Law and Practical Reason - Böcker

This open access book addresses a palpable, yet widely neglected, tension in legal discourse. In our everyday legal practices – whether taking place in a courtroom, classroom, law firm, or elsewhere – we routinely and unproblematically talk of the activities of creating and applying the law. However, when legal scholars have analysed this distinction in their theories (rather than simply assuming it), many have undermined it, if not dismissed it as untenable.The book considers the relevance of distinguishing between law-creation and law-application and how this transcends the boundaries of jurisprudential enquiry. It argues that such a distinction is also a crucial component of political theory. For if there is no possibility of applying a legal rule that was created by a different institution at a previous moment in time, then our current constitutional-democratic frameworks are effectively empty vessels that conceal a power relationship between public authorities and citizens that is very different from the one on which constitutional democracy is grounded.After problematising the most relevant objections in the literature, the book presents a comprehensive defence of the distinction between creation and application of law within the structure of constitutional democracy. It does so through an integrated jurisprudential methodology, which combines insights from different disciplines (including history, anthropology, political science, philosophy of language, and philosophy of action) while also casting new light on long-standing issues in public law, such as the role of legal discretion in the law-making process and the scope of the separation of powers doctrine.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

The received view on the nature of legal authority contains the idea that a sound account of legitimate authority will explain how a legal authority has a right to command and the addressee a duty to obey. The received view fails to explain, however, how legal authority truly operates upon human beings as rational creatures with specific psychological makeups. This book takes a bottom-up approach, beginning at the microscopic level of agency and practical reason and leading to the justificatory framework of authority. The book argues that an understanding of the nature of legal normativity involves an understanding of the nature and structure of practical reason in the context of the law, and advances the idea that legal authority and normativity are intertwined. This point can be summarised thus: if we are able to understand both how the agent exercises his or her practical reason under legal directives and commands and how the agent engages his or her practical reason by following legal rules grounded on reasons for actions as good-making characteristics, then we can fully grasp the nature of legal authority and legal normativity. Using the philosophies of action enshrined in the works of Elisabeth Anscombe, Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, the study explains practical reason as diachronic future-directed intention in action and argues that this conception illuminates the structure of practical reason of the legal rules' addressees. The account is comprehensive and enables us to distinguish authoritative and normative legal rules in just and good legal systems from 'apparent' authoritative and normative legal rules of evil legal systems. At the heart of the book is the methodological view of a 'practical turn' to elucidate the nature of legal normativity and authority.

This new book advances a fresh philosophical account of the relationship between the legislature and courts, opposing the common conception of law, in which it is legislatures that primarily create the law, and courts that primarily apply it. This conception has eclectic affinities with legal positivism, and although it may have been a helpful intellectual tool in the past, it now increasingly generates more problems than it solves. For this reason, the author argues, legal philosophers are better off abandoning it. At the same time they are asked to dismantle the philosophical and doctrinal infrastructure that has been based on it and which has been hitherto largely unquestioned. In its place the book offers an alternative framework for understanding the role of courts and the legislature; a framework which is distinctly anti-positivist and which builds on Ronald Dworkin’s interpretive theory of law. But, contrary to Dworkin, it insists that legal duty is sensitive to the position one occupies in the project of governing; legal interpretation is not the solitary task of one super-judge, but a collaborative task structured by principles of institutional morality such as separation of powers which impose a moral duty on participants to respect each other’s contributions. Moreover this collaborative task will often involve citizens taking an active role in their interaction with the law.

