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Natural Law And The Cultivation Of Legal Rhetoric, Francis J. Mootz Iii
Natural Law And The Cultivation Of Legal Rhetoric, Francis J. Mootz Iii
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This essay appeared in a book celebrating Lon Fuller's contributions to jurisprudence. In it, Professor Mootz argued that Fuller's conception of secular natural law, designated as an "internal morality of law," lends welcome assistance to the effort to articulate a new direction in legal philosophy. He defended Fuller's natural-law approach from the common misinterpretations that it is either a hollow echo of the natural law tradition or an essentialist conception of law at odds with the legal-realist world that he helped to create with his doctrinal scholarship. By reading his famous, "The Case of the Speluncean Explorers," in a new …
Law In Flux: Philosophical Hermeneutics, Legal Argumentation And The Natural Law Tradition, Francis J. Mootz Iii
Law In Flux: Philosophical Hermeneutics, Legal Argumentation And The Natural Law Tradition, Francis J. Mootz Iii
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Peter Goodrich describes the plight of contemporary legal theory with concise accuracy: We have abandoned natural law foundations originally constructed in ecclesiastical venues only to find that the project of developing a secular legal language capable of transforming the management of social conflict into questions of technical rationality is doomed to failure. The ascendancy of analytic legal positivism has purchased conceptual rigor at the cost of separating the analysis of legal validity from moral acceptability, but retreat from this stale conceptualism and a return to traditional natural law precepts appears wildly implausible. The irrelevance of the natural law tradition in …