Pragmatism, Logic, and Law

(Paperback)

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Pragmatism, Logic and Law offers a view of legal pragmatism consistent with pragmatism writ large, tracing it from origins in late 19th century America to the present, covering various issues, legal cases, personalities, and relevant intellectual movements within and outside law. It addresses pragmatisms relation to legal liberalism, legal positivism, natural law, critical legal studies (CLS), and post-Rorty neopragmatism. It views legal pragmatism as an exemplar of pragmatisms general contribution to logical theory, which bears two connections to the western philosophical tradition: first, it extends Francis Bacons empiricism into contemporary aspects of scientific and legal experience, and second, it is an explicitly social reconstruction of logical induction. Both notions were articulated by John Dewey, and both emphasize the social or corporate element of human inquiry. Empiricism is informed by social as well as individual experience (which includes the problems of conflict and consensus). Rather than following the Aristotelian model of induction as immediate inference from particulars to generals, a model that assumes a consensual objective viewpoint, pragmatism explores the actual, and extended, process of corporate inference from particular experience to generalization, in law as in science. This includes the necessary process of resolving disagreement and finding similarity among relevant particulars.

Reviews

Judicial independence from executive and legislative agendas has never been more important for constitutional integrity and national stability. The experimental logic of law, in the hands of philosophical pragmatism since O.W. Holmes Jr., can respect past precedent while attending to present-day life. Frederic Kellogg has impressively advanced our comprehension of American legal theory, and possibly rescued it from partisan occupation.

Author Bio

Frederic R. Kellogg is visiting professor at the Federal University of Pernambuco in Recife, Brazil.