Legal Theory Blog

Wednesday Calendar

Saint Louis University, School of Law: Lawrence Solum, University of San Diego School of Law Virture Jurisprudence: An Aretaic Theory of Law. Here is a taste:
Contemporary legal theory in the United States has been dominated by the realist paradigm. The extreme version of realism is captured by the slogan of the critical legal studies movement: “Law is politics!” Other heirs to the realist tradition (including normative law and economics, the legal process school, legal pragmatism, and so forth) coalesce around what we might call the instrumentalist thesis—the point of legal institutions (especially courts) is to use the law as an instrument to achieve the goals of some normative theory (such as welfarism or deontology ) or a political ideology (of the left, right, or center). There are, of course, opposing tendencies in contemporary legal theory. Some neoformalists emphasize the duty of adjudicators to follow the law and give the parties what they are due; in a rough and ready sort of way, these neoformalists adopt a deontological perspective on legal theory that competes with the consequentialism of contemporary neorealists.

In this paper, I sketch an alternative direction for contemporary legal theory, an approach that I call “virtue jurisprudence.” My core idea is quite simple. In moral theory, virtue ethics offers a third way—an alternative to the deontological and consequentialist approaches that dominated modern moral philosophy until very recently. What would happen if we transplanted virtue ethics into normative legal theory? This paper offers the sketch of an answer to that question.

University College, London-Colloquium in Legal and Social Philosophy: Professor Simon Blackburn (Cambridge), ‘Hume, Justice and Sentiment’. Here is a taste:

The popularity of rationalism, and the general feeling that there ‘must be something to’ the kinds of argument I have been discussing, are very deep-rooted. Partly, they represent a noble dream. They answer a wish that the knaves of the world can be not only confined and confounded, but refuted – refuted as well by standards that they have to acknowledge. Ideally, the will be shown to be in a state akin to self contradiction. Kerstein acknowledges that Kant and neo-Kantians have not achieved anything like this result. But it is still, tantalizingly there as a goal or ideal, the Holy Grail of moral philosophy, and many suppose that all right-thinking people must join the pilgrimage to find it.

We sentimentalists do not like our good behaviour to be hostage to such a search. We don’t altogether approve of Holy Grails. We do not see the need for them. We are not quite on all fours with those who do. And we do not quite see why, even if by some secret alchemy a philosopher managed to glimpse one, it should ameliorate his behaviour, let alone that of other people. We think instead that human beings are ruled by passions, and the best we can do it to educate people so that the best passions are also the most forceful. We say of rationalistic moral philosophy what Hume says of abstract reasonings in general, that when we leave our closet, and engage in the common affairs of life, its conclusions seem to vanish, like the phantoms of the night on the appearance of the morning.

Hofstra University School of Law: Monroe Freedman, Hofstra Law School, “The Public Defender and Triage—Gideon’s Trumpet Becomes Gideon’s Strumpet”.

NYU Legal History: Deborah Malamud, An-Bryce Professor of Law, NYU School of Law.

Nuffield College, Oxford: Antanas Mockus, Culture and Law Enforcement.

UCLA Legal History: Ariela Dubler, Columbia, Immoral Purposes: The Genus of Illicit Sex and the Marriage Cure.