Some say that private law ought to correct wrongs or to protect rights. Others say that private law ought to maximise social welfare or to minimise social cost. In this book, Emmanuel Voyiakis claims that private law ought to make our responsibilities to others depend on the opportunities we have to affect how things will go for us. Drawing on the work of HLA Hart and TM Scanlon, he argues that private law principles that require us to bear certain practical burdens in our relations with others are justified as long as those principles provide us with certain opportunities to choose what will happen to us, and having those opportunities is something we have reason to value.The book contrasts this ‘value-of-choice’ account with its wrong- and social cost-based rivals, and applies it to familiar problems of contract and tort law, including whether liability should be negligence-based or stricter; whether insurance should matter in the allocation of the burden of repair; how far private law should make allowance for persons of limited capacities; when a contract term counts as ‘unconscionable’ or ‘unfair’; and when tort law should hold a person vicariously liable for another’s mistakes.

This collection of essays takes as its starting point Arthur Ripstein’s Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy, a seminal work on Kant’s thinking about law, which also treats many of the contemporary issues of legal and political philosophy. The essays offer readings and elucidations of Ripstein’s thought, dispute some of his claims and extend some of his themes within broader philosophical contexts, thus developing the significance of Ripstein’s ideas for contemporary legal and political philosophy.All of the essays are contributions to normative philosophy in a broadly Kantian spirit. Prominent themes include rights in the body, the relation between morality and law, the nature of coercion and its role in legal obligation, the role of indeterminacy in law, the nature and justification of political society and the theory of the state. This volume will be of interest to a wide audience, including legal scholars, Kant scholars, and philosophers with an interest in Kant or in legal and political philosophy.

This book invites newcomers to analytical legal philosophy to reconsider the terms in which they are accustomed to describing and defending their jurisprudential allegiances. It argues that familiar taxonomic labels such as legal positivism, natural law theory and legal interpretivism are poor guides to the actual diversity of views on the nature and normativity of law, mainly because they fail to carve up the reality of jurisprudential disagreement at its joints. These joints, the author suggests, are elusive because the semantics of law systematically misplaces them. Their true nature resides in the metaontological and metanormative features that dictate or indicate the target of a theory’s jurisprudential commitments. The book advocates a new vocabulary for articulating these commitments without eliminating the use of familiar criteria of division among competing theories of law. The resulting picture is a much broader platform of meaningful disagreement about the nature and grounds of legal truth and legal normativity. Albeit based on a factualist-cognitivist understanding of the sources and grounds of law, the book reserves ample room for the unconvinced. Those suspicious of the project of “ontologising” theoretical disagreements in law can avail themselves of the quietist or anti-metaphysical avenue that the book’s alternative taxonomy also makes available. The humblest path to law’s reality may not be metaphysically ambitious after all.

This is the first book to bring together distinguished jurisprudential theorists, as well as up-and-coming scholars, to critically assess the nature of legal reasoning. The volume is divided into 3 parts:The first part, General Jurisprudence and Legal Reasoning, addresses issues at the intersection of general jurisprudence - those pertaining to the nature of law itself - and legal reasoning.The second part, Rules and Reasons, addresses two concepts central to two prominent types of theory of legal reasoning.The essays in the third and final part, Doctrine and Practice, delve into the mechanics of legal practice and doctrine, from a legal reasoning perspective.

This book provides a philosophical critique of legal relations between the EU and ‘distant strangers’ neither located within, nor citizens of, its Member States. Starting with the EU’s commitment in Articles 3(5) and 21 TEU to advance democracy, human rights, and the rule of law in ‘all its relations with the wider world’, Ganesh examines in detail the salient EU and international legal materials and thereafter critiques them in the light of a theory of just global legal relations derived from Kant’s philosophy of right. In so doing, Ganesh departs from comparable Kantian scholarship on the EU by centering the discussion not around the essay Toward Perpetual Peace, but around the Doctrine of Right, Kant’s final and comprehensive statement of his general theory of law.The book thus sheds light on areas of EU law (EU external relations law, standing to bring judicial review), public international law (jurisdiction, global public goods) and human rights (human rights jurisdiction), and also critiques the widespread identification of the EU as a Kantian federation of peace.The thesis on which this book was based was awarded the 2020 René Cassin Thesis Prize (English section).

