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Law & Humanities Blog

The Law and Jeremy Bentham

Posted: 26 Nov 2013 08:13 AM PST

Philip Schofield, University College London, Faculty of Laws, has published The Legal and Political Legacy of Jeremy Bentham at 9 Annual Review of Law and Social Science 51 (2013). Here is the abstract.

The study of Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), the English legal philosopher and reformer, is being transformed by the appearance of volumes in the new authoritative edition of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham. Following revisionist studies in the 1980s and 1990s that reasserted Bentham's credentials as a key figure in the emergence of the liberal tradition, more recent work has explored an increasingly varied range of topics from the perspective of an increasing variety of disciplines, including literary studies, sociology, and history of political thought, as well as law and philosophy. The view of Bentham as a crude authoritarian behaviorist is no longer tenable, and Bentham's place as a major philosopher with relevance for the twenty-first century is being increasingly recognized.
The full text is not available from SSRN.
 

How They Do It Good

Posted: 26 Nov 2013 08:09 AM PST

Richard Weisberg, Cardozo School of Law, has published Grisham vs. Solmssen as Cardozo Legal Studies Research Paper No. 411. Here is the abstract.

A close comparative analysis of the law-related works of two excellent story-tellers, one celebrated (John Grisham) and the other (Arthur G. Solmssen) even more worthy of fame.
Download the paper from SSRN at the link. 

Ludwig's Way

Posted: 26 Nov 2013 08:00 AM PST

Bert Van Roermund, Tilburg Law School, Tilburg School of Humanities, Tilburg Law School, has published Rules as Icons: Wittgenstein's Paradox and the Law, at 26 Ratio Juris 538 (2013). Here is the abstract.
In this paper Section 1 distinguishes between two modes of interpreting legal rules: rehearsal and discourse, arguing that the former takes priority over the latter in law, as in many other contexts. Section 2 offers two arguments that following a legal rule in the rehearsing mode presents a riddle. The first argument develops from law, and submits that legal rules do not tell us anything, because they are tautological. The second one develops from philosophy (Wittgenstein's later works), confronting us with the paradox that incompatible courses of action may be derived from any rule. My solution presents a theory of rules as icons (Section 3). I use "icon" rather than "picture," partly to avoid confusion with what is known among philosophers as "the picture theory of meaning." Interpretation in the rehearsing mode hinges on imagination: imagining oneself in the space of reasons for action rather than reasoning oneself. In this act of imagination, we project ourselves into the rule in ways that are similar to the way we grasp the sense of paintings, music, stories, or poems. Finally (Section 4) I will defend the position that my view solves the puzzles in the second section, by arguing (a) that it is a better account of what Wittgenstein wrote than two competing theories (intuitionism and conventionalism), and (b) that it provides a more satisfactory account of how lawyers deal with legal rules in actual practice.
The full text is not available from SSRN. 
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