On Logic in the Law: "Something, but not All"

Ratio Juris 20 (1):1-31 (2007)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

In 1880, when Oliver Wendell Holmes (later to be a Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court) criticized the logical theology of law articulated by Christopher Columbus Langdell (the first Dean of Harvard Law School), neither Holmes nor Langdell was aware of the revolution in logic that had begun, the year before, with Frege's Begriffsschrift. But there is an important element of truth in Holmes's insistence that a legal system cannot be adequately understood as a system of axioms and corollaries; and this element of truth is not obviated by the more powerful logical techniques that are now available.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,221

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

The legal system between order and disorder.Michel van de Kerchove - 1994 - New York: Oxford University Press. Edited by François Ost.
On legal pragmatism: Where does 'the path of the law' lead us?Susan Haack - 2005 - American Journal of Jurisprudence 50 (1):71-105.
Lon L. Fuller.Robert S. Summers - 1984 - Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
Readings in jurisprudence and legal philosophy.Morris Raphael Cohen - 1951 - New York,: Prentice-Hall. Edited by Felix S. Cohen.
Consistency and Contradiction.Burkhard Tuschling - 1988 - Philosophy and Theology 2 (4):327-361.
Of truth, in science and in law.Susan Haack - 2008 - Brooklyn Law Review 73 (2).
Epistemology legalized: Or, truth, justice, and the american way.Susan Haack - 2004 - American Journal of Jurisprudence 49 (1):43-61.

Analytics

Added to PP
2009-01-28

Downloads
157 (#111,526)

6 months
21 (#100,442)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Susan Haack
University of Miami

References found in this work

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.Thomas Samuel Kuhn - 1962 - Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Edited by Otto Neurath.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.Thomas S. Kuhn - 1962 - Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Edited by Ian Hacking.
Logical foundations of probability.Rudolf Carnap - 1950 - Chicago]: Chicago University of Chicago Press.
In contradiction: a study of the transconsistent.Graham Priest - 1987 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Past, present and future.Arthur N. Prior - 1967 - Oxford,: Clarendon P..

View all 150 references / Add more references