Law Commons^™

Principled Adjudication: Tort Law And Beyond, Richard W. Wright

All Faculty Scholarship

The article briefly discusses the impossibility of a strict formalist or positivist approach to legal adjudication and the necessity and plausibility of a principled approach, according to which it is necessary to resort, explicitly or implicitly, to the principles underlying the positive expressions or sources of law to identify, interpret and apply the law, in easy as well as hard cases. The legitimacy of the principled approach crucially depends on resort to the community's moral principles as embedded in the existing law -- those moral principles which best explain as much as possible of the existing law -- rather than …