On the Nature of Necessary Truths in Jurisprudence: Putting Wittgensteinian Hinges to Use

2021 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 203-237
Author(s):  
Yi Tong
Keyword(s):  
Fundamental Nature ◽  
Joseph Raz ◽  
Necessary Truths ◽  
The Law

Inquiring into the fundamental nature of law has been traditionally formulated as an attempt to answer the question, “What is Law?” Such an inquiry typically proceeds by identifying the necessary features of law. Joseph Raz, for example, writes: A theory consists of necessary truths, for only necessary truths about the law reveal the nature of the law. We talk of ‘the nature of law’, or the nature of anything else, to refer to those of the law’s characteristics which are of the essence of law, which make law into what it is. That is those properties without which the law would not be law.1

Humanist Lawyer, Public Career: Thomas More and Conscience

Moreana ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 46 (Number 176) (1) ◽  
pp. 77-96
Author(s):  
Travis Curtright
Keyword(s):  
Liberal Arts ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
Fundamental Nature ◽  
Rhetorical Studies ◽  
The Law ◽  
Public Career

Because Thomas More did not introduce grand programs of Utopian policy through new legislation, or modify the fundamental nature of British law with principles of humanist jurisprudence, most scholars regard More as a follower of Cardinal Wolsey’s legal innovations and not much of a reformer himself. This essay will challenge that perception, presenting More as a humanist reformer by examining the importance of equity to humanist legal and rhetorical studies and by showing how More viewed the law as part of the liberal arts.

Political Legitimacy and the Duty to Obey the Law

2003 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 373-389 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Durning
Keyword(s):  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
The Other ◽  
Joseph Raz ◽  
David Copp ◽  
The Law ◽  
Legitimate State ◽  
Sense Of Urgency

A growing number of political and legal theorists deny that there is a widespread duty to obey the law. This has lent a sense of urgency to recent disagreements about whether a state's legitimacy depends upon its ‘subjects’’ having a duty to obey the law. On one side of the disagreement, John Simmons, Robert Paul Wolff, David Copp, Hannah Pitkin, Leslie Green, George Klosko, and Joseph Raz hold that a state could only be legitimate if the vast majority of its subjects have a duty to obey the law. On the other side, M.B.E. Smith, Jeffrey Reiman, Kent Greenawalt, Christopher Morris, Rolf Sartorius, Jeremy Waldron, Christopher Wellman, William Edmundson and Allen Buchanan claim that a state could be legitimate even if its subjects lacked a duty to obey the law.This disagreement contains two separate disputes. One is a linguistic dispute about the meaning of ‘legitimacy,’ or about what it means to call something a ‘legitimate state.’ The other is a Substantive dispute about whether the various aspects of legitimacy are linked together. Since discussing the linguistic dispute will help us examine the Substantive dispute, let us consider it first.

RELIGION AND THE LAW OF CHARITY: A LIBERAL PERSPECTIVE

2014 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 236-258
Author(s):  
Matthew Harding
Keyword(s):  
Public Reason ◽  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
The Political ◽  
Joseph Raz ◽  
The Law ◽  
Political Philosopher ◽  
Main Ideas ◽  
Liberal Perspective

AbstractThis article considers the treatment of religious purposes in charity law from a liberal perspective informed by the work of the political philosopher Joseph Raz. The article begins by describing briefly the main ideas in Razian liberalism. It then considers the key question when thinking from a Razian perspective about the treatment of religious purposes in charity law: To what extent does the state's promotion of religious purposes via charity law promote the conditions of autonomy? Finally, the article considers the practical reasoning of state officials who deliberate about religious purposes in the charity law setting, asking to what extent such reasoning meets an ideal of public reason informed by Razian liberalism. The article concludes that in many, but not all, respects the treatment of religious purposes in charity law is consistent with Razian liberal commitments.

Plato's Minos: The Soul of the Law

2016 ◽  
Vol 78 (3) ◽  
pp. 343-363
Author(s):  
Michael Davis
Keyword(s):  
Dual Nature ◽  
Fundamental Nature ◽  
The Law

AbstractThe account of law in Plato's Minos is on its surface strange. Law is both what “wants to be the finding out of what is” and “the finding out of what is.” It is a faculty in us like sight or hearing, and its stability requires that it be independent of us. It makes universal claims but always does so for a particular people in a particular place. Law must be grounded in what is beyond the law, and yet, once established, must assert its own final authority. Lawgivers must be at once above the law, almost a different species from those for whom they legislate, and, like everyone else, subject to the law. These ambiguities, indeed duplicities, are not so much defects of law to be resolved as indications of its fundamental nature. What follows is an account of this dual nature, especially in its necessary connection to poetry.

scholarly journals To the question of the essence of financial law

2020 ◽  
pp. 26-32
Author(s):  
E. Yu. Gracheva
Keyword(s):  
Continuous Improvement ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Legal Regulation ◽  
Social Processes ◽  
Social Phenomenon ◽  
Fundamental Nature ◽  
The Social ◽  
Legal Foundations ◽  
The Law

The article discusses some issues of the essence of modern financial law, which, according to the author, remains unchanged, but is filled with new content, which is associated with constantly and rapidly changing social processes of digitalization of society, with all objectivity influencing the content and form of law in general and financial law in particular. The article emphasizes that these processes influence, but do not change the essence of financial law, since otherwise the social phenomenon itself — the law changes. The article analyzes the main essential features of financial law in their unity, interconnection and interaction, taking into account filling them with new content and emphasizing the inviolability and fundamental nature of the legal foundations of modern society, the need for continuous improvement of legal regulation as the most effective and fair instrument of influence on social processes.

