Dimitrios Kyritsis

WHAT IS GOOD ABOUT LEGAL CONVENTIONALISM

According to legal conventionalism, a legal system cannot come into existence and be sustained over time unless legal officials see themselves as working together with their fellow participants in the practice of law for the purpose of achieving coordination or alternatively realizing a joint endeavor. This thesis has traditionally been thought to support a positivist understanding of law. The paper challenges this piece of common wisdom. It aims to establish that the idea of cooperation among legal officials that figures so prominently in conventionalist accounts of law may in a suitable form be appropriated by a robust version of natural-law theory. It claims that participants in the practice of law may be understood as having reasons of political morality to heed the acts and decisions of their fellow participants and calibrate their own behavior accordingly. It takes the value of democracy to illustrate the point. Democracy furnishes a reason for courts to give effect to democratically reached decisions rather than work out on their own how best to adjudicate disputes before them.

Re-viewing Shared Authority

Rather than defend a conception of the nature of law from the ground up, I sought to test competing theories for their ability to explain a set of parochial legal phenomena associated with the relationship between courts and the legislature (C-L relationship). This exercise in what Jeremy Waldron has called ‘particular jurisprudence’ has a negative and a positive component. In its negative limb it criticises Joseph Raz’s prominent legal positivist theory for its failure sufficiently to explicate these phenomena, whereas in its positive limb it articulates a revised version of Dworkin’s interpretivism that is superior on this count. I have selected the former as an example of a theory that propounds that the content of the law is necessarily determined by social facts only, and the latter as a theory that accepts moral principles as necessary determinants of the content of the law. Assuming it is successful, this comparison may give an edge to my conception over its competitors, but it is far from conclusive. For Dimitris Tsarapatsanis this is

Legitimacy, stability and democratic persuasion

How may a reasonably just regime defend itself from its enemies without collapsing into tyranny? This question marks a recurring concern in political theory at least since Machiavelli. The concern is even more acute for liberal political theory. As a general matter, liberalism grants individuals freedom to form their own comprehensive moral views and associate with others who share them. But citizens of a liberal regime will not always be attracted to moral views that chime with the liberal ethos of mutual toleration and respect. They will sometimes embrace viewpoints championing hate. However, history teaches us that, if such viewpoints gain broad following and permeate social life, their adherents are likely to turn against the political institutions that allowed them to flourish in the first place. Is liberalism paradoxical then? In his bookWhen the State Speaks, What Should it Say Corey Brettschneider aims to solve this apparent paradox. He defends a variant of liberal democracy which he calls value democracy. A political society committed to value democracy affords citizens robust rights to freedom of expression and association but at the same time uses its own persuasive power and its subsidy policy to champion and promote the ideal of free and equal citizenship that is the basis of a liberal regime. Brettschneider calls this aspect of government action democratic persuasion. When it

Law's Province in the Domain of Value

Judges have always held a prominent place in Ronald Dworkins interpretive theory of law. Since its early incarnation as an immanent critique of legal positivism, interpretivism has taken as its st...