Law Commons^™

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 …