General Jurisprudence
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Richard Stillman on the problem of theoretical disagreements
This will only interest my legal philosophy readers, but I do want to commend to their attention this paper by Richard Stillman, who trained as a philosopher of language with Stephen Neale before coming to Chicago to study law (and jurisprudence). He has identified something important about at least one subset of theoretical disagreements in…
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“From a Realist Point of View”: coming in March
That’s Thucydides on the cover! Readers will know some of the distinguished scholars kindly endorsing the book, but may not know the first two: Michel Troper is the preeminent French legal realist, who also introduced legal philosophy to French legal education in the 1970s (and was, I learned, a visiting professor here at Chicago a…
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Harvard student newspaper profiles Adrian Vermeule…
….but manages never to note that his feeble book Common-Good Constitutionalism (aptly dubbed “Twitter constitutionalism” by some colleagues) is full of jurisprudential claims that are either mistaken or unargued for. Vermeule’s repeated reference to “the classical tradition” is a reference to something that does not exist.
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Some questions and doubts about Greenberg’s “Moral Impact Theory of Law”
(The following grew out of a discussion with two Chicago students doing an "independent study" in advanced general jurisprudence: 3L Courtney Cox and 2L Phil Smoke. They are not responsible for what follows, but I was helped by discussing the paper with them.) Mark Greenberg (UCLA) has recently published a paper that synthesizes some of…
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Priel on “Towards Classical Legal Positivism”
Dan Priel (Osgoode) has posted a draft of this paper on SSRN. I assume it's an early draft, since there's lots of rhetorical excess and overreaching, and associated carelessness, but there is a core idea that is interesting and prima facie plausible and deserves attention and development. The idea is this: the "classical" positivists like Hobbes and…
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The Internal Point of View Strikes Again!
From The New Yorker, July 11 & 18, 2011, "The Financial Page: Dodger Mania," about corruption and tax cheats in Greece: Greek citizens also have what social scientists call very low "tax morale." In most developed countrie, tax-compliance rates are much higher than a calculation of risks would imply. We don't pay our taxes just…
I respond to this report here https://jasonstanleyantifascist.substack.com/p/on-the-philosophical-muddle-that