Jurisprudence Commons^™

This article discusses what it means for a decision-maker to have a reason for a decision and to give that reason as a justification for the decision. Indeed, if the relationship is difficult to sort out at the individual, private level, it becomes even more complicated when we move to complex collective entities like public institutions. This is why we need to know under what conditions public institutions may 'have' reasons for their decisions. The article explores the hypothesis that proper ascriptions of reasons to institutions depend on whether they have formally adopted a common set of reasons. I contend …

This paper asks whether the notion of justification can play a unifying role comparable to that of explanation for the sciences. It argues that legal justification poses a challenge to the project of unifying sciences on the basis of justification. To be sure, lawyers import methodological requirements typical of scientific discourse into the law. In particular, following the Aristotelian doctrine of the syllogism and compelled by the popularity of the Deductive-Nomological models of explanation in the 20th century, they often claim to be using a deductivist conception of justification. In practice, however, the justification of legal decisions violates this conception …