only the US holds national elections on a workday.
Incumbents win, on average, four times out of five. Rejecting more benign explanations, Przeworski suggests that the advantages of incumbency itself account for their success in getting themselves re-elected. He recounts an experience he had one winter living Chicago, trying to get authorities to free his car from the ice encasing it. Calling the City got no response, so his wife called the Democratic precinct captain. “He was at our door in minutes, pointing out that we had not voted in the last municipal election.” (P. 58.) Przeworski instantly gave the expected assurances. Problem solved. Obviously, this anecdote does not itself explain the incumbent advantage. Partisan “clientism” is not so blatant in other US cities; but studies of campaign contributions show that there is an incumbent advantage here, too. Is contribution the reported “pro quo” that indicates an implicit “quid” that the public at large can only guess at?
Przeworski is cautious about the widely held view that money in politics is mainly what stands between us and more representative government: “to date, no consensus has been reached regarding the effectiveness of campaign spending on vote shares.” (P. 65.) Nevertheless, he endorses his colleague Ann Harvey’s finding that “removal of state limits on campaign financing in the United States led to increased Republican vote shares and the election of more conservative candidates.” (P. 66.) But the real problem is structural: “Private ownership of productive resources limits the range of outcomes that can ensue from the democratic process … crucial economic decisions, those affecting employment and investment, are a private prerogative.” (P. 74.) Campaign spending limits don’t touch that.
How do democracies and autocracies compare in terms of economic performance? Autocracies tend to occupy the tails of the bell curve: “while the fastest-growing economies tend to be poor autocracies, so are the economic basket cases.” (P. 101.) Przeworski reports that at any given level of total output, democracies exhibit higher wages better life-expectancy, and lower economic volatility. But he sees an ominous development in the combination of stagnant median income growth and dramatically increased inequality in the democracies: “the erosion of the belief in intergradational [sic] progress may well be historically unprecedented and its political consequences are ominous.” (P. 99.) How have elections allowed this to occur?
Assume majority rule is in force, and the distribution of wealth is on the voting agenda. If we assume further that everyone votes according to self-interest and nothing else (i.e., no one cares what her relative share is), the so-called “median-voter theorem” tells us that the resulting distribution of wealth will tend to equate to that of the the voter whose wealth is such that half of the electorate has more and half has less. Thus, “the coexistence of universal suffrage with economic inequality is hard to fathom.” (P. 104.) Yet, surprisingly, “at every level of per capita income, the extent of inequality is not lower in democracies than in autocracies.” (P. 105.) And he reports the astonishing further fact that although “democratic governments redistribute more income … as income inequality increases from very low to intermediate levels, …they redistribute less as inequality increases once it is already high.” (P. 105 and Fig. 10.1) In other words, across a range of different democracies, low levels of inequality tend to call forth mitigating efforts to dampen further inequality, but high inequality leads to ever higher inequality. Dismissing various other explanations, Przeworski concludes that “the main culprit is that people are not politically equal in economically unequal societies” —meaning, in economically unequal “democratic” societies. (P. 106) Merely formal political equality does not prevent massive inequality of political influence in conditions of high economic inequality; and as substantive political inequality increases, so too does the economic inequality that begat it: “a vicious circle.” (P. 111.)
Elections neither presuppose, nor do they tend to promote, either political or economic equality. As economic inequality increases, elections do less and less to brake it. Nonetheless, elections make civic peace possible. How is this? Przeworski observes that elections facilitate peaceful transitions of power only if the stakes are not too high for the incumbent. “Just imagine that the … incumbent fears that if he loses the forthcoming election, he will exit the office through a window.” (P. 49.) Competitive elections presuppose more than tolerating opposition: they also presuppose that the incumbent may relinquish power without anxiety. Ordinary politics must be low-stakes politics, in this sense. Once the election habit has taken hold, it becomes stronger with each cycle. The “outs” know their turn will come and the “ins” know that if turned out they will be allowed to win themselves back in. So long as the populace also retains its faith in “intergradational progress,” the electoral stakes stay manageably low for all, and the election habit strengthens with repetition.
