Cambridge Legal Theory Discussion Group (CLTDG): 'Legal Normativity: A Puzzle'

You are warmly invited to attend the first session of the Cambridge Legal Theory Discussion Group.

This session will be chaired by Amin Ebrahimi Afrouzi, who will be presenting his paper entitled "Legal Normativity: A Puzzle". Sessions are pre-read, and the full paper is available from Dropbox.

“There are strong intuitions that the law is normative in the reason-giving sense. In fact, for many philosophers who are also committed to conceptual analysis, an account of something non-normative would necessarily be an account of something other than law. As Kaplan (2017: 469) notes, many take law’s normativity as “a pretheoretical datum: a relatively uncontroversial feature of law that rules out all theories of law that fail to account for it.” This means that, for many scholars, the ability to account for law’s normativity is an adequacy-criteria for a theory about the nature of law. However, this assumption has been recently challenged by a growing number of scholars who propose that law is indeed not normative in the reason-giving sense at all. This gives rise to a methodological or meta-theoretical debate in jurisprudence. In this paper, I present various existing positions on legal normativity, discuss what criteria we can use to adjudicate between them, and to what extent it can serve as a success criteria for a theory of law.”

Everyone is welcome to attend!