Abstract
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.
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References
Neil MacCormick, Legal Reasoning and Legal Theory, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1978, pp. 106 ff.; “Coherence in Legal Justification” in Theorie der Normen. Festgabe für Ota Weinberger, Berlin, Duncker und Humblot, 1984, p. 37 ff.
A. Aamio, The Rational as Reasonable - A Treatise in Legal Justification, Dordrecht, D. Reidel, 1987, p. 196 ff.
A. Peczenik, “Creativity and Transformations in Legal Reasoning”, Theorie der Normen, op. cit. p. 277 ff.
As regards the exception - an ambiguous one, to boot - constituted by the French historian Paul Veyne, see P. Ricœur, Temps et Récit, t. 1, Paris, Seuil, 1983, p. 239.
On this see J. Habermas, Théorie de l’agir communicationnel, t.l, French translation by J.M. Ferry, Paris, Fayard, 1987, p. 408, note 63.
For these developments, see our article cited, “Philosophie contemporaine du droit et modèle herméneutique”, and also, for the expressions this model adopts in contemporary political philosophy, see our work, forthcoming in 1988, A. Berten and J. Lenoble, Dire la norme, t.1, Les paradigmes en présence.
N. MacCormick and O. Weinberger, An Institutional Theory of Law - New Approaches to Legal Positivism, Dordrecht, Reidel, 1986, p. 135. See also N. MacCormick, H.L.A. Hart, London, Edward Arnold, 1981, p. 38; P.M.S. Hacker, “Hart’s Philosophy of Law”, in P.M.S. Hacker and J. Raz (eds.), Law, Morality and Society, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1977, pp. 12 and 13.
J. Ladrière, L’articulation du sens, vol. 1, Paris, Edit. du Cerf, 1984, p. 46. As he points out, the hermeneutic circle is manifested also in another way, particularly suggestive for the classical issues of the descriptivist or otherwise character of the “science” of law and of interpretation in law: “the knowledge that one acquires of the object modifies the latter, and in consequence modifies the interpreting subject himself”. As Ladrière states, “this is however nothing but a variant of the fundamental problem”. (ibid).
P. Ricœur, Le conflit des interprétations - Essais d’herméneutique, Paris, Le Seuil, 1969
J. Habermas, Morale et Communication - conscience morale et activité communicationelle, French trans. By C. Bouchindhomme, Paris, Ed. du Cerf, 1986, p. 42.
P. Rabinov and W.M. Sullivan, Interpretive Social Science: A Reader, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1979.
The notion of hermeneutics, conceived as a discipline or technique of interpretation of sacred, legal or literary texts, did not emerge until the mid-17th century, in Germany. (J. Dannhauser, Hermeneutica sacra sive methodus exponendarum sacrarum literarum, 1654”) J. Starobinski, foreword, in F. Schleiermacher, Herméneutique, French Trans, by M. Simon, Geneva Edit. Labor et Fides, 1987, p. 6.
P. Riceeur, op. cit., p. 16.
J. Ladrière, L’articulation de sens, vol. II op. cit., p. 213.
N. MacCormick, Coherence in Legal Justification, loc. cit., p. 37.
Ibid., p. 53; from this same viewpoint, MacCormick states elsewhere that “coherence concerns the derivability of a novel decision or ruling in law from the preexisting body of law, not the ultimate defensibility of the decision or ruling from a moral point of view” (p. 47).
A. Peczenik, “Creativity and Transformation in Legal Reasoning”, op. cit., p. 288.
Op. cit., pp. 198–201.
R. Dworkin, “La Chaîne du droit”, in Droit et Société, no. 1, 1985, p. 51.
R. Dworkin uses the metaphor of Hercules to describe the “imaginary judge of superhuman intellectual power and patience who would accept the thesis of unity in law” (op. cit., p. 55).
R. Dworkin, “A Reply by R. Dworkin”, in Marshall Cohen (ed.) Ronald Dworkin and Contemporary Jurisprudence, Totowa (New Jersey), Rowman and Allanheld, 1983, p. 247.
Ibid., p. 254. Hence the difference between rules and principles: by contrast with what is the case for principles, “it cannot be said that a rule is sufficiently important within a system of rules in order for one rule, in the event of conflict between two of them, to carry the field because of its greater weight” (La Chaîne du droit, op. cit., pp. 39–40).
On this see R. Dworkin, “A Reply by R. Dworkin”, op. cit., p. 254. Hence also the difference that Dworkin seeks to articulate between legal judgement and political judgement, between legal rights and legislative rights, and likewise, his critique of utilitarian pragmatism.
N. MacCormick, “Dworkin as Pre-Benthamite”, in R. Dworkin and Contemporary Jurisprudence, op. cit., p. 182 ff.
R. Dworkin, Law’s Empire, London, Fontana Press, 1986, p. 239.
A Reply by R. Dworkin”, op. cit., p. 280; in the same sense, he had previously noted (p. 279): “Of course there is not (an Archimedean point). A neutral point of view is the point of view of someone with no moral convictions, and nothing about morality could possibly be decided from such a point of view. But that includes the negative thesis of morality, that no moral claim is “really” right or accurate or sound or true, because that is also a moral claim, if it is a sensible claim at all.”
J. Habermas presents the complete form of this argument in “Notes programmatiques pour fonder en raison une Ethique de la discussion” in Morale et Communication, op. cit., pp. 63–130.
We would point out that the following remarks will deliberately be kept brief. They are developed and argued in more detail in a forthcoming book, A. Betten and J. Lenoble, op. cit., t.1, Les paradigmes en présence, to be published in 1988.
J. Bouveresse, “Herméneutique et linguistique”, in Meaning and Understanding, edited by M. Pan-et and J. Bouveresse, W. De Gruyter, Berlin-New York, 1981, p. 117.
Frege, Grundlagen der Arithmetik, (1884), French translation by C. Imbert in 1969, under the title Les fondements de l’arithméthique - recherche logico-mathématique sur le concept de nombre, Paris, Seuil.
J.A. Miller, “La suture-élément de la logique du signifiant”, in Cahiers pour l’analyse, (travaux du cercle d’épistémologie de l’Ecole normale supérieure), Paris, Seuil, vol. 1, 1966, p. 37 ff.
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Lenoble, J. (1990). Narrative Coherence and the Limits of the Hermeneutic Paradigm. In: Nerhot, P. (eds) Law, Interpretation and Reality. Law and Philosophy Library, vol 11. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7875-2_9
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