Adam Michał Dyrda
Principia, Volume 61-62, 2015, pp. 239 - 262
https://doi.org/10.4467/20843887PI.15.014.5543The subject of this paper is the status of the most fundamental legal disagreements. Since all legal disagreements are conceptually dependent on theoretical assumptions about law (the grounds of law), they should be seen as theoretical disagreements in the Dworkinean sense. After an analysis of the basic concepts of the grounds of law, theoretical disagreements are evaluated from the epistemic point of view. By assumption, all philosophical disagreements, including fundamental legal disagreements, are disagreements between epistemic peers, since there occurs a symmetry between the evidence in favour of each of the proposed theories. In order to avoid the scepticism that such a diagnosis may lead to, we should engage in pragmatic considerations of the status of legal theory in general.
Adam Michał Dyrda
Principia, Volume 65, 2018, pp. 113 - 143
https://doi.org/10.4467/20843887PI.18.005.9888Analyses of the concept of law rely on certain self-evident truths: truisms (platitudes) about law that people generally share and which reflect their common understanding of this important social concept. General legal theories are products of such analyses. In this paper I argue that every reference to truisms in the context of legal theory building should also take into account inferential processes by which truisms themselves are coined, namely different types of heuristics about law and related phenomena. Since both truisms and heuristics are unstructured, often inconsistent, and even fallible, conceptual analyses are the main means of transforming such “raw” evidence into rationally structured legal theories.
This paper was written as a result of research project no. 2016/21/D/HS5/03839, financed by the Polish National Science Centre.