But, as Przeworski indicates, confidence in intergradational progress is eroding in the western democracies. And his analysis suggests a latent dilemma. The opposition, to be genuine, must give voice to discontent; and, to be effective, it must stoke discontent. But the election habit is based on an unspoken promise of amnesty for the incumbent rascal. Otherwise, an incumbent, who faces the prospect of prison for perceived crimes, will self-defensively misuse the incumbent’s advantage to rig (if not abort) the election process. Where amnesty is the norm, as it must be to keep the stakes low, elections can do little to check top-level official corruption and simony, which can be expected ever to increase unless some breaking point exists. On the other hand, once the amnesty norm is breached, elections cease to be the low-stakes affairs that orderly transitions of power presuppose.
Przeworki, in concluding, reassuringly dismisses the possibility of democracy collapsing in wealthy countries where the election habit has taken hold. But he is concerned about “deterioration” —“although we should not be desperate, we should also not be sanguine. Something profound is going on.” (P. 132). Anyone who shares this concern would do well to bother with this illuminating book.
Mar 28, 2018 Brian Bix
Stanley L. Paulson,
Metamorphosis in Hans Kelsen’s Legal Philosophy, 80
Modern L. Rev. 860 (2017), available at
SSRN.
Though Hans Kelsen is arguably the best-known and most influential legal philosopher of the 20th century world-wide, he is not especially well known among American scholars, and when his work is discussed in this country, it is often misunderstood. One scholar who has worked tirelessly for decades to make Kelsen better known and better understood on these shores is Stanley L. Paulson. He has (with the help of Bonnie Litschewski Paulson) translated Kelsen’s works, written numerous articles summarizing and evaluating Kelsen’s work, and translated and compiled other significant commentaries on Kelsen. Paulson’s most recent article, “Metamorphosis in Hans Kelsen’s Legal Philosophy,” (a) explains the neo-Kantian approach of most of Kelsen’s works (Pp. 876-880), (b) discerns certain weaknesses in the argument (Pp. 880-881, 893), and (c) investigates when and why Kelsen ultimately abandoned a neo-Kantian approach, and also changed his views about the application of logic to (legal) norms (Pp. 861-865, 882-892).
Anglo-American legal scholars are accustomed to a more empirical and pragmatic approach to philosophy in general, and to the study of law in particular, which is why H. L. A. Hart’s approach has been well received. What has made Kelsen’s works so difficult for us is that his best-known writings are grounded in a very different approach, one based on Kant’s transcendental argument. As Paulson explains, Kelsen’s neo-Kantian argument goes along the following lines: We need to ask what follows from the fact that we (or “legal science”) view the acts of officials as valid legal norms. The mystery is grounded in the fact that the actions of officials are in the empirical realm (facts about what legislators, judges, administrators, and other officials have done or said), while legal rules are in the normative (non-empirical) realm. A standard philosophical view is that normative conclusions cannot be derived from strictly empirical premises.
Kelsen died in 1973; a lengthy manuscript that he left unfinished was published posthumously in 1979, with an English translation appearing in 1991. That work caused a sensation among legal theorists, because it involved a sharp departure from Kelsen’s longstanding neo-Kantian approach to understanding law. In that final work, Kelsen presented his “Basic Norm” now as a fiction (in the spirit of Hans Vaihinger’s work, and offered an approach based on skeptical empiricism, in the spirit of David Hume.
In the present article, Paulson shows that Kelsen’s break in fact occurred in 1960, many years before his death, and, more surprisingly, that this break in fact had a precursor, in some of Kelsen’s writings in 1939-1940 (Pp. 885-892). Paulson argues that Kelsen’s switch from Kant to Hume may have been tied to a different dispute, regarding whether it makes sense to apply logic to norms.
Paulson’s article ultimately makes a great deal about the transformations in Kelsen’s views clearer, but, in the process, creates new mysteries. For example, the switch away from neo-Kantian views in 1939 and 1960 is left clearer than the return to that approach in 1941, and its continued use until 1960. Paulson speculates (P. 891) that Kelsen’s return to his neo-Kantian approach in 1941 may have been due to his practical circumstances (in exile from Europe, looking for a permanent position), but more may be needed to explain his persistence with that approach for two more decades.
For those who wish to study Kelsen (with or without the post-1960 works), Paulson’s publications, including the present article, are the best places to start.
