Natural jurists deny this idea and insist that a supposed norm can only become legally valid if it crosses a certain moral threshold. The content of positive law must correspond to certain fundamental rules of natural law, i.e. universal morality, in order to become law. In other words, natural jurists argue that the moral content or value of norms, and not just their social origin, is also part of the legal conditions of validity. And again, it is possible to consider this position as a non-reductive conception of law, asserting that legal validity cannot be reduced to non-normative facts. See the entry on theories of natural law. A second, hotly debated question about jurisprudential methodology is whether first-rate legal theories are inherently evaluative. The above views on the correct purpose of first-order legal theories have different implications for this second question. But before explaining this, we must first clarify the issue. In terms of conceptual analysis, legal theories aim to grasp the concept of law, and they succeed in providing a coherent presentation of relevant data on this term and related concepts. In particular, the data to be systematized are understood as intuitions of people who include a common legal concept (or related concepts such as legal validity or legal obligation). In their simplest form, these intuitions can be considered as judgments about the applicability or otherwise of the concept in question to certain cases.
Thus, from this point of view, a legal theory aims to describe the conditions under which the target concept of law (or one of its related elements) applies. Judges cannot promulgate a new law by new decisions; They do not assume that power: they are simply trying to explain what the common law is and what it has been since its first existence. But as new circumstances and new complications of facts, and even new facts, constantly arise, judges are compelled to apply to them what they consider to be the common law throughout its existence, and so they seem to pass a new law, applying only the old principles to a new set of facts.5 In contrast, naturalists tend not to support the salon method of testing legal theories against intuition, as they aim to make “philosophical theories continuous and dependent on scientific theorizations” (Leiter 2007, 35). Leiter argues that our intuitions about the law are too unreliable to gain much epistemic weight (as others have done with intuitions in other areas of philosophy) (Leiter 2007, 180, 184; cf. Cummins 1998). According to Leiter, philosophers should generally aim to dissect “concepts that have been confirmed by their role in the successful explanation and prediction of empirical phenomena” (Leiter 2007, 184). Therefore, he proposes a methodology according to which “the . Social science literature on law.
to see which legal concept plays a role in the most powerful explanatory and predictive models of legal phenomena such as judicial behaviour” (Leiter 2007, 184). However, this methodological view raises the question of why the philosopher of law should only examine legal behavior and not anything else. In general, the naturalist owes a report on which features of the law require the most explanation and why. Lawyers are usually interested in the question: What is the law on a particular subject? This is always a local question, and the answers should vary depending on the specific jurisdiction in which they are asked. In contrast, the philosophy of law is concerned with the general question: What is law? This general question about the nature of law presupposes that law is a unique socio-political phenomenon, with more or less universal characteristics that can be recognized by philosophical analysis. General jurisprudence, as this philosophical inquiry into the nature of law is called, is supposed to be universal. It assumes that the law possesses certain qualities, and it possesses them by its nature or essence as law, when and where it exists. But even if there are such universal features of law – which is controversial, as we shall see later – the reasons for a philosophical interest in their illumination remain explainable. First, there is the sheer intellectual interest in understanding such a complex social phenomenon, which is, after all, one of the most complicated aspects of human culture. But law is also a normative social practice: it claims to guide human behavior and create reasons for action. The attempt to explain this normative and rational aspect of law is one of the central challenges of general jurisprudence. These two sources of interest in the nature of the law are closely linked.
Law is not the only normative area of our culture; Morality, religion, social conventions, etiquette, etc. also guide human behavior in many ways similar to the law. Therefore, part of understanding the nature of law is an explanation of how law differs from these similar normative domains, how it interacts with them, and whether its comprehensibility depends on other normative orders such as morality or social conventions. Therefore, if one wants to maintain the possibility of purely descriptive legal theories of the first order, it would be a more promising strategy to respond to the argument of interpretation to challenge its key premise – namely, that legal theory is necessarily an interpretive enterprise in Dworkin`s sense. For a proponent of the argument to be able to claim this premise from the interpretation, a justification would have to be given. That is, arguments are needed as to why we should think that understanding the law requires constructive interpretation. A critic of the interpretation argument might then argue that the proponents of the argument have not shouldered the burden of providing a justification for this premise, on which the argument crucially depends. The graphs presented above allow us to compare the collection of legislative documents both horizontally (i.e., between countries) and vertically (i.e., over time).
In particular, hierarchical charts and reference graphs allow us to track basic statistics over time (see “Assessing the growth of the law”) that change as legislators add, update or remove legal rules, as shown in Fig. 1b. Sequences help us coordinate the basic elements of legal texts over the years (see “Comparison of document networks in space and time”). Together with quotient graphs, they also facilitate the reorganization of legislative documents through the grouping of graphs (see “Comparison of document networks in space and time”), which allows us to focus on different topics or levels of granularity depending on the research question being studied. To our knowledge, there is no comparable explicit model for collections of legislative documents in the document network analysis literature. Since we do not use all the features of the model in our analysis, greater use of the power of our data model is a natural direction for future work (see “Discussion” for more details). The complex structure of modern physics has led to many ambiguities and inaccuracies that have crept into the formulation of its epistemological premises. Even the cosmological value of the principles and equations of relativity is difficult to extract clearly from the mass of dimensional and non-dimensional speculations that produced them. In clarifying the confusing conditions of theoretical physics, Prof. Mackaye has fulfilled a very useful task; And it does so by providing critical answers to a number of relevant questions, such as: What is the cause of gravity? Is matter a form of radiation? What causes Lorentz contraction? Why are material bodies not delayed in their movement in space? Has the theory of relativity replaced the law of causality? Is the acceleration of material bodies exclusively relative to other material bodies? “How could we ignore the eloquent Chinese poetic parallelism of this dish?” (here, with the fleas), I wondered aloud.