Naturalizing Jurisprudence - Three Approaches
Naturalizing Jurisprudence - Three Approaches
Naturalizing Jurisprudence - Three Approaches
Brian Leiter
November 2008
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To appear in J. Shook & P. Kurtz (eds.), The Future of Naturalism (Amherst, N.Y.:
Prometheus Books, 2009).
Brian Leiter
evident, for example, in the epistemology, philosophy of mind and moral philosophy of
the past forty years.1 In this paper, I want to sketch three ways in which naturalism might
should approach philosophical inquiry. On this view, philosophy proceeds (as the most
familiar metaphor has it) “in tandem with the sciences,” that is, as the abstract and
reflective branch of the empirical sciences as they limn the causal structure of the world.
Such an approach is agnostic about ontological questions: the sciences decide those, and
since, as Jerry Fodor has repeatedly emphasized, the trend in the past fifty years has been
towards the proliferation of the special sciences, rather than a systematic reduction to a
supernatural entities since these play no role in any scientific enterprise with the “predict
1
Why that should be so is an issue I will return to briefly at the end.
2
This will largely constitute a précis of my recent collection Naturalizing Jurisprudence: Essays
on American Legal Realism and Naturalism in Legal Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
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There have, of course, been substantive naturalistic programs in jurisprudence
whose aim was to show that all the distinctive normative concepts of the law—
Scandinavian Legal Realism (because of the nationalities of its proponents) is the primary
example in the last hundred years, but one of H.L.A. Hart‟s decisive achievements was to
demonstrate the failure of the Scandinavian program to account for the perspective of
actors within a legal system--such a perspective, Hart argued plausibly, being essential to
might “naturalize” jurisprudential questions. Two of these pertain to questions about the
nature of law, one to the nature of adjudication, that is, the formal procedures by which
courts and official bodies decide legal disputes. Like most branches of philosophy,
philosophy of law has been concerned with the distinctive features of its subject-matter:
what demarcates legal norms from other kinds of norms, most notably moral ones; how
we distinguish human societies with law from those with other forms of normative
regulation; and what kind of normative force is characteristic of legal rules? The most
important work of 20th-century jurisprudence was H.L.A. Hart‟s 1961 book on The
Concept of Law, which decisively displaced two influential alternative positions: on the
one hand, Hans Kelsen‟s view that the nature of law was essentially tied to its use of
sanctions, and that its normative force was only explicable by reference to a non-natural
transcendental fact, what Kelsen called the Grundnorm; on the other hand, the
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normative terms in law to empirical predictions about official behavior. Hart‟s own
philosophical outlook, as his student Joseph Raz has emphasized, was a naturalistic one.
Contra Kelsen, Hart thought one could explain legal systems and their apparent
normative force in terms that were exclusively psychological and sociological—in terms
of what legal officials actually do and their attitudes towards what they do—and thus
naturalistic view that ours was a world without normative facts, but contra the
Scandinavians, he did not think this required reductive definitions of all normative terms
in law. The normative terms in law, Hart thought, can be understood non-cognitively,
and not simply as unsuccessfully referential terms. Talk of a “legal right” or “legal
obligation” did not pick out properties in the world, but rather expressed the distinctive
a theory according to what law depends on positive facts about official behavior—can be
understood as, itself, informed by philosophical sympathies that are naturalistic in spirit.
Yet Hart‟s own method of inquiry is one that hardly looks to be naturalistically
Austin, Hart relied on appeals to intuitive claims about law manifest in ordinary language
and in the understanding of, as he put it, a “modern municipal legal system” possessed by
the ordinary man—or at least the “ordinary man” as conceived (perhaps correctly) by
Oxford dons. Serious jurisprudence has, since then, been so spectacularly Oxford-centric
3
For the most systematic development of this idea, see Kevin Toh, “Hart’s Expressivism and His
Benthamite Project,” Legal Theory 11 (2005: 75-123.
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that it would not be wrong to say that intuitions that ring true in the vicinity of High
All of this calls to mind Robert Cummins‟s dismissive remarks about the “Twin
relevant intuitions [about the Twin Earth cases] were undisputed….The Putnamian
take on these cases is widely enough shared to allow for a range of thriving
intramural sports among believers. Those who do not share the intuitions are simply
Should legal philosophers be worried that the “intuitions” invited to the general
jurisprudence “game” have been unrepresentative and thus unreliable? Perhaps they
should. But before the question gets off the ground, a very different worry is likely to
occur: namely, what alternative could there possibly be to appeal to intuitions about the
Quine famously suggests that naturalism is “the recognition that it is within science
itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.”5 In
We can give up on intuitions about the nature of space and time and ask instead
what sorts of beasts space and time must be if current physical theory is to be
4
Robert Cummins, “Reflections on Reflecting Equilibrium,” in Rethinking Intuition: The
Psychology of Intuition and Its Role in Philosophical Inquiry, ed. M. DePaul & W. Ramsey (Lanham,
Maryland: Rowman & Littelfield, 1998), p. 116.
