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

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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