This timely and compelling book delves into the dynamic interpretation of Hans Kelsen’s General Theory of Norms through the lens of 21st-century jurisprudential debates. Engaging with key contemporary philosophical concepts such as fictionalism in the philosophy of science, explanation and understanding, and supervenience, this book sheds new light on Kelsen’s original ideas.By offering a contemporary interpretation of his later work, it re-examines classic concepts known from the ‘Pure Theory of Law’ like the basic norm, the separation of ‘is’ and ‘ought,’ validity and efficacy, imputation, and the concept of the legal norm. Integrating modern philosophy with Kelsen’s lasting ideas, this book presents a novel theoretical landscape, inviting readers to explore fresh perspectives on Kelsen’s contributions to legal theory and emphasising its enduring relevance.

This book invites newcomers to analytical legal philosophy to reconsider the terms in which they are accustomed to describing and defending their jurisprudential allegiances. It argues that familiar taxonomic labels such as legal positivism, natural law theory and legal interpretivism are poor guides to the actual diversity of views on the nature and normativity of law, mainly because they fail to carve up the reality of jurisprudential disagreement at its joints. These joints, the author suggests, are elusive because the semantics of law systematically misplaces them. Their true nature resides in the metaontological and metanormative features that dictate or indicate the target of a theory’s jurisprudential commitments. The book advocates a new vocabulary for articulating these commitments without eliminating the use of familiar criteria of division among competing theories of law. The resulting picture is a much broader platform of meaningful disagreement about the nature and grounds of legal truth and legal normativity. Albeit based on a factualist-cognitivist understanding of the sources and grounds of law, the book reserves ample room for the unconvinced. Those suspicious of the project of “ontologising” theoretical disagreements in law can avail themselves of the quietist or anti-metaphysical avenue that the book’s alternative taxonomy also makes available. The humblest path to law’s reality may not be metaphysically ambitious after all.

This book provides a philosophical critique of legal relations between the EU and ‘distant strangers’ neither located within, nor citizens of, its Member States. Starting with the EU’s commitment in Articles 3(5) and 21 TEU to advance democracy, human rights, and the rule of law in ‘all its relations with the wider world’, Ganesh examines in detail the salient EU and international legal materials and thereafter critiques them in the light of a theory of just global legal relations derived from Kant’s philosophy of right. In so doing, Ganesh departs from comparable Kantian scholarship on the EU by centering the discussion not around the essay Toward Perpetual Peace, but around the Doctrine of Right, Kant’s final and comprehensive statement of his general theory of law.The book thus sheds light on areas of EU law (EU external relations law, standing to bring judicial review), public international law (jurisdiction, global public goods) and human rights (human rights jurisdiction), and also critiques the widespread identification of the EU as a Kantian federation of peace.The thesis on which this book was based was awarded the 2020 René Cassin Thesis Prize (English section).

This open access book addresses a palpable, yet widely neglected, tension in legal discourse. In our everyday legal practices – whether taking place in a courtroom, classroom, law firm, or elsewhere – we routinely and unproblematically talk of the activities of creating and applying the law. However, when legal scholars have analysed this distinction in their theories (rather than simply assuming it), many have undermined it, if not dismissed it as untenable.The book considers the relevance of distinguishing between law-creation and law-application and how this transcends the boundaries of jurisprudential enquiry. It argues that such a distinction is also a crucial component of political theory. For if there is no possibility of applying a legal rule that was created by a different institution at a previous moment in time, then our current constitutional-democratic frameworks are effectively empty vessels that conceal a power relationship between public authorities and citizens that is very different from the one on which constitutional democracy is grounded.After problematising the most relevant objections in the literature, the book presents a comprehensive defence of the distinction between creation and application of law within the structure of constitutional democracy. It does so through an integrated jurisprudential methodology, which combines insights from different disciplines (including history, anthropology, political science, philosophy of language, and philosophy of action) while also casting new light on long-standing issues in public law, such as the role of legal discretion in the law-making process and the scope of the separation of powers doctrine.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

