Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Law
Legitimation, Mark C. Modak-Truran
Legitimation, Mark C. Modak-Truran
Mark C Modak-Truran
This article identifies three different conceptions of legitimation - pre-modern, modern, and post-secular - that compete both within and across national boundaries for the coveted prize of informing the social imaginary regarding how the government and the law should be legitimated in constitutional democracies. Pre-modern conceptions of legitimation consider governments and rulers legitimate if they are ordained by God or if the political system is ordered in accordance with the normative cosmic order. Contemporary proponents of the pre-modern conception range from those in the United States who maintain that the government has been legitimated by the “Judeo-Christian tradition” to those …
Prolegomena To A Process Theory Of Natural Law, Mark C. Modak-Truran
Prolegomena To A Process Theory Of Natural Law, Mark C. Modak-Truran
Mark C Modak-Truran
Two contemporary quandaries in legal theory provide an occasion for a revival of interest in natural law theories of law. First, the debate about legal indeterminacy has made it clear that law cannot function autonomously—as a self-contained set of rules—but requires a normative justification of judges’ decisions in hard cases. In addition, Steven D. Smith has persuasively argued that there is an "ontological gap" between the practice of law, which presupposes a classical or religious ontology, and legal theory, which presupposes a scientific ontology (i.e., scientific materialism) that rejects religious ontology. This article demonstrates how the process philosophy of Alfred …