Four Qualms About Legal Pragmatism
Files
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
Recommended Citation
Stone, Martin J., "Four Qualms About Legal Pragmatism" (2013). Faculty Book Chapters. 104.
https://larc.cardozo.yu.edu/faculty-chapters/104