5
“Things and Their Place in Theories,” in W.V.O. Quine, Theories and Things (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 21. Quine, unfortunately, never seems to have noticed that the
psychological science of the 1930s--to which he was wedded--was subsequently discredited.
work well where we have bona fide sciences—for example, space-time physics or
cognitive neuroscience--to turn to for guidance. But how do we fare when we turn to
in the political science literature, Segal‟s and Spaeth‟s “Attitudinal Model.”7 Developing
ideas first broached by the American Legal Realists,8 Segal and Spaeth argue that the best
explanation for judicial decision-making (more precisely, decisions by the U.S. Supreme
Court) is to be found in the conjunction of the “the facts of the case” and “the ideological
attitudes and values of the justices.”9 Segal and Spaeth identify the “ideological
issues (for example, civil rights and liberties).10 Looking at more than thirty years of
practices involving the arrests of criminal suspects and searches of their cars, homes, and
property--Segal and Spaeth found that their Attitudinal Model correctly predicted 71% of
the votes by justices: that is, the ideological attitudes of the judge towards the underlying
6
Cummins, “Reflections on Reflective Equilibrium,” pp. 117-118.
7
Jeffrey Segal and Harold Spaeth, The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model Revisited
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
8
Id. At 87-89.
9
Id. At 86.
10
Id. at 321. As Segal & Spaeth remark: “Athough this measure is less precise than past votes, it
nonetheless avoids the circularity problem, is exogenous to the justices‟ behavior, and is reliable and
replicable.” Id.
Of course, to show that their explanation is the best one, Segal and Spaeth must
compare the Attitudinal Model with some alternatives--most importantly, with what they
call “the Legal Model” of decision.11 On the Legal Model, it is valid sources of law, in
conjunction with valid interpretive methods applied to those sources, that determine
outcomes (call the valid sources and interpretive methods “the class of legal reasons”).
The difficulty is that the class of legal reasons is indeterminate: it justifies more than one
If various aspects of the legal model can support either side of any given dispute
that comes before the Court, and the quality of these positions cannot be reliably
and validly measured a priori, then the legal model hardly satisfies as an
In other words, one can generate no testable predictions from the Legal Model because
the class of valid legal reasons justifies, and thus, predicts, multiple outcomes.13
true and explanatory? For the Attitudinal Model to be true and explanatory, there has to
be, among other things, a clear demarcation between the ideological attitudes of judges
(which are causally effective in determining the decisions) and the valid sources of law
11
Id. at 48-85. Their treatment of the “Legal Model” is, in several respects, crude; I have cleaned
it up considerably for purposes of presentation in the text.
12
Id. At 86.
13
This is because prediction tracks justification on the Legal Model.
authoritative texts (precedents, statutes, constitutions) which are the raw material of the
competing Legal Model, and which exclude the ideological attitudes central to the
Attitudinal Model. The concept of law, in turn, that vindicates this assumption is none
other than Raz‟s “hard positivist” notion of a rule of recognition whose criteria of legality
are exclusively ones of pedigree: a rule (or canon of interpretation) is part of the law by
provisions. That is the view of law required by the Legal Model, and it is the view of law
required to vindicate the Attitudinal Model as providing the best explanation of judicial
decision. Raz‟s Hard Positivism, in short, captures what law must be if the Attitudinal
Model is true and explanatory. To be sure, this defense of Hard Positivism is very
different from Raz‟s own—to which we‟ll return in a moment—but for the naturalist it
suffices that the Hard Positivist concept of law figures in the best explanatory account of
legal phenomena.