Mar 7, 2018 Andrew Halpin
This is a shaggy dog jot. It starts in the conventional way by identifying a recent piece of work that is recommended for the attention of the reader. However, in the course of justifying that recommendation there is a series of diversions to other works, which distracts from any sustained understanding of where exactly the virtue of the piece is to be found. But, like a shaggy dog story which finally reveals its point, there does eventually emerge a point to the recommendation; although, as with the simile, not the point that might have been anticipated.
The work cited is a response by Gerald Postema to critics in a symposium on the volume covering common-law legal philosophy in the twentieth century he has contributed to Springer’s multi-volume Treatise of Legal Philosophy and General Jurisprudence. Within his coverage of that subject matter, Postema cites an article as a resource for unpacking the notion of true philosophy (vera philosophia) which he then utilizes in his own assessment of the achievements of common-law legal philosophy. This article by Donald Kelley in the 1976 Journal of the History of Philosophy, has not, as far as I am aware, received much attention in mainstream Jurisprudence; and I have failed to uncover any real enthusiasm for it within more exclusive, niche jurisprudential concerns. It is, nevertheless, central to our present concerns.
The recent availability of Postema’s volume in a far more affordable paperback version appears to have provoked discussion in the review pages of the core understanding of legal philosophy expounded by Postema in that work. Notably, Kevin Walton has challenged the basis of Postema’s evaluation of the failings of common-law legal philosophy, and has in turn offered his own account of at least a virtuous legal philosophy (if not an account of true philosophy) by which the efforts of legal philosophers can be measured. Postema has responded to Walton’s criticism (Pp. 611-12), providing us with further thoughts on where the value of legal philosophy is to be found. The disagreement between Postema and Walton turns on how, and the extent to which, legal philosophy has attained the status of a “sociable science”. This alternative depiction of what can be expected to be achieved by Jurisprudence, picked up by Walton, had been amplified in an article by Postema in the 2015 Virginia Law Review, subsequent to the initial publication of his Treatise volume.
There is a close connection in Postema’s writing between a sociable science and vera philosophia, as signalling the appropriate aspiration for Jurisprudence. However described, the aspiration finds fulfillment in engagement with the matters that are core to understanding the human social condition. The debate between Postema and Walton fixes on which of these matters have been taken into account by twentieth-century anglophone legal philosophy, and the level of emphasis they have received. Their discussion also encompasses the extent to which legal philosophy has been receptive to the contributions of related disciplines in constructing a full and informative picture of sociability.
At this point, the prized accolade of vera philosophia appears attainable in different ways by Jurisprudence. Either by displaying an adequate grasp of its appropriate subject matter (sociability), or through a willingness to borrow from adjoining disciplines their coverage of the subject matter. Seen in this way, the prize might equally be offered to other disciplines, if only they provide adequate coverage, or form suitable alliances, to deal effectively with their own particular subject matters.
On returning to Kelley’s article, we find a different criterion for awarding the honour of vera philosophia to Jurisprudence. It is not on the basis of effective coverage, but on the provision of singular insight. Postema cites Kelley’s article in advancing a noble philosophical vision for Jurisprudence contrasted with a narrow perspective on law found in blinkered professionalism – taking this to be the perspective of the iurisperiti (those merely learned in the law, or unthinking lawyers) in the denunciation from Budé that Kelley quotes. More than that is found in Kelley’s article in distinguishing the true calling of vera philosophia. Kelley also quotes the words of Louis le Caron (at 270), to make the point that it is also to be distinguished from mere philosophy: “true philosophy is contained in the books of law and not in the useless and inarticulate libraries of philosophers, who in effect are men of great learning but incompetent in public affairs”.
On this account, Jurisprudence is not prized because it displays virtues that any branch of learning might attain. Far from it. Jurisprudence is distinct from general philosophy precisely because it can offer the insights that philosophy misses. The idea emerging from Kelley’s survey of renaissance jurisprudence that Jurisprudence might have a unique perspective to offer between mere practice and mere philosophy is a tantalizing one. It seems plausible to suggest, on the one hand, that some kind of deeper theoretical reflection on the practice of law in regulating the social condition might yield more illumination than unthinking adherence to practice, while suggesting on the other hand that lofty philosophical speculation uninformed by a practical grounding is likely to be limited in the insight it can deliver.
