In the present essay, I consider the relevance of evolutionary psychology (EP) for legal positivism, addressing the two main traditions in the legal positivist family: (1) the tradition I identify with the works of Hart and Kelsen and characterize as “normativist,” as it tries to describe law as a purely or, at least, as an essentially normative phenomenon, while remaining true to the ideal of scientific objectivity and value-neutrality; (2) the tradition I broadly refer to as “legal realism,” which equates (...) law with adjudication and “legal science” with the task of explaining judicial behaviour. (shrink)

Ronald Dworkin is one of the most frequently cited legal philosophers. His work, notably his attack on H. L. A. Hart's positivist theory of law, has received considerable attention, earning him praise as well as trenchant criticism. Instead of discussing the analytical validity of Dworkin's claims, though, we propose an alternative reading of his jurisprudential writings that emphasises their rhetorical nature. After delineating the rhetorical context of his work, we provide several illustrations of his use of rhetorical strategies and, with (...) the help of sentiment‐analysis techniques, emotional language. While resorting to classical rhetorical tactics, Dworkin's rhetoric, we argue, appealed to the emotional power of rights talk at a time when the notion of rights enjoyed greater resonance with his audience. (shrink)

Ratio Juris, Volume 34, Issue 4, Page 356-385, December 2021.

I consider the potential of eight text-scaling methods for the analysis of jurisprudential change. I use a small corpus of well-documented German Federal Constitutional Court opinions on European integration to compare the machine-generated scores to scholarly accounts of the case law and legal expert ratings. Naive Bayes, Word2Vec, Correspondence Analysis and Latent Semantic Analysis appear to perform well. Less convincing are the performance of Wordscores, ML Affinity and lexicon-based sentiment analysis. While both the high-dimensionality of judicial texts and the validation (...) of computer-based jurisprudential estimates pose major methodological challenges, I conclude that automated text-scaling methods hold out great promise for legal research. (shrink)