Yet is one thing to turn to space-time physics, whose explanatory and predictive
another to think the feeble social scientific models churned out by political scientists are
cutting the social world at its causal joints. The Attitudinal Model, for example, looking
only at a limited range of cases, and making some fairly crude assumptions about the
competing Legal Model, is able to predict outcomes only 71% of the time. Predictive
success of 50% would be achieved by the “flip the coin” model. A 71% success rate is,
in short, not the stuff of which scientific credibility is made. Yes, the Attitudinal Model
pertinent sciences of law is not a viable option, that still leaves unanswered the worries
about the robustness of the Oxford-centric intuitions that undergird claims about the
nature of law and authority central to Anglophone jurisprudence. There is, however, a
second possible way in which jurisprudential questions about the nature of law might be
intuitions are to be decisive in fixing the extensions of concepts, why not investigate,
empirically, what those intuitions really are? Why not find out, to borrow Hart‟s
Consider the Razian argument for the Hard Positivst doctrine mentioned a
moment ago, according to which all norms that are legally binding are so in virtue of
their source or pedigree. Raz claims that it is part of the concept of law that all law
necessarily claims authority, that is, it claims the right to tell its subjects what it is they
must do. But in order to even claim authority, Raz argues, legal rules must be intelligible
without recourse to the practical considerations on which they are based—they must, in
Raz‟s terms, be “exclusionary” reasons for action that preclude consideration of the
reasons on which they are based. According to Raz, this is because the concept of
authority appropriate to law is what Raz calls the “service conception,” according to
which a claim to authority is justified insofar as it helps those subject to the authority do
what they really ought to do more successfully than they would without the mediation of
But are authoritative directives really exclusionary reasons? That is, quite
explicitly, an intuitive claim about the nature of authority. It has been contested by a
number of legal philosophers, who think that authoritative reasons are simply weighty,
rather than exclusionary, reasons, and so nothing significant follows about the nature of
law, they claim, from the fact that all law claims authority. I confess my own intuitions
line up with Raz‟s, but so what? Raz himself emphasizes that the concept “law” is one
“used by people to understand themselves,” adding that “it is a major task of legal theory
understand themselves.”14 It is curious, indeed, then, that no one has made any effort to
figure out what “people”--as distinct from the subset of them who work in the vicinity of
But now let us put to one side questions about the nature of law and turn to
adjudication. Within American law, the most influential academic movement of the 20th-
century was known as “American Legal Realism,” which I alluded to earlier. The
American Legal Realists—lawyers and legal scholars writing most actively in the 1920s
and 1930s—urged that we look realistically at what courts are doing when they decide
cases. If we do so, they argued, we will find that many of the legal doctrines and
arguments that judges give in their opinions do little to explain the results they reach; the
published opinions more often conceal, rather than illuminate, the actual grounds of
decision. In fact, the judges are responsive to the underlying factual scenarios—what the
14
Joseph Raz, “Authority, Law and Morality,” The Monist 68 (1995), pp. 321-322.
legal norms of fairness and economic efficiency. The “legal arguments” they then give
The details of the Realist theory do not really matter for our purposes here; what
is significant is how they conceived their theoretical task. The Legal Realists thought
that the task of legal theory was to identify and describe--not justify--the patterns of court
tool for carrying out this non-normative task. There is a sense, then, in which we may
actual judicial decisions. (Indeed, one Legal Realist, Underhill Moore, even anticipates
the Quinean slogan: “This study lies within the province of jurisprudence. It also lies
within the field of behavioristic psychology. It places the province within the field.”17)
Notice, in particular, that both Quine and the Realists can be seen as advocating
15
W.V.O. Quine, “Epistemology Naturalized,” in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1969), p. 82.
16
Jaegwon Kim, “What is „Naturalized Epistemology‟?” Philosophical Perspectives 2 (1988), p.
388.
17
Underhill Moore & Charles Callahan, “Law and Learning Theory: A Study in Legal Control,”
Yale Law Journal 53 (1943), p. 1.
10
see the sterility of the foundationalist program, we see that the only genuine questions
there are to ask about the relation between theory and evidence and about the acquisition
of belief are psychological questions.”18 That is, once we recognize our inability to tell a
certain kind of normative story about the relation between evidence and theory--a story
about what theories are justified on the basis of the evidence--Quine would have us give
up the normative project: “Why not just see how [the] construction [of theories on the
So, too, the Realists can be read as advocating an empirical theory of adjudication
precisely because they think the traditional jurisprudential project of trying to show
decisions to be justified on the basis of legal rules and reasons is a failure. For the
Realists, legal reasoning is indeterminate: that is, the class of legitimate legal reasons
that a court might appeal to in justifying a decision fails, in fact, to justify a unique
outcome in many of the cases. If the law is determinate, then we would expect--except in
cases of ineptitude or corruption--that legal rules and reasons would be reliable predictors
of judicial outcomes. But the law in many cases is indeterminate, and thus in those cases
there is no “foundational” story to be told about the particular decision of a court: legal
reasons would justify just as well a contrary result. But if legal rules and reasons can not
rationalize the decisions, then they surely can not explain them either: we must,
accordingly, look to other factors to explain why the court actually decided as it did.
