Category Archives: Uncategorized
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.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.
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.”