It is one thing to state this as an aspiration for Jurisprudence; it is quite another thing to realize it. Kelley’s article, to be blunt, does not get us beyond reporting an aspiration that culminated in the sixteenth century. There is no evidence for supposing that such an exalted aspiration for Jurisprudence was maintained over succeeding centuries, either in the common-law world or in the civil-law world, as the relevant volumes of the Treatise reveal. Instead of providing the clarity of vera philosophia to inform us of the human social condition, Jurisprudence or legal philosophy has fragmented into discordant voices. In his general editorial preface to volumes 9 and 10 of the Treatise, Enrico Pattaro suggests that one can detect different versions of legal philosophy, which he attributes to general philosophers, jurists, and legal philosophers in a narrow sense. More recently, quite bitter rivalries have surfaced between those who see Jurisprudence as, or not (just) as, legal philosophy.
One possible clue to explaining this state of affairs is furnished by another of Donald Kelley’s works. In The Problem of Knowledge and the Concept of Discipline, Kelley suggests that the real factors shaping the substance of a discipline are to be found in the attitudes of those who exhibit mastery of the discipline and influence “disciples”. Different masters, different disciples, divided disciplines. If that line of argument is accepted, then one might reasonably question the value of noting efforts by its masters of a bygone age to elevate the discipline of Jurisprudence to a status it never actually achieved. And at the same time, question the emphasis given in a jot to an article that notes this very thing.
On further reflection, however, if we do take seriously Kelley’s thesis in his later piece, over the responsibility of the masters of a discipline for shaping the ambition and scope of that discipline, then it might after all be relevant to have our attention drawn to an era when those leading the discipline had a far more ambitious vision for Jurisprudence than it enjoys today.
Cite as: Andrew Halpin,
A Story of Jurisprudence and True Philosophy, JOTWELL
(March 7, 2018) (reviewing Gerald J. Postema,
The Perils and Prospects of Critical History: Comments on Bernal, Naffine, Vatter, and Walton, 8
Jurisprudence 609 (2017)),
https://juris.jotwell.com/story-jurisprudence-true-philosophy/.
Jan 16, 2018 Brian Bix
William Blackstone was for a long time one of the central figures of both British and American legal thought. His Commentaries on the Laws of England was the text by which many learned law in England. In the United States, Blackstone was equally authoritative, though often read with additional commentary (e.g., by St. George Tucker).
Blackstone’s Commentaries has also played a significant role within legal theory—especially for theorists critical of certain features of the approach to adjudication and judicial reasoning that he espoused and are large parts of Anglo-American tradition. Criticism of Blackstone and his Commentaries is, for example, integral to much of Jeremy Bentham’s writings on law. Bentham was an opponent of judicial law-making in general and the common law approach in particular. In a small piece called “Truth versus Ashurst” he compared the way that common law judges make law to the way people make laws for their dogs: “When your dog does anything you want to break him of, you wait till he does it, and then beat him for it.” This attack on the unpredictability and retroactivity of common law decision-making remains important to the present day.
Bentham’s student, John Austin, also made a famous attack on natural law theory, using a passage in the Commentaries as his stalking horse. Blackstone stated that “no human laws are of any validity if contrary to [the law of nature].” Austin countered that “to say that human laws which conflict with the Divine Law are not binding, that is to say, are not laws, is to talk stark nonsense. The most pernicious laws, and therefore those which are most opposed to the will of God, have been and are continually enforced by judicial tribunals.” To Austin, Blackstone’s approach to legal reasoning—and hence many aspects of Anglo-American judicial tradition—conflated what the law is with what it ought to be.
In more recent work, Duncan Kennedy, a critical legal theorist, offered an extended discussion of Blackstone as the occasion for propounding his idea of “the fundamental contradiction.” This is a contradiction he perceives between individual liberty and the community coercion that both safeguards and threatens it. Kennedy used details from the Commentaries to support the conclusion that there is this ongoing “contradiction” in law and government.
As these examples show, Blackstone’s work has provided both a guidepost for a great amount of Anglo-American judicial practice and an object of criticism for a wide array of jurisprudential thinkers concerned with aspects of those traditions.
