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Other materials
- Legal Positivism Social Source Thesis and Metaphysical Grounding: Employing Metaphysical Grounding based on Metaphysical Laws
The core of legal positivism is the so-called social source thesis, which claims that legal facts are determined only by social facts. I examine an interpretation of this thesis that uses metaphysical grounding as an exact relation between legal facts and social facts. Read more
- Dimensions of Legal Ethics in the Light of Paul Ricoeur’s ‘Petite Éthique’
The article investigates the multidimensional phenomenon of legal ethics, whose complexity justifies looking for adequate tools for its systematization in philosophy. An attempt is made to characterize a number of aspects of legal ethics in the perspective of Paul Ricoeur’s “little ethics” (French: la petite éthique). Read more
- The Culture of Justification and Public Reason: Comments on the Motion of Members of the Polish Parliament to the Constitutional Tribunal
The aim of the paper is to demonstrate how the culture of justification and the public reason can serve as legitimacy device in legal justifications. The idea of the culture of justification, proposed by David Dyzenhaus, makes an interesting contribution to the discussion on how to make headway with the problem of determining the limits of public authority. Read more
- Paulus Vladimiri and His Forgotten Concept of the Just War
The theoretical reflection formulated in the neo-scholastic School of Salamanca has been regarded as the source of the contemporary concept of international relations: going beyond the paradigm of the time – determined, on the one hand, by the idea of the holy war and, on the other, by the doctrine of the just war – the Salamanca scholars laid down foundations for the edifice of modern international law. Read more
- Judges’ Virtues and Vices: Outline of a Research Agenda for Legal Theory
This article focuses on the issue of applicability of virtue theory to legal theory in civil-law (statutory) jurisdictions and suggests research areas and problems in that respect. The author starts with an assumption that the notion of “virtue” and virtue ethics should be used for the purposes of legal theory starting from references to judicial ethics and normative theory of judicial decision-making. Read more
- Why Moral Norms Cannot be Reduced to Facts: On a Trilemma in Derivations of Moral “Ought” from “Is”
The paper aims at formulating a certain trilemma that applies to justifying moral norms. The trilemma can be succinctly stated as follows: any attempt to derive a “moral-ought-statement” from an “is-statement” with a justificatory goal (i.e. to justify the “moral-ought-statement”), even if it were successful in its “derivation” part (i.e. Read more
- Against the Input View of Legal Gaps
The goal of this paper is to identify and criticize an intuitive way of thinking about gaps in the law, which I dub “the input view”. In this approach, legal gaps play the role of premises in legal reasoning in the sense that they trigger the application of, otherwise impermissible, methods of interpretation. Read more
- Cultural Pluralism and Religious Belief: Around Henry Hardy’s “In Search of Isaiah Berlin: A Literary Adventure”
The article discusses Henry Hardy’s book In Search of Isaiah Berlin: A Literary Adventure, published in the fall of 2018. The author was Berlin’s closest collaborator and is the editor or co-editor of eighteen volumes of his works and four volumes of his letters. Read more
- Hardy on Polanowska-Sygulska on Hardy on Berlin on Pluralism and Religion
Henry Hardy responds to various minor points in Beata Polanowska-Sygulska’s review of his book In Search of Isaiah Berlin, and argues that she provides no good reason to resist his claim that Isaiah Berlin’s value pluralism is inconsistent with mainstream forms of religious belief. Read more