General Jurisprudence
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“What do you do when you do jurisprudence? Challenges and New Paths”
This upcoming roundtable at the UK chapter of the IVR (the international association for legal philosophy), organized by Daniel Murata (Surrey), will be online, for those who might be interested:
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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 first met Tom around 2002. I was a graduate student in Philosophy at UVA and dating someone who was…