Until recently, those who wanted to study or cite to Blackstone’s Commentaries usually made use of a very good 1979 University of Chicago Press edition (Stanley N. Katz, ed.), which was a facsimile of the (1765-1769) first edition of the Commentaries. While this version of the Commentaries remains good enough for many purposes, the new Oxford University Press edition has significant advantages for those who want to dive deeper into Blackstone’s text, with particular attention to historical context and how Blackstone varied his text over the various editions up to the ninth (and first posthumous) edition (1783). Each volume of the new OUP Commentaries contains a helpful introduction by a different historical expert in the field (David Lemmings for Book I — Of the Rights of Persons; Simon Stern for Book II — Of the Rights of Things; Thomas P. Gallanis for Book III — Of Private Wrongs; and Ruth Paley for Book IV — Of Public Wrongs), along with the varia, and helpful tables of statutes and cases mentioned in Blackstone’s text, at the end of each volume.
Blackstone’s Commentaries remain a central source for understanding both historical and modern Anglo-American law – as well as many debates in Anglo-American legal philosophy – and Oxford University Press’s new edition of the Commentaries offers a valuable new resource for studying them.
Cite as: Brian Bix,
A New Blackstone, JOTWELL
(January 16, 2018) (reviewing William Blackstone,
Commentaries on the Laws of England (Ruth Paley & Wilfrid Prest eds., Oxford University Press, 2016)),
https://juris.jotwell.com/a-new-blackstone/.
Dec 18, 2017 Sean Coyle
Sylvie Delacroix,
Law and Habits, 37
Oxford J. of Legal Stud. 660 (2017), available at
SSRN.
The article begins by considering two theses from H.L.A Hart: thesis 1) a legal system can be based on official acceptance alone; thesis 2) such a system is particularly conducive to a society that is deplorably sheeplike. The author argues that (2) is correct but (1) is unhelpful or wrong. Hart spells out the sheeplike tendency when he speaks of ‘an unreflecting inherited or traditional attitude, or the mere wish to do as others do.’ The author wants to interrogate the idea of “acceptance”, and to switch the focus from social practices to the habits (patterns of repeated behaviour) that underpin the practices. Hart, it is said, sought to bridge the gap between habits as a social fact and law as social rules, by the concept of acceptance.
The author states that an “emphasis on the necessity to grow out of the habitual through critical reasoning translates a key assumption that structures all non-naturalist accounts of ethical agency: there is a fundamental discontinuity between the natural and the ethical.” She defends a type of moral naturalism that gives a central place to habit. For, quoting Hans Fink, “nature is never mere nature.” There follows an interesting account of the position of habits (or social facts) in the philosophy of thinkers such as Railton, McDowell and Leiter. In short, the account “highlight[s] the extent to which one’s understanding of habit reflects one’s meta-ethical understanding of agency.” For example, if one’s notion of autonomy requires “transcending one’s causal environment,” then habits “belong firmly to the province of sociology.” On the other hand, a naturalist interpretation of human agency will regard habits not only as conditioning but as enabling “normative choices.” Hart himself maintained an “agnostic meta-ethical position” in which he utilized habits only as a means of more clearly opposing them to rule-governed practices.
Two strategies were open to Hart: the first, a Wittgensteinian approach, which seeks to demonstrate that rule-following’s bedrock is “simply what we do.” The second is a Weberian approach which conjectures a continuum from usage, custom, convention and finally legal order (which may then in turn lead to new habits and custom formation). This two-way relationship of law and habit is then subjected to an enlightening analysis in the article’s middle section.
The general question of habits is important also in relation to Raz’s service conception of authority. Where the law successfully claims authority, it gives us reasons for action that displace a range of dependent reasons and therefore simplifies our practical reasoning. But this tendency of the law leads to a situation in which it is the law that forms the basis of habit, allowing us precisely to avoid reasoning, and act out of habit: we become like sheep. Thus ever fewer people will maintain that critical standpoint toward the law that is necessary for it to retain its authority: the sense that the law does indeed better enable us to comply with demands of right reason.
Returning to Hart, the article’s final conclusion is that “a theory of law that dismisses the importance of habits ends up with a poorer concept of ethical agency and a concomitantly truncated account of legal normativity.”
