Neil MacCormick / Stanley Paulson / Veronica R Blanco / Sean Coyle / Carsten Heidemann / Richard Holton / Nicos Stavropoulos / Andreas Takis / Philip Leith / George Pavlakos

Wednesday 23 October 2002 and Thursday 24 October 2002
Queen’s University, Belfast

Speakers
Neil MacCormick, University of Edinburgh, MEP
Stanley Paulson, Washington University
Veronica R Blanco, University of Birmingham
Sean Coyle, University of Durham
Carsten Heidemann, Barrister, Kiel Bar Association
Richard Holton, University of Edinburgh
Nicos Stavropoulos, Mansfield College, Oxford
Andreas Takis, Barrister, Athens Bar Association
Philip Leith, Queen’s University Belfast
George Pavlakos, Queen’s University Belfast

For much of the 20th century, analytical legal theory has assumed that objectivity can be maintained only in combination with a value-free account of law’s normativity.

In recent years, it appears that our understanding of the relations between normativity and objectivity has undergone a significant change: a line of thought, originating with Dworkin’s seminal work, has forcefully urged that, despite the unavailability of value-free explications of law’s normativity, value-laden explications need not be less objective than value-free ones. The path to this understanding of law has been paved by considerable developments in contemporary metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. Two developments are crucial in this context. The first refers to the increasingly plausible idea that values can be conceived as mind-independent, objective entities. The second consists in the thought that evaluative language directly refers to such mind-independent entities.

In the light of these developments, the question of the nature of legal theory arises anew: Is legal theory to be regarded as Jurisscientia that studies norms as essentially mind-independent social facts? Or is it instead to be treated as Jurisprudentia that deals with norms and reasons for action as intellectual products, which can be regimented and understood in various, possibly conflicting, ways?