Thus, the Realists in effect say: “Why not see how the construction of decisions really
18
“Introduction: What is Naturalistic Epistemology,” in Naturalizing Epistemology, 2nd edition,
ed. H. Kornblith (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), p. 4.
19
Quine, “Epistemology Naturalized,” p. 75.
11
theory of adjudication, a theory of what it is that causes courts to decide as they do.
This way of naturalizing jurisprudence will no doubt call to mind the Attitudinal
Model, discussed earlier, though the use to which such a theory is being put is now
different. Whereas earlier we considered the possibility that we might look to social
scientific theories of adjudication to figure out what concept of law renders those theories
true and explanatory, the Legal Realist proposal under consideration is more modest: it
suggests that rather than pretending that the law justifies one and only one decision in the
kinds of legal disputes that attract the most attention (e.g., decisions of the U.S. Supreme
explanations that make sense of the empirical evidence, namely, the patterns of decisions
legal scholarship,20 though largely disdained by legal philosophers. But it may constitute
the most successful instance of one kind of “naturalized jurisprudence” that we presently
have on offer.
20
See, e.g., Thomas J. Miles & Cass R. Sunstein, “The New Legal Realism,” University of
Chicago Law Review 75 (2008): 831-851 for a useful overview of pertinent literature.
12
200. Susan Bandes, The Heart Has Its Reasons: Examining the Strange Persistence of the
American Death Penalty (January 2008)
201. Susan Bandes, After Innocence: Framing Wrongful Convictions (January 2008)
202. Ariel Porat, Expanding Restitution: Liability for Unrequested Benefits (January 2008)
203. Adam B. Cox, Deference, Delegation and Immigration Law (February 2008)
204. Ariel Porat and Alon Harel, Aggregating Probabilities across Offences in Criminal Law
(March 2008)
205. Jonathan S. Masur, Process as Purpose: Administrative Procedures, Costly Screens, and
Examination at the Patent Office (March 2008, revised July 2008)
206. Eric A. Posner and Cass R. Sunstein, Should Green house Gas Permits Be Allocated on a
Per Capita Basis? (March 2008)
207. Eric A. Posner, Human Welfare, Not Human Rights (March 2008)
208. Susan Bandes, Victims, “Closure,” and the Sociology of Emotion (March 2008)
209. Cass R. Sunstein, Is OSHA Unconstitutional? (March 2008)
210. Shyamkrishna Balganesh, Foreseeability and Copyright Incentives
211. Lee Fennell, Slices and Lumps (March 2008)
212. M. Todd Henderson, Citing Fiction (March 2008)
213. Jacob E. Gersen and Eric A. Posner, Soft Law (March 2008)
214. Christopher R. Berry and Jacob E. Gersen, The Unbundled Executive (March 2008)
215. Cass R. Sunstein and Reid Hastie, Four Failures of Deliberating Groups (April 2008)
216. Adam M. Samaha, Judicial Transparency in an Age of Prediction (April 2008)
217. Stephen J. Choi, Mitu Gulati, & Eric A. Posner, Which States Have the Best (and Worst)
High Courts? (May 2008)
218. Cass R. Sunstein, Two Conceptions of Irreversible Environmental Harm (May 2008)
219. Jonathan R. Nash, The Uneasy Case for Transjurisdictional Adjudication (June 2008)
220. Adam B. Cox and Thomas J. Miles, Documenting Discrimination? (June 2008)
221. Susan Bandes, Emotions, Values and the Construction of Risk (June 2008)
222. Jonathan R. Nash, Taxes and the Success of Non-Tax Market-Based Environmental
Regulatory Regimes (July 2008)
223. Thomas J. Miles and Cass R. Sunstein, Depoliticizing Administrative Law (June 2008)
224. Eric A Posner, Erga Omnes Norms, Institutionalization, and Constitutionalism in
International Law (July 2008)
225. Thomas J. Miles and Eric A. Posner, Which States Enter into Treaties, and Why? (July
2008)
226. Cass R. Sunstein, Trimming (August 2008)
227. Jonathan R. Nash, The Majority That Wasn’t: Stare Decisis, Majority Rule, and the Mischief
of Quorum Requirements (August 2008)