Nov 15, 2017 Edward Rubin
Empirical studies are often regarded as having less cachet than theory, and the circuit courts certainly have less cachet than the Supreme Court, so an empirical study of the circuit courts might be expected to rank somewhat low in the academic pecking order. But this article belongs at the top. A survey and analysis of all the federal Court of Appeals decisions from 2003 to 2013 that refer to the Chevron doctrine – some 2,272 of them – it reveals the actual operation and significance of this most famous of modern administrative law decisions. The Supreme Court invokes Chevron fairly regularly, of course, but often for the purpose of modifying it. In any case, Supreme Court decisions tend to be so politically charged that they frequently seem sui generis, a characteristic that provided the Court itself, in King v. Burwell, with still one more basis for modifying Chevron doctrine. It is in the circuit courts that the quotidian work of administrative law is carried out, and that is the pudding where the proof of Chevron‘s real impact can be found.
The most basic conclusion that Professors Barnett and Walker reach is that Chevron makes a difference. Contrary to prior empirical studies of Chevron‘s impact in the Supreme Court (“Chevron Supreme,” as the authors call it, since wordplay with the decision’s name is difficult to resist), they find that the win rate for the agencies in a circuit court (“Chevron Regular”) is substantially higher when the court invokes the Chevron doctrine. At 77%, it is fully 20% higher than the win rate when the court invokes Skidmore. To be sure, this is hardly a surprising conclusion, and thus lacks the counter-intuitive allure that some of the best empirical studies offer. But it is a conclusion reached only after a massive amount of careful effort and it represents an important contribution to our knowledge about Chevron’s real impact.
Moreover, Professors Barnett and Walker go beyond this basic conclusion to ask a number of important and intriguing questions about the pattern of the decisions. Distinguishing between cases decided at Chevron step one and step two, they find that when the case is decided at step one, the agency wins at a much lower rate than at step two, but nonetheless in a respectable 39% of the decisions, essentially the same as its win rate when the court employs a de novo standard. This suggests, although it does not prove, that Chevron‘s two-step formulation is more coherent and more principled that its critics claim. Counting against the coherence of Chevron, however (and the authors are admirably neutral in reaching and reporting their conclusions) is the differential treatment of the doctrine by the circuit courts, something that only a study of this sort could reveal. In cases where the court invoked Chevron, the agency won 83% of the time in the First Circuit, but only 66% of the time in the Ninth, a startling differential. This variance might be the result of applying Chevron at different rates, and here too there are dramatic differences, from 89% of the cases in the D.C. Circuit where the doctrine was at issue to 61% in the Sixth Circuit. It might be imagined, by proponents of the doctrine, that these two variables would balance out, but that is not the case. Constructing a composite score of three different measurements (win rates for agencies, frequency with which Chevron is applied, and win rate when Chevron is applied), the authors found that the First Circuit scored 8.38 on a ten-point scale while the Ninth Circuit scored 6.85.
There are a number of other intriguing distinctions in the pattern of decisions that Professors Barnett and Walker are able to derive from their data. When the composite score for subject matter and particular agencies are computed, equally dramatic variations appear. The score, and thus the impact of the Chevron doctrine, is highest in the field of telecommunications (8.67), and also high in education and entitlement programs (8.15 and 8.14). It is lowest for civil rights (5.99) and similarly low in housing and prison cases (6.04 and 6.64). Agencies that receive high levels of deference include the ICC (9.38), the FCC (8.67) and the NLRB (8.26); those that fare worst are the EEOC (5.08), HUD (5.19), the FTC (6.74) and the Bureau of Prisons (6.79). It is difficult to determine whether these variations reveal that the Chevron doctrine operates in a coherent fashion; that would depend on the wording of the authorizing statutes and perhaps that level of expertise that the authorization demands. This study cannot answer those questions, as the authors readily acknowledge, but it provides a framework by which the answers can be explored in future work.
Chevron, the insignia of modern administrative law, has fueled reconsideration of the relationship of Congress, the executive and the judiciary. The actual impact of the decision, however, has often been the subject of crude generalizations. By distilling the results of the circuit court decisions that invoke this doctrine, Professors Barnett and Walker provide a more refined account of the doctrine’s development, and have thus performed a valuable service to the entire field of administrative law.
Oct 6, 2017 Kenneth Himma
Luka Burazin,
Can There be an Artifact Theory of Law?, 29
Ratio Juris 385 (2016), available at
SSRN.
