Four Qualms About Legal Pragmatism

Four Qualms About Legal Pragmatism

Description

An invitation from Professors Graham Hubbs and Douglas Lind to participate in a panel on “Legal Pragmatism” left me feeling gratefully surprised: surprised, because I have never called myself a “legal pragmatist” or found inspiration in the jurisprudential work that embraces that label; but grateful, too, because I welcomed the opportunity to formulate my sense of why “legal pragmatism” is mostly useless in thinking about law, and to do so, moreover, against the background of statements from colleagues I admire concerning what they find significant in pragmatist thought. The following remarks are the upshot of that occasion. I will try to identify my basic qualms about legal pragmatism under four headings: (1) empty eclecticism, (2) reductive instrumentalism, (3) “the primacy of practice,” and (4) the metaphysically preservative recoil.

ISBN

9780415857307

Book Title

Pragmatism, Law, and Language

Editor(s)

Graham Hubbs and Douglas Lind

Publication Date

11-14-2013

Publisher

Routledge

Disciplines

Courts | Jurisprudence | Law | Law and Philosophy

Four Qualms About Legal Pragmatism

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