This book introduces a novel puzzle, the 'Lorry Driver Paradox', to advance our understanding of moral responsibility beyond current paradigms, to connect moral philosophy and legal scholarship in new ways, and to break new ground in the ethics of AI. Part 1 introduces the Lorry Driver Paradox as a set of three individually plausible but jointly inconsistent claims. It then develops and defends the concept of strict moral answerability as the most effective solution, making it the central idea of the book, alongside an account of how ‘taking responsibility’ could amount to a new, hitherto neglected normative power and an exploration of the significance of apologies in our social practices.Part 2 extends this discussion to the context of artificial intelligence, proposing a major shift in how we currently think about responsibility and AI. It challenges the conventional notion of AI-generated ‘responsibility gaps’ and, instead, proposes the idea of ‘responsibility abundance’. This reframing, it is argued, offers distinct theoretical, dialectical, and practical advantages.Significant parts of these arguments draw on legal scholarship, particularly considerations about reverse burdens of proof in criminal law and the waiving of state immunity in public international law. On these grounds, the book also pursues the methodological idea of a ‘legal lead’, that is, the idea that we can advance our understanding of moral responsibility by investigating (selected aspects of) legal responsibility, and not just the other way around.

This is the first book to bring together distinguished jurisprudential theorists, as well as up-and-coming scholars, to critically assess the nature of legal reasoning. The volume is divided into 3 parts:The first part, General Jurisprudence and Legal Reasoning, addresses issues at the intersection of general jurisprudence - those pertaining to the nature of law itself - and legal reasoning.The second part, Rules and Reasons, addresses two concepts central to two prominent types of theory of legal reasoning.The essays in the third and final part, Doctrine and Practice, delve into the mechanics of legal practice and doctrine, from a legal reasoning perspective.

This book considers the seminal debate in jurisprudence between Ronald Dworkin and Stanley Fish. It looks at the exchange between Dworkin and Fish, initiated in the 1980s, and analyses the role the exchange has played in the development of contemporary theories of interpretation, legal reasoning, and the nature of law. The book encompasses 4 key themes of the debate between these authors: legal theory and its critical role, interpretation and critical constraints, pragmatism and interpretive communities, and some general implications of the debate for issues like the nature of legal theory and the possibility of objectivity. The collection brings together prominent legal theorists and one of the protagonists of the debate: Professor Stanley Fish, who concludes the collection with an interview in which he discusses the main topics discussed in the collection.

This book considers the seminal debate in jurisprudence between Ronald Dworkin and Stanley Fish. It looks at the exchange between Dworkin and Fish, initiated in the 1980s, and analyses the role the exchange has played in the development of contemporary theories of interpretation, legal reasoning, and the nature of law. The book encompasses 4 key themes of the debate between these authors: legal theory and its critical role, interpretation and critical constraints, pragmatism and interpretive communities, and some general implications of the debate for issues like the nature of legal theory and the possibility of objectivity. The collection brings together prominent legal theorists and one of the protagonists of the debate: Professor Stanley Fish, who concludes the collection with an interview in which he discusses the main topics discussed in the collection.

This is a book about law and its impact on our practical reasoning. Drawing from Bernard Williams, the book argues that our practical engagements with the law are complex and often obscure. It begins with a novel view on practical reason that is called open-minded reasons internalism. This is a view that emphasises how certain considerations can bear on action for concrete agents, and in doing so it is an explanatory account of reasons and actions. The account is receptive to the considerations that makes much of people's lives: the motivations and dispositions they have, the notions of character and identity, and respect. The book claims that this account helps in making sense of much of the richness seen in real life in how concrete agents engage with the law. It provides the tools to explain when and why an agent identifies herself totally with the law, as Inspector Javert did in Les Misérables, but it can also explain the attitude of respect that many law-abiding citizens have, and even the merely prudential considerations of OW Holmes’ famous ‘bad man’. What emerges from this book is a view on law and practical reason that takes seriously the phenomenology of action. This book will be of interest to anyone interested in philosophical accounts of how we engage our practical reasoning with complex social practices.