It seems clear that, on any plausible general theory of law, the institutions and content of law are manufactured by human beings for the purpose of regulating human behavior and are, thus, properly understood as social artifacts. Positivism, of course, is committed to the idea that the existence and content of law owes entirely to human social activity. But it is not unreasonable to think that law is an artifact on even the strongest natural law view. According to this view, the law consists of those properly enacted norms that conform to objective moral requirements. Although there are, thus, necessary moral constraints on what counts as law, it nonetheless seems reasonable to characterize law, on this view, as an artifact. The construction and operation of more familiar concrete artifacts, such as clocks, are constrained by laws of physics yet are paradigmatically artifacts; the situation seems not much different, from the standpoint of legal theory, with socially constructed law that is constrained by moral norms.
Despite its conspicuous theoretical significance, the artifactual nature of law has not, until comparatively recently, received a great deal of attention from legal theorists. In Can There be an Artifact Theory of Law, Luka Burazin sets out to remedy this omission by giving a brief outline of an artifact theory of law. Burazin attempts to identify the implications of the claim that law is an artifact, as well as sketch what an adequate “artifact theory of law” might look like. Burazin’s analysis in this excellent paper is concerned only with law qua legal system (as opposed to law qua norm) presumably because the normative output of an institutional artifact, like a legal system, must also be artifacts.
On Burazin’s view, the nature of social artifacts, unlike the nature of natural occurring objects, is determined by the intentional states of certain persons who can be thought of as “authors,” which also determine the content of the corresponding concepts. Burazin’s insightful analysis incorporates Risto Hilpinen’s explication of the concept of an artifact, which Hilpinen defines as “an object that has been intentionally made or produced for a certain purpose.”
Accordingly, an artifact must, on this definition, have some kind of characteristic use. Insofar as a legal system is an artifact, and insofar as every artifact has a purpose that depends on human intentional states, every legal system has a purpose that depends on the collective intentional states of those who create and sustain its existence through their lawmaking and adjudicative activities.
A legal system is, according to Burazin’s artifact theory of law, “Created by authors who have a particular intention to create the institutional artifact ‘legal system,’ based on the author’s substantive and substantively correct concept of what the legal system is, under the condition that this intention be largely successfully realized.” (P. 397.) As an abstract institutional object, the existence of a legal system requires the collective recognition of some social group. On a positivism view, the “authors” of the legal system are officials who “recognize” the legal system by practicing the rule of recognition. But citizens also play a role, albeit less direct, in providing the requisite collective recognition: what is required of citizens, on a Hartian view, is that their behavior generally conforms to the rules validated by the conventional rule of recognition.
Here it is important to note that, on an artifact theory of law, the set of “authors” of the legal system will change over time as one set of officials and citizens are replaced by another set in a stable legal system. Unlike a light bulb, which was invented by one determinate author, a legal system is sustained by a set of individuals which changes over time; the sustained existence of a legal system is thus determined by the same factors that determine its creation. Indeed, one might, without much distortion, think of the existence of a legal system as sustained over time by exactly the same activities that are thought to create it. Creation and sustainment are two sides of the same coin, on an artifact theory of law.
One might think that legal systems can arise without being intentionally created, but Burazin correctly rejects this possibility: “Since legal systems are undoubtedly highly complex institutional artifacts, it seems strange to claim that such complex entities could emerge (wholly) unintentionally, as is sometimes the case with ordinary artifacts (e.g., a fortuitously created medicine).” (P. 399.)
It is worth noting that Burazin’s essay provides just a sketch of an artifact theory that would need to be fleshed out in considerably more detail to be fully articulated, but the importance of this project should be quite clear. If law is, by nature, an artifact, then a conceptual theory of law cannot be successful without including the appropriate elements of a plausible theory of artifacts. Just as the nature of a gun cannot be fully explained without explicitly recognizing that it is an artifact, the nature of a legal system cannot be fully explained without explicitly recognizing that it is an artifact. The explication of a legal system’s artifactuality will, of course, be more complicated and abstract than the explication of a gun’s artifactuality because a legal system, unlike a gun, is an abstract institutional object that persists over time through the same activities that explain its coming into existence in the first place.
