Claudio Michelon

Politics, Practical Reason and the Authority of Legislation

Abstract The article argues that the structure of practical reason has political implications regarding the authority of legislation. After arguing against one thesis about the relation between practical reason and legislative authority, namely, Waldrons “doctrine of the wisdom of the multitude”, it goes on to argue that the role of commonly held beliefs in practical reason helps to justify the authority of legislation. The connection between practical reasons structure and legislative authority explains why certain institutional designs embody a particular kind of recognition of other members of the political community. That recognition is connected to a particular division of reasoning labour between political institutions which, in turn, allows for a conception of political representation in which representatives are neither simply the bearers of their constituents opinions nor an elite that need not take in consideration those opinions. The last section discusses how agreement can be politically relevant in plural societies.

Introduction to ‘Virtue and Law’ symposium

It took a while for the virtue theory penny to drop within legal theory. In the second half of the twentieth century, when virtue theory was beginning to make a long overdue return to the centre st...

Lawfulness and the perception of legal salience

ABSTRACT The ability to identify all (and only the) legally salient properties within a complex situation is a subjective trait necessarily possessed by a lawful person. This ability is better explained as a type of perception. The paper puts forward an account of the perception of legally salient properties in which perception (i) affords a preliminary ordering of the total information received (ii) while allowing for the formation of a remainder that explains the peripheral legal perception experienced legal practitioners develop over time. After this account of legal perception is in place, the paper considers the relationship between this aspect of subjectivity and complete virtue, in particular, practical wisdom and lawfulness.

The Public, the Private and the Law

This paper aims at challenging the perceived continuity between the underlying normativety of, on the one hand, the public and the private domains of social action and, on the other, the normativity of public and private law. As the argument goes, the underlying normative assumptions of the utilization of law (in general) by the political community do not overlap significantly with the broader normative assumptions embedded in each domain of social action. This would go a long way towards providing a framework within which the perceived (and often commended) movements towards a ‘publicization of private law’ or, conversely, towards a ‘privatization of public law’ could be understood.