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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 …
A Process Theory Of Natural Law And The Rule Of Law In China, Mark C. Modak-Truran
A Process Theory Of Natural Law And The Rule Of Law In China, Mark C. Modak-Truran
Mark C Modak-Truran
The Rule of Law faces critical challenges both at home and abroad. At home, legal indeterminacy and the ontological gap between legal theory and practice defy resolution by contemporary normative theories of law. Legal indeterminacy raises the specter that judicial decisions in hard cases are illegitimate (political not legal) because judges must rely on personal political, moral, or religious beliefs. The “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), further reveals the irrelevance of legal theory (including conceptions of the rule of law) …
Beyond Theocracy And Secularism (Part I): Toward A New Paradigm For Law And Religion, Mark C. Modak-Truran
Beyond Theocracy And Secularism (Part I): Toward A New Paradigm For Law And Religion, Mark C. Modak-Truran
Mark C Modak-Truran
The continued vitality of religion has motivated many scholars in sociology, anthropology, political theory, international relations, and philosophy to revisit their assumptions about how religion relates to their disciplines. Despite this robust re-examination in other disciplines, two outmoded paradigms about the relationship between law and religion —theocracy (pre-modern) and secularism (modern)—continue to dominate legal theory. Under the modern paradigm, the secularization of law—that the law is or should be independent of any religious foundation or values—arguably constitutes the most widely-held but least-examined assumption in contemporary legal theory. My thesis is that two quandaries or crises for legal theory—legal indeterminacy and …
Secularization, Legal Indeterminacy, And Habermas's Discourse Theory Of Law, Mark C. Modak-Truran
Secularization, Legal Indeterminacy, And Habermas's Discourse Theory Of Law, Mark C. Modak-Truran
Mark C Modak-Truran
The unexpected vitality of religion has motivated scholars in many fields like anthropology, sociology, political science, international relations, and philosophy to revisit their assumptions about the supposed secularization of their disciplines. Despite this robust re-examination in other disciplines, the secularization of law arguably constitutes the most widely-held but least-examined assumption in contemporary legal theory. Legal scholars and philosophers have surprisingly ignored one exception—Jürgen Habermas’s discourse theory of law. Accordingly, this article focuses on Habermas’s sophisticated awareness of the tension between the secularization of law and legal indeterminacy and treats his discourse theory of law as a significant test of the …
Corrective Justice And The Revival Of Judicial Virtue, Mark C. Modak-Truran
Corrective Justice And The Revival Of Judicial Virtue, Mark C. Modak-Truran
Mark C Modak-Truran
Aristotle's discussion of corrective justice has been generally thought to mark the beginning of the philosophical examination of tort law. In addition, many scholars consider corrective justice, of one form or another, the main normative alternative to the economic analysis of law for explaining not only tort law but also private law and law in general. Most discussions of Aristotle’s conception of corrective justice in the law review literature, however, have failed to account for the established reading of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics as proposing a teleological form of ethics. Accordingly, Corrective Justice and the Revival of Judicial Virtue argues for …
Habermas's Discourse Theory Of Law And The Relationship Between Law And Religion, Mark C. Modak-Truran
Habermas's Discourse Theory Of Law And The Relationship Between Law And Religion, Mark C. Modak-Truran
Mark C Modak-Truran
Jürgen Habermas's discourse theory of law poignantly sets forth the modern legitimation crisis of law. Relying on Max Weber's social theory and sociology of law, he argues that the rationalization of society has eliminated religious and metaphysical justifications for law and has differentiated law from politics and morality. Law must now be legitimated based on its legality. The legal positivists (including Weber, H.L.A. Hart, John Austin) and John Finnis attempt to define legality merely in terms of procedural requirements. Habermas, however, demonstrates the circularity of this definition of legality. Legal positivists fail to legitimate the procedural requirements that are claimed …