Jacques Lenoble

Democracy, Law and Governance

This book concerns the transformation of the modes of governance of contemporary developed democracies and aims to define the conditions required for the promotion of the public interest in these democracies public policy. It has two goals- firstly to show why a sound theoretical approach to the concept of law results in opening up the theory oif law to the debate on governance in the social sciences. Secondly, it reconstructs the underpinnings of recent debates on governance, focusing on the pragmatist turn that has marked efforts to overcome the inadequacies of both the economic and the deliberative approaches. In fulfilling this second goal, it examines the advances yielded by the pragmatist turn as well as its limitations and concludes by proposing a theoretical approach to dealing with its limitations. This illuminating book illuminating book applies recent research in both theory of law and theory of governance and it seeks to deepen the analytic impact of the recent pragmatist revival.

Droit et gouvernance, Pour une procéduralisation contextuelle du droit

Sous differentes formes s’atteste aujourd’hui une transformation profonde de nos democraties occidentales. Sans doute, ces transformations traduisent-elles une insuffisance de nos formes traditionnelles d’organisation sociale. La question de la gouvernance, de son efficience et du respect effectif des objectifs qui lui sont assignes au nom de la democratie est progressivement devenu, ces dernieres annees, l’enjeu majeur de nos debats sociaux. Pour la rencontrer, deux reponses antinomiques se trouvent aujourd’hui convoquees par le droit et les sciences sociales : soit une reponse en termes d’ethique procedurale, soit une reponse en termes d’efficience. Meme si ces perspectives contiennent toutes deux un element de verite, elles ne laissent pas d’etre percues comme intuitivement insatisfaisantes. C’est cette intuition de leur insuffisance commune que notre hypothese de la « proceduralisation contextuelle du droit » entend reconstruire et depasser. Notre hypothese est en effet que ces deux solutions contemporaines partagent, par-dela leur apparente opposition, un meme presuppose qui explique leur insuffisance parallele. Ce presuppose concerne la question du ‘mode d’action de la norme’ : comment comprendre cette operation par laquelle la societe entend se reguler et agir sur elle-meme a travers des normes qu’elle juge legitimes ?

The Function of Analogy in Law: Return to Kant and Wittgenstein

From the very beginning, philosophical reflection on law has been confronted with questions of legal reasoning and of the relation between judge and rule. These questions entail indeed as Gadamer pointed out1 the issue of the role of Reason in human activity (moral, political and legal), and hence ultimately the issue of the statute of Reason.

Narrative Coherence and the Limits of the Hermeneutic Paradigm

The theme of narrative coherence has become a recurrent one in contemporary legal theory. The most significant recent publications in the field bring this out. Suffice it to mention, as well as R. Dworkin’s well-known ideas on the matter, the thought of Neil MacCormick,1 A. Aarnio2 and A. Peczenik.3 The emergence of this theme in current thinking about law is bound up with a deeper shift in legal theory, concerning the epistemological paradigm that governs it. It can also be linked with what is happening in other sectors of current philosophical thought.

Epistemology and Validity in Law

The contemporary reflection on the problem of the validity of juridical norms conducts to a radical questioning of the frontier drawn by the positivist theories of law between an approach which intends to be merely descriptive and a process that tends to integrate the axiological dimension into the study of normative systems. Recent developments in both deontic logic (Bulygin, 1982) and the analysis of juridical reasoning (A. Aarnio, R. Alexy and A. Peczenik, 1981) reveal clearly the necessity to question the principle of axiological neutrality which underlies the positivist explanations of the validity in law. Our reflection tries to bring out the aporetic structure which the thesis of the principal positivist theoreticians offers with regard to the question of the validity of norms.