Law's Humility: Enlarging the Scope of Jurisprudential Disagreement

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This book invites newcomers to analytical legal philosophy to reconsider the terms in which they are accustomed to describing and defending their jurisprudential allegiances. It argues that familiar taxonomic labels such as legal positivism, natural law theory and legal interpretivism are poor guides to the actual diversity of views on the nature and normativity of law, mainly because they fail to carve up the reality of jurisprudential disagreement at its joints. These joints, the author suggests, are elusive because the semantics of law systematically misplaces them. Their true nature resides in the metaontological and metanormative features that dictate or indicate the target of a theorys jurisprudential commitments. The book advocates a new vocabulary for articulating these commitments without eliminating the use of familiar criteria of division among competing theories of law. The resulting picture is a much broader platform of meaningful disagreement about the nature and grounds of legal truth and legal normativity. Albeit based on a factualist-cognitivist understanding of the sources and grounds of law, the book reserves ample room for the unconvinced. Those suspicious of the project of ontologising theoretical disagreements in law can avail themselves of the quietist or anti-metaphysical avenue that the books alternative taxonomy also makes available. The humblest path to laws reality may not be metaphysically ambitious after all.

Reviews

This is an important and substantive contribution to metaphysical and methodological debates in the philosophy of law. The book advances a sophisticated analysis that deserves a careful consideration and discussion. * Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco, Professor of Moral and Political Philosophy, University of Surrey, UK *
In Laws Humility, Gkouvas provides us with a refreshing account of legal disagreements, able to place this issue between the metaphysics of law in terms of grounding and the legal normativity in terms of reasons for action. * JJ Moreso, Professor of Legal Philosophy, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain *

Author Bio

Triantafyllos Gkouvas is Visiting Academic at the University of Glasgow, UK.