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Freedom, Benefit And Understanding: Reflections On Laurence Claus's Critique Of Authority, John Finnis
Freedom, Benefit And Understanding: Reflections On Laurence Claus's Critique Of Authority, John Finnis
Journal Articles
Written for a symposium in the University of San Diego Law School in September 2013 on Laurence Claus, Law’s Evolution and Human Understanding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), this article appears in the final issue of volume 52 of the San Diego Law Review. With new illustrations and considerations suggested by the book, the article argues for a number of theses: “Because I/we say so” is never a reasonable ground or formulation of authoritative acts such as enactments or parental or other orders. The moral authority of rule makers is never peremptory in a binary (all or nothing) as …
Law As Fact And As Reason For Action: A Response To Robert Alexy On Law's 'Ideal Dimension', John M. Finnis
Law As Fact And As Reason For Action: A Response To Robert Alexy On Law's 'Ideal Dimension', John M. Finnis
Journal Articles
Robert Alexy’s 2013 Natural Law Lecture, published in vol. 58 of the American Journal of Jurisprudence, presents law as having two dimensions, ideal and real, and thus a dual nature, to be elucidated by a conceptual analysis distinguishing between the observer’s and the participant’s perspective. It argues on this basis for a “non-positivist” theory of law that is “inclusive” in that it classifies some unjust laws as laws, but not all (and is thus not “super-inclusive”); it rejects the “exclusive non-positivism” that would treat every injustice in a law’s making or content as excluding it from the class of valid …