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DWORKIN'S INTERPRETIVISM AND THE PRAGMATICS OF LEGAL DISPUTES*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2014

David Plunkett  and
Timothy Sundell
David Plunkett
Affiliation:
Dartmouth College, david.plunkett@dartmouth.edu
Timothy Sundell
Affiliation:
University of Kentucky
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Abstract

One of Ronald Dworkin's most distinctive claims in legal philosophy is that law is an interpretative concept, a special kind of concept whose correct application depends neither on fixed criteria nor on an instance-identifying decision procedure but rather on the normative or evaluative facts that best justify the total set of practices in which that concept is used. The main argument that Dworkin gives for interpretivism about some concept—law, among many others—is a disagreement-based argument. We argue here that Dworkin's disagreement-based argument relies on a mistaken premise about the nature of disagreement. We propose an alternative analysis of the type of dispute—what we call “seeming variation cases”—that Dworkin uses to motivate the idea of interpretative concepts. We begin by observing that genuine disagreements can be expressed via a range of linguistic mechanisms, many of which do not require that speakers literally assert and deny one and the same proposition. We focus in particular on what we call “metalinguistic negotiations,” disputes in which speakers do not express the same concepts by their words but rather negotiate how words should be used and thereby negotiate which of a range of competing concepts should be used in that context. We claim that this view has quite general theoretical advantages over Dworkin's interpretivism about seeming variation cases and about the relevant class of legal disputes in particular. This paper thus has two interlocking goals: (1) to undermine one of Dworkin's core arguments for interpretivism, and (2) to provide the foundations for a noninterpretivist alternative account of an important class of legal disputes.

Type
Research Article
Information
Legal Theory , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , September 2013 , pp. 242 - 281
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

*

Thanks to David Braddon-Mitchell, Alexi Burgess, Ronald Dworkin, Andy Egan, Triantafyllos Gkouvas, Sandy Goldberg, Mark Greenberg, Scott Hershovitz, AJ Julius, Frank Jackson, Chris Kennedy, Brian Leiter, Peter Ludlow, Kate Manne, Tristram McPherson, Eliot Michaelson, Daniel Nolan, George Pavlakos, Karl Schafer, François Schroeter, Laura Schroeter, Scott Shapiro, Seana Shiffrin, Alex Silk, Dale Smith, Nicos Stavrapolous, Kevin Toh, Kevin Walton, and Pekka Väyrynen. Versions of this paper were presented to audiences at the Julius Stone Institute of Jurisprudence at the University of Sydney School of Law, the Legal Theory Workshop at the University of Melbourne School of Law, the Centre for Law and Cosmopolitan Values at the University of Antwerp, the Jurisprudence Discussion Group at Oxford University, and the 2012 Inland Northwest Philosophy Conference on Pragmatism, Law, and Language. Thanks to everyone who participated in those sessions for their helpful questions and comments.

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