Jorge Silva Sampaio - Böcker

This volume explores the importance of constitutivism for legal studies. Constitutivism is the view that the normative force, or authority, of practical reasons is grounded in principles, capacities, aims, or functions that are essential to, and thus constitutive of, agency. While the implications that the constitutivist approach has on the fundamental metaethical disputes and central ethical debates have been extensively explored, the literature on the relations between constitutivism and law remains scarce, unsystematic, and sporadic. This collection brings together world-renowned practical philosophers and legal theorists to fill a noticeable gap in the literature. The authors systematically and innovatively address key dimensions of the relationships between constitutivism and the theoretical study of law, as well as programmatically offering novel insights into the conceptual connections between constitutivist claims, fundamental legal concepts and practices, legal issues, and, ultimately, the law as a distinctive concept. The book will be of interest to academics and researchers working in the areas of Legal Philosophy, Legal Theory, Jurisprudence, Moral Philosophy and Metaethics.Chapter 8 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylor-francis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.Chapter 2 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

This book addresses the principle of proportionality, which is currently one of the most important instruments of judicial review, from both analytical and theory of law perspectives. As such, the analysis provided is far more comprehensive and can be applied to all areas of law, not just constitutional law.

This book discusses the question of whether legal interpretation is a scientific activity. The law’s dependency on language, at least for the usual communication purposes, not only makes legal interpretation the main task performed by those whose work involves the law, but also an unavoidable step in the process of resolving a legal case. This task of decoding the words and sentences used by normative authorities while enacting norms, carried out in compliance with the principles and rules of the natural language adopted, is prone to all of the difficulties stemming from the uncertainty intrinsic to all linguistic conventions. In this context, seeking to determine whether legal interpretation can be scientific or, in other words, can comply with the requirements for scientific knowledge, becomes a central question. In fact, the coherent application of the law depends on a knowledge regarding the meaning of normative sentences that can be classified(at least) as being structured, systematically organized and tendentially objective. Accordingly, this book focuses on analyzing precisely these problems; its respective contributions offer a range of revealing perspectives on both the problems and their ramifications.

This book discusses the question of whether legal interpretation is a scientific activity.