Philosophy of Law

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrei Marmor
Keyword(s):  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Comprehensive Analysis ◽  
Legal Philosophy ◽  
Philosophy Of Law ◽  
Fundamental Nature ◽  
Legal Thought ◽  
The People ◽  
Normative Significance ◽  
The Law ◽  
Legal Domain

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of contemporary debates about the fundamental nature of law—an issue that has been at the heart of legal philosophy for centuries. What the law is seems to be a matter of fact, but this fact has normative significance: it tells people what they ought to do. The book argues that the myriad questions raised by the factual and normative features of law actually depend on the possibility of reduction—whether the legal domain can be explained in terms of something else, more foundational in nature. In addition to exploring the major issues in contemporary legal thought, the book provides a critical analysis of the people and ideas that have dominated the field in past centuries. It will be essential reading for anyone curious about the nature of law.

scholarly journals Musical theory in the early philosophical transactions

1940 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 149-157
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Musical Note ◽  
Educational Value ◽  
Fundamental Nature ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Law

In the Rede Lecture which he delivered in 1878 Clerk Maxwell wrote : ‘ The special educational value of this combined study of music and acoustics is that more than almost any other study it involves a continual appeal to what we must observe for ourselves.’ It had been the defect of musical theory in the preceding century or more that it had continually failed to make this appeal. If, however, we go to earlier days still, to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, before Rameau (1683-1764) ‘ discovered ’ the so-called chord of nature in the harmonic overtones of a musical note, we find a different story. True, we find the curious-minded speculating, as the Pythagoreans had done, about the fundamental nature of music ; but we do not find them laying down the law for composers, as the English neo-Pythagoreans attempted to do in the nineteenth century. From this point of view, as well as from that of the history of acoustics, some of the early papers in the Philosophical Transactions are as significant as they are interesting. Two of these papers appear, at first sight, to be primarily scientific. Their importance in the history of musical theory will emerge later in this paper.

scholarly journals THE OBLIGATION TO OBEY THE LAW IN THE LIGHT OF THE DEBATE BETWEEN FINNIS AND RAZ

2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (152) ◽  
pp. 725
Author(s):  
Andrea Luisa Bucchile Faggion
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Moral Obligation ◽  
Prima Facie ◽  
Moral Obligations ◽  
Social Facts ◽  
Recent Debate ◽  
Joseph Raz ◽  
The Law ◽  
John Finnis

The recent debate between John Finnis and Joseph Raz on the existence of a general prima facie moral obligation to obey positive laws is a major contribution to a classical topic in legal and political philosophy. In this paper, I argue that Raz’s normal justification thesis and Finnis’s doctrine of “determinatio,” inherited from Aquinas, complement each other, shedding light on how norms grounded in social facts can give rise to particular moral obligations independently of their content. However, I argue that this on its own does not explain the possibility of a general moral obligation to obey the law, that is, the notion that everyone has a prima facie moral obligation to obey every law that applies to them.

Legislature Proposes, Judiciary Disposes: Supreme Court’s Ruling on the Atrocities Act

Social Change ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 275-282
Author(s):  
K. B. Saxena
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Social Injustice ◽  
Social Equality ◽  
Public Servants ◽  
Fundamental Nature ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Scheduled Castes ◽  
The Law ◽  
Procedural Safeguards ◽  
Court Proceeding

The increasing ferocity and frequency of violence against Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs) led to the enactment of the SCs/STs (Prevention of Atrocities) Act 1989. The law now forbade the practice of untouchability thus protecting marginalised communities against all forms of social injustice and exploitation. However, the ensuing years revealed many deficiencies in the Act and its enforcement leading to a demand to strengthen it. Subsequently, the SCs and STs Amendment Ordinance was issued in March 2014, followed by the enactment of the SCs and STs (Prevention of Atrocities) Amendment Act 2015 that came into force in January 2016. However, barely two years later, the Supreme Court, proceeding on the assumption that there was rampant abuse of the law by SCs/STs struck a crippling blow to the legislation. In oder to protect public servants from being falsely implicated in cases under the Act, the Supreme Court, in a recent ruling (Dr Subhash K. Mahajan vs. State of Maharashtra) introduced procedural safeguards of such a fundamental nature that the law has been virtually rewritten and will profoundly impact the dalit’s fight for social equality and justice.

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