Yearly Archives: 2018

After Legal Positivism

Jul 24, 2018 Dennis PattersonAdd a Comment

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 theory¹ —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 law² and an equally impressive book on global constitutionalism³ —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.”⁴ (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 Fish⁵ and his embrace of a skeptical reading of Wittgenstein on rule-following.⁶ But these are minor blemishes on an otherwise compelling and engaging work.⁷

Hohfeld and Property

Jun 27, 2018 Michael GreenAdd a Comment

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.

The Turn to Pluralist Jurisprudence

May 30, 2018 Brian TamanahaAdd a Comment

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,¹ 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 Pound²) 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.³

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[.]”⁴ 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.”⁵ 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.”⁶ This essay represents a remarkable turnaround for Raz, who for decades has advanced a universalistic theory of law built on the state law model.⁷

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.⁸ 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.

It Can’t Happen Here, Has It?

Apr 26, 2018 W.A. Edmundson1 comment

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.

The Transformation in Kelsen’s Last Works

Mar 28, 2018 Brian BixAdd a Comment

Though Hans Kelsen is arguably the best-known and most influential legal philosopher of the 20^th 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.See D. A. Jeremy Telman, Hans Kelsen in America – Selected Affinities and the Mysteries of Academic Influence (2016). 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,See, e.g., Hans Kelsen, Introduction to the Problems of Legal Theory (Bonnie Litschewski Paulson & Stanley L. Paulson, trans.,1992). written numerous articles summarizing and evaluating Kelsen’s work, and translated and compiled other significant commentaries on Kelsen.See, e.g., Stanley L. Paulson & Bonnie Litschewski Paulson, Normativity and Norms: Critical Perspectives on Kelsenian Themes (1998). 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.See, e.g., H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford, 2012). 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.Hans Kelsen, General Theory of Norms (Michael Hartney, trans., 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 workSee Hans Vaihinger, Philosophy of “As If” (C. K. Ogden, trans., 1965). “The acts of will of legal organs are to be treated as if they could be understood normatively, not empirically.” (P. 884, footnote omitted)., 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.