Search Results for: semantics

Public Interest and Access to Justice: A Liminal Analysis

Dr Jan Winczorek

University of Warsaw

English abstract: The paper argues that there exists a contradiction between access to justice and public interest. It substantiates this claim by reviewing selected arguments for access to justice and by referring to empirical evidence. The contradiction is then interpreted using a sociological theory of law, which enables establishing the structural reasons for such a clash. In order to reconcile access to justice with the public interest, the legal system must develop the semantics allowing for a better understanding of social inclusion conditions. In particular, the legal system must finally do away with pre-modern charity-oriented concept of access to justice, be able to grasp access to justice in its totality and reflect on conditions of legal inclusion. If it fails to do that, it is doomed to reproduce the conflict. The concept of access to justice developed by Cappelletti and others in the 1970s is a good point of departure here, but it is by far insufficient.

Keywords: access to justice, public interest, systems theory

Language: English

Published: Number 3(24)/2020, pp. 24-40.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36280/AFPiFS.2020.3.24

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Number of downloads: 651

A Judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union from the Perspective of Cognitive Theory of Prototypes: A Case Study

Dr Mateusz Zeifert

University of Silesia in Katowice

English abstract: Interpretative doubts in the application of law are usually born of discrepancies between the statutory language and the non-linguistic reality. Therefore, they pose the problem of categorization. The theory of law and legal practice have for centuries been dominated by the classical theory of categorization, according to which conceptual categories can be described by a set of sufficient and necessary features. In the 1970s, an American researcher Eleanor Rosch conducted a series of psychological experiments that led her to question the classical theory and lay the foundations for an alternative one, known as the prototype theory. According to this approach, conceptual categories are organized around the most typical exemplars (prototypes), and membership of a category is measured by similarity to the prototype. Some of the consequences of such view are that category membership is a gradable feature and that the borderlines of categories are fuzzy. The article presents an outline of the prototype theory in the version used in cognitive linguistics. Its usefulness for the theory and practice of statutory interpretation is tested on the basis of the judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union regarding the concept of beer. In this judgment, the CJEU refused to define the concept of beer by setting requirements as to its raw material composition and ruled that beer is a product that has organoleptic characteristics of beer. This definition on the basis of classical theory appears to be tautological, however, it finds theoretical justification in the prototype theory. In conclusions, the author indicates research problems that must be taken up in order for the prototype theory to be reliably used in jurisprudence.

Keywords: categorization, semantics, prototype theory, statutory interpretation

Language: Polish

Published: Number 2(23)/2020, pp. 109-120.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36280/AFPiFS.2020.2.109

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Number of downloads: 644

In search of the hidden nature – natural kinds and legal language

Mgr Bartosz Janik

Jagiellonian University

English abstract: In the theoretical legal literature there are views that consistently want to combine natural kinds with semantics of legal language (M. Moore, D. Brink, N. Stavropoulos). The motivation for creating such a theories is the desire to get the semantics of the legal language to be realistic. This semantics should enable the formulation of an objective theory of legal determination. Very often, the obvious objection to such theories is that the legal terms do not correspond to any objects in the world. The purpose of this article is to examine these ideas and attempt to show that the nature of the legal terms directly shows the impossibility of building an objective discourse for such terms (where objectivity is understood as objectivity in the scientific sense). Regardless, such theories can be formulated and treated as objective but the objectivity of those theories will come from methods of construction of the objects and not from their nature.

Keywords: natural kinds, essentialism, legal theory, realism

Language: Polish

Received: 02.10.2016
Accepted: 13.11.2016

Published: Number 1(14)/2017, pp. 66-73.

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Number of downloads: 409