The Rule of Law and Its Predicament

Problema. Anuario de Filosofía y Teoría del Derecho

Ronald Dworkin sostiene que el contenido del derecho se limita al conjunto de derechos sujetos a ser adjudicados ante los tribunales. Para Dworkin, el valor de la "legalidad", es decir, el valor que sirve el derecho de manera distintiva cuando funciona adecuadamente, es una virtud de las decisiones judiciales. El objetivo de este artículo es criticar el enfoque hacia las cortes de Dworkin, dado que proporciona una concepción empobrecida de lo que es el valor de la "legalidad", argumentaré que la legalidad tiene una dimensión tanto sistemática como adjudicativa. En su dimensión sistemática, exige que el gobierno en su conjunto esté estructurado de tal forma que garantice el ejercicio adecuado del poder público. Por lo tanto, para que un sistema jurídico presente el valor de la legalidad, no es suficiente que los jueces emprendan el uso de la coerción del Estado bajo ciertas condiciones. Además, el ejercicio del poder público tiene que ser acorde con un esquema de separación de poderes con un objetivo de justicia. Así entendidas, no todas las exigencias de la legalidad son sujetas a ser adjudicadas judicialmente. Esta * Artículo recibido el 16 de octubre de 2014 y aceptado para su publicación el 6 de noviembre de 2014. ** Associate Professor, School of Law, University of Reading. dimitris.kyritsis@ gmail.com. I thank participants in the Workshop on the Legal Philosophy of Ronald Dworkin organized by UNAM and the Supreme Court of Mexico for their helpful comments. I am also grateful to an audience at the 2014 McMaster Conference in Legal Philosophy, where I also presented the argument of this article, and especially to Eric Encarnacion for his written and oral comments. This article elaborates claims that I make in my monograph Shared Authority: Courts and Legislatures in Legal Theory (forthcoming Hart Publishing).

Ronald Dworkin argues that the content of the law is limited to the set of judicially enforceable rights. For him, legality, the value that law distinctively serves when it goes well, is primarily a virtue of judicial decision-making. The purpose of this article is to criticize Dworkin’s court-centrism on the ground that it delivers an impoverished conception of legality. Legality has a systemic as well as an adjudicative dimension. In its systemic dimension it requires that government as a whole is structured in a way that guarantees the proper exercise of public power. Accordingly, for a legal system to exhibit the value of legality, it is not sufficient that its judges direct the use of state coercion under certain conditions. Additionally the exercise of public power must accord with a scheme of separation of powers that is geared towards justice. Not all the requirements of legality thus understood are judicially enforceable. This expansive conception of legality is underpinned by a theory of political legitimacy that differs from Dworkin’s. Legitimacy is not merely a retail thing. A political community is also legitimate when it has standing guarantees for the proper exercise of power. Separation of powers is crucial among them. http://biblio.juridicas.unam.mx/Revista/FilosofiaDerecho/

2016

Ronald Dworkin sostiene que el contenido del derecho se limita al conjunto de derechos sujetos a ser adjudicados ante los tribunales. Para Dworkin, el valor de la "legalidad", es decir, el valor que sirve el derecho de manera distintiva cuando funciona adecuadamente, es una virtud de las decisiones judiciales. El objetivo de este artículo es criticar el enfoque hacia las cortes de Dworkin, dado que proporciona una concepción empobrecida de lo que es el valor de la "legalidad", argumentaré que la legalidad tiene una dimensión tanto sistemática como adjudicativa. En su dimensión sistemática, exige que el gobierno en su conjunto esté estructurado de tal forma que garantice el ejercicio adecuado del poder público. Por lo tanto, para que un sistema jurídico presente el valor de la legalidad, no es suficiente que los jueces emprendan el uso de la coerción del Estado bajo ciertas condiciones. Además, el ejercicio del poder público tiene que ser acorde con un esquema de separación de poderes con un objetivo de justicia. Así entendidas, no todas las exigencias de la legalidad son sujetas a ser adjudicadas judicialmente. Esta * Artículo recibido el 16 de octubre de 2014 y aceptado para su publicación el 6 de noviembre de 2014. ** Associate Professor, School of Law, University of Reading. dimitris.kyritsis@ gmail.com. I thank participants in the Workshop on the Legal Philosophy of Ronald Dworkin organized by UNAM and the Supreme Court of Mexico for their helpful comments. I am also grateful to an audience at the 2014 McMaster Conference in Legal Philosophy, where I also presented the argument of this article, and especially to Eric Encarnacion for his written and oral comments. This article elaborates claims that I make in my monograph Shared Authority: Courts and Legislatures in Legal Theory (forthcoming Hart Publishing).

Philosophical Investigations, 2006

Drawing deeply from Wittgenstein's later works, Thomas Morawetz has articulated a vision of legal decision making according to which it is not a defect, but inherent in the very nature of law, for there to be disagreement among judges regarding their legal decision-making strategies. Central to Morawetz's account is the notion of a legal grammatical proposition. This essay argues that because legal grammatical remarks lack any truth-value, they cannot play a justificatory role. This would imply that the rule of law is no more justifiable than the violent alternatives used by anarchists and religious fanatics.

2012

The debates about the interrelations between reason and law have undergone a change after the eighteenth century. References to the recta ratio of jusnaturalistic tradition have not disappeared, but other comprehensions of legal reason have developed. The European debate over legal positivist science has contributed to this in a manifestation of the rationality of law. This transformation may be considered the basis for the development of true “legal technologies” throughout the twentieth century. On the other hand, in the context of theories of positive law which have taken the relation between ethics and legal reason as a problem, the formation of discourses on coercion (Austin and Holmes), on validity (Kelsen and Hart) and on justification (Alexy and Dworkin) has also contributed to the emergence of new models of legal rationality. In this paper, it is highlighted that the construction of these models is linked to the “points of view” which theories have proposed as legitimate fo...

Despite its long history of discourse in the Western world, " rule of law " (RL) is one of the most indeterminate normative concepts of political governance. " Thin " and " thick " definitions garner varying levels of support from different camps and remain controversial. The indeterminacy, nevertheless, does not cripple the enthusiastic promotion of RL around the world. The indeterminacy of RL presents more than merely an intellectually interesting question; it is also a pragmatic issue with real world consequences. A clear and pragmatic definition of the rule of law is needed for such a universally applied concept. Because time has shown that the traditional, conceptual-deductive approach alone cannot successfully solve the problem of indeterminacy and the risk of impracticability, this essay proposes a bottom-up, comparative-inductive approach responsive to both challenges. After discussing a new approach for thinking about rule of law pragmatically, this paper demonstrates the approach and analyzes relevant important findings I will then redefine RL accordingly and compare with the European Union's understanding of RL from some of its promotion projects. I hope that the new definition will not only prove analytically strong for thinking about normative concepts on the methodological level, but will also establish the European Union's promotion of RL upon the common ground among the wisdom and experience of the realistic scholars and research.

Law and Philosophy Library, 1999