Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Publication
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Law
Transparency And Determinacy In Common Law Adjudication: A Philosophical Defense Of Explanatory Economic Analysis, Jody S. Kraus
Transparency And Determinacy In Common Law Adjudication: A Philosophical Defense Of Explanatory Economic Analysis, Jody S. Kraus
Faculty Scholarship
Explanatory economic analysis of the common law has long been subject to deep philosophical skepticism for two reasons. First, common law decisions appear to be cast in the language of deontic morality, not the consequentialist language of efficiency. For this reason, philosophers have claimed that explanatory economic analysis cannot satisfy the transparency criterion, which holds that a legal theory's explanation must provide a plausible account of the relationship between the reasoning it claims judges actually use to decide cases and the express reasoning judges provide in their opinions. Philosophers have doubted that the economic analysis has a plausible account of …
Aesthetic Judgment And Legal Justification, Guyora Binder
Aesthetic Judgment And Legal Justification, Guyora Binder
Journal Articles
Although criticized as illegitimate, literary elements are necessary features of legal argument. In a modern liberal state, law motivates compliance by justifying controversial prescriptions as products of an appropriate process for representing the will of society. Yet because law constructs the will of individual and collective actors in representing them, its representations are necessarily figurative rather than mimetic. In evaluating law's representation of society, citizens of the liberal state are also shaping their own ends. Such self-expressive choices, subjective but non-instrumental, entail aesthetic judgment. Thus the literary elements of rhetorical figuration and aesthetic appeal are fundamental, rather than merely ornamental, …