Richard A. Posner — What Has Pragmatism to Offer Law?
34 published claims from this book.
- A closely related point is that the application of scientific method to law lay in the future (point 7). Cardozo in his judicial opinions was very much the rhetorician (point 8), but his essay on…
- Although pragmatic jurisprudence embraces a richer set of ideas than can be found in The Nature of the Judicial Process or ‘The Path of the Law,’ one can hardly say that there has been much…
- Criminal law assesses dangerousness, not actual mental states or free will.
- Deceptive judicial rhetoric does not refute explanations of behavior
- Different versions differ chiefly in their description of the fundamental test of pedigree a rule must meet to count as a rule of law.
- Dworkin’s characterization wrongly equates pragmatism with act utilitarianism.
- Formalism answers legal questions by pedigree, not by what works.
- Free inquiry reliably grows knowledge even when it cannot guarantee truth.
- Judges should use consequences to guide statutory interpretation.
- Judges’ attitudes cannot be reliably inferred from opinion rhetoric
- Lacking ethical foundations does not defeat the economic approach for pragmatists.
- Legal liability concepts can be redescribed without metaphysical notions.
- Legal pragmatism values long-range and systemic consequences, not merely case outcomes.
- Legal realism failed for lack of methodological tools, not for lack of aims.
- Modern theories expose legislatures as not purely public-interested bodies.
- Most American judges have been practicing pragmatists despite formalist discourse.
- Newtonian science shaped a mechanical worldview of human reason
- Parallel to and influenced by the pragmatists, legal realism comes on the scene, inspired by the work of Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Chipman Grey, and Benjamin Cardozo and realized in the work of…
- Potential offenders perceive risk more accurately than law-abiders do
- Pragmatic jurisprudence has advanced beyond Cardozo mainly in economics and free speech
- Pragmatic law judges rules by their consequences, not their origins.
- Pragmatism has revived but produced no new jurisprudence.
- Pragmatism inverts formalism by deriving legal rules from social need rather than semantic extension
- Pragmatism is not a school but a label spanning deeply divergent thinkers.
- Pragmatism redefined thought as an active tool for solving problems rather than passive contemplation.
- Pragmatism rejects Enlightenment dualisms as props of conservatism
- Pragmatism requires judges to adapt law to social change, not freeze it.
- Pragmatism’s rejection of foundations licenses rhetoric’s role in legal change
- Reviewing my eight items, we can see that Cardozo had a solid pragmatic grasp of the weakness of formalism (point 3) and a good pragmatic theory of adjudication (point 6), but free speech was not…
- Romantics challenged mechanical worldview by celebrating imagination
- Scientism and social science are distinct, and pragmatism extends scientific inquiry’s ethic
- Text interpretation is a consequence-sensitive act, not a logical exercise.
- These elements in turn imply an outlook that is progressive (in the sense of forward-looking), secular, and experimental, and that is commonsensical without making a fetish of common sense-for…
- This view, broadly scientific but flavored with a Platonic sense of a world of order behind the chaos of sense impressions, was challenged by the Romantic poets (such as Blake and Wordsworth) and…