This book is the first collection of essays on Bernard Williams’ moral and political philosophy to shed light on the nature of law, and key legal concepts. By the time of his death in 2003, Williams was widely regarded as the most important moral philosopher of his generation. Surprisingly, his work is still largely under-discussed in legal theory. This book aims to fill this gap with brand new discussions from scholars both from law and philosophy.The first part of the book focuses on Williams’ work on responsibility and regret and its implications for law. Drawing from Ancient Greek authors, Williams maintained that luck might play a key role in our practices of responsibility and that some dimensions of responsibility are tied to the notion of having a character. What we do – intentionally or not – might affect our understanding of ourselves and of our place in the world. How do those ideas help us in making sense of legal responsibility? How broader concerns about our practices of responsibility impact the law? Those are some of the questions addressed by the authors in this part.The second part looks at how Williams’ understanding of philosophy can shape the way we do jurisprudence. Williams’ work on the methodology of philosophy combines resources from analytical philosophy, continental authors, history, and literature. He understood philosophy as a humanistic discipline. The authors in the second part of the book draw from Williams' work, notably his innovative take on the genealogical method, to discuss how we could practice legal philosophy in this same spirit.

What does it take for someone—or something—to count as a legal person? Is it a matter of biology, ideology, or both?This book explores how societies determine who or what qualifies as a legal person, from individual humans to corporations, from nation-states to environmental entities.The author argues that legal personhood is not grounded in fixed, mind-independent properties or logical entailments. Instead, it develops from how humans experience their physical and cultural worlds through embodied cognition. Mapping these experiences onto seemingly discrete (legal) concepts yields a categorisation process that is creative yet patterned by culturally entrenched models and institutional aims.The book introduces the “radial conception,” which posits that legal personhood is a flexible, context-dependent category centred around a core case. The core case – often, in many legal systems, the adult citizen of sound mind – is a mental model that helps define the category and influences how we think about it. This makes the most typical features of a category the default ones we think of when encountering it. As new situations arise or social needs evolve, legal personhood expands outward from the core case to include a diverse range of entities. However, this expansion does not follow rigid rules; rather, it relies on conceptual mappings that derive much of their persuasive power from cognitive tools like metaphors, metonymies, and image schemas.Of interest to students engaged in legal philosophy, academics exploring the interplay between cognitive science and law, practitioners aiming to deepen their knowledge of legal personhood, or anyone intrigued by the merging of legal concepts and psychological insights, this book charts new territory in understanding law’s persons.

This book presents an argument for the existence of moral rights held by groups and a resulting account of how to reconcile group rights with individual rights and with the rights of other groups. Throughout, the author shows applications to actual legal and political controversies, thus tying the normative theory to actual legal practice. The author presents collective moral rights as an underlying normative explanation for various legal norms protecting group rights in domestic and international legal contexts. Examples at issue include rights held by indigenous peoples, by trade unions, and by religious and cultural minority groups. The account also bears on contemporary discussions of multiculturalism and recognition, on debates about reasonable accommodation of minority communities, and on claims for third generation human rights. The book will thus be relevant both to theorists and to legal and human rights practitioners interested in related areas.

Some say that private law ought to correct wrongs or to protect rights. Others say that private law ought to maximise social welfare or to minimise social cost. In this book, Emmanuel Voyiakis claims that private law ought to make our responsibilities to others depend on the opportunities we have to affect how things will go for us. Drawing on the work of HLA Hart and TM Scanlon, he argues that private law principles that require us to bear certain practical burdens in our relations with others are justified as long as those principles provide us with certain opportunities to choose what will happen to us, and having those opportunities is something we have reason to value.The book contrasts this ‘value-of-choice’ account with its wrong- and social cost-based rivals, and applies it to familiar problems of contract and tort law, including whether liability should be negligence-based or stricter; whether insurance should matter in the allocation of the burden of repair; how far private law should make allowance for persons of limited capacities; when a contract term counts as ‘unconscionable’ or ‘unfair’; and when tort law should hold a person vicariously liable for another’s mistakes.

