Abstract
In The Force of Law, Frederick Schauer launches an attack on a contemporary variety of jurisprudence that looks after law’s essential properties, boasts a Hartian pedigree in doing so, and claims coercion not to be part of the very nature, or essence, of the law. The present chapter is meant to supplement Fred’s argument against that sort of essentialist jurisprudence, first, by contesting its pretended Hartian pedigree, so far as Hart’s meta-philosophy and legal theory are concerned, and, secondly, by suggesting, by means of a Benthamite argument, that it is a mistaken enterprise.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Hart (1983, 6): «The methods of linguistic philosophy […] are […] silent about different points of view which might endow one feature rather than another of legal phenomena with significance»; later on, Hart claims that, in order to cope properly with jurisprudential controversies, it is necessary «first, the identification of the latent conflicting points of view which led to the choice or formation of divergent concepts, and secondly, reasoned argument directed to establishing the merits of conflicting theories, divergent concepts or rules, or to showing how these could be made compatible by some suitable restriction of their scope» (italics added, ndr).
- 3.
Another line of argument can be drawn from Hart’s theory of international law (Hart 1961, ch. X); I will not consider it here.
- 4.
Hart (1958, 79): «The connection between law and moral standards and principles of justice is therefore as little arbitrary and as ‘necessary’ as the connection between law and sanctions, and the pursuit of the question whether this necessity is logical (part of the ‘meaning’ of law) or merely factual or causal can safely be left as an innocent pastime for philosophers».
- 5.
I provide an account of Bentham’s jurisprudential toolbox in Chiassoni (2009, ch. I).
References
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Chiassoni, P. (2016). Supporting The Force of Law: A Few Complementary Arguments Against Essentialist Jurisprudence. In: Bezemek, C., Ladavac, N. (eds) The Force of Law Reaffirmed. Law and Philosophy Library, vol 117. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33987-0_4
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