This book focuses on a specific component of the normative dimension of law, namely, the normative claim of law. By 'normative claim' we mean the claim that inherent in the law is an ability to guide action by generating practical reasons having a special status. The thesis that law lays the normative claim has become a subject of controversy: it has its defenders, as well as many scholars of different orientations who have acknowledged the normative claim of law without making a point of defending it head-on. It has also come under attack from other contemporary legal theorists, and around the normative claim a lively debate has sprung up. This debate makes up the main subject of this book, which is in essence an attempt to account for the normative claim and see how its recognition moulds our understanding of the law itself. This involves (a) specifying the exact content, boundaries, quality, and essential traits of the normative claim, (b) explaining how the law can make a claim so specified, and (c) justifying why this should happen in the first place. The argument is set out in two stages, corresponding to the two parts in which the book is divided.In the first part, the author introduces and discusses the meaning, status, and fundamental traits of the normative claim of law; in the second he explores some foundational questions and determines the grounds of the normative claim of law by framing an account that elaborates on some contemporary discussions of Kant's conception of humanity as the source of the normativity of practical reason.

This book fills a major gap in the ever-increasing secondary literature on Hannah Arendt's political thought by providing a dedicated and coherent treatment of the many, various and interesting things which Arendt had to say about law. Often obscured by more pressing or more controversial aspects of her work, Arendt nonetheless had interesting insights into Greek and Roman concepts of law, human rights, constitutional design, legislation, sovereignty, international tribunals, judicial review and much more. This book retrieves these aspects of her legal philosophy for the attention of both Arendt scholars and lawyers alike. The book brings together lawyers as well as Arendt scholars drawn from a range of disciplines (philosophy, political science, international relations), who have engaged in an internal debate the dynamism of which is captured in print. Following the editors' introduction, the book is split into four Parts: Part I explores the concept of law in Arendt's thought; Part II explores legal aspects of Arendt's constitutional thought: first locating Arendt in the wider tradition of republican constitutionalism, before turning attention to the role of courts and the role of parliament in her constitutional design. In Part III Arendt's thought on international law is explored from a variety of perspectives, covering international institutions and international criminal law, as well as the theoretical foundations of international law. Part IV debates the foundations, content and meaning of Arendt's famous and influential claim that the 'right to have rights' is the one true human right.

This book explores the relevance of virtue theory to law from a variety of perspectives. The concept of virtue is central in both contemporary ethics and epistemology. In contrast, in law, there has not been a comparable trend toward explaining normativity on the model of virtue theory. In the last few years, however, there has been an increasing interest in virtue theory among legal scholars. 'Virtue jurisprudence' has emerged as a serious candidate for a theory of law and adjudication. Advocates of virtue jurisprudence put primary emphasis on aretaic concepts rather than on duties or consequences. Aretaic concepts are, on this view, crucial for explaining law and adjudication. This book is a collection of essays examining the role of virtue in general jurisprudence as well as in specific areas of the law. Part I puts together a number of papers discussing various philosophical aspects of an approach to law and adjudication based on the virtues. Part II discusses the relationship between law, virtue and character development, with some of the essays selected analysing this relationship by combining both eastern perspectives on virtue and character with western approaches. Parts III and IV examine problems of substantive areas of law, more specifically, criminal law and evidence law, from within a virtue-based framework. Last, Part V discusses the relevance of empathy to our understanding of justice and legal morality.

An important part of the legal domain has to do with rule-governed conduct, and is expressed by the use of notions such as norm, obligation, duty and right. These require us to acknowledge the normative dimension of law. Normativity is, accordingly, to be regarded as a central feature of law lying at the heart of any comprehensive legal-theoretical project. The essays collected in this book are meant to further our understanding of the normativity of law. More specifically, the book stages a thorough discussion of legal normativity as approached from three strands of legal thought that are particularly influential and which play a key role in shaping debates on the normative dimension of law: the theory of planning agency, legal conventionalism and the constitutivist approach. While the essays presented here do not aspire to give an exhaustive picture of these debates - an aspiration that would be, by its very nature, unrealistic - they do provide the reader with some authoritative statements of some widely discussed families of views of legal normativity. In pursuing this objective, these essays also encourage a dialogue between different traditions of study of legal normativity, stimulating those who would not otherwise look outside their tradition of thought to engage with new ideas and, ultimately, to arrive at a more comprehensive account of the normativity of law.

This collection of essays takes as its starting point Arthur Ripstein’s Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy, a seminal work on Kant’s thinking about law, which also treats many of the contemporary issues of legal and political philosophy. The essays offer readings and elucidations of Ripstein’s thought, dispute some of his claims and extend some of his themes within broader philosophical contexts, thus developing the significance of Ripstein’s ideas for contemporary legal and political philosophy.All of the essays are contributions to normative philosophy in a broadly Kantian spirit. Prominent themes include rights in the body, the relation between morality and law, the nature of coercion and its role in legal obligation, the role of indeterminacy in law, the nature and justification of political society and the theory of the state. This volume will be of interest to a wide audience, including legal scholars, Kant scholars, and philosophers with an interest in Kant or in legal and political philosophy.

Autonomy is the central idea of modern practical philosophy. Understood as self-legislation, autonomy seems to require that the validity of norms depends on recognition, namely, that their addressees, being autonomous agents, recognise these norms to be valid. But how can one be bound by norms whose validity depends on their being recognised as valid by their addressees? The questions of how autonomous morality and, on this basis, the authoritative character of law can be understood, present persistent puzzles that have been widely discussed, but still await a satisfactory solution.This book presents an analysis of the idea of autonomy as self-legislation and its consequences for law and morality. It links the idea of autonomy with the idea of the balancing of normative arguments, develops a notion of normative arguments as distinct from normative judgements and statements and explains claims to correctness and objectivity that are found in normative discourse. Thus, a 'logic of autonomy' emerges, and it is pervasive in normative reasoning. It connects theses regarding the logic of norms, the structure of balancing, human and fundamental rights, legal validity, legal interpretation, and the relations among legal systems, offering a theory of central elements of normative argumentation, a theory that is undergirded by the mutual relations that exist between and among its parts as well as through the relations that it bears to other theories. Moreover, it offers an alternative to Kantian notions of autonomy and provides solutions to problems that other theories have failed to master.

This new book advances a fresh philosophical account of the relationship between the legislature and courts, opposing the common conception of law, in which it is legislatures that primarily create the law, and courts that primarily apply it. This conception has eclectic affinities with legal positivism, and although it may have been a helpful intellectual tool in the past, it now increasingly generates more problems than it solves. For this reason, the author argues, legal philosophers are better off abandoning it. At the same time they are asked to dismantle the philosophical and doctrinal infrastructure that has been based on it and which has been hitherto largely unquestioned. In its place the book offers an alternative framework for understanding the role of courts and the legislature; a framework which is distinctly anti-positivist and which builds on Ronald Dworkin’s interpretive theory of law. But, contrary to Dworkin, it insists that legal duty is sensitive to the position one occupies in the project of governing; legal interpretation is not the solitary task of one super-judge, but a collaborative task structured by principles of institutional morality such as separation of powers which impose a moral duty on participants to respect each other’s contributions. Moreover this collaborative task will often involve citizens taking an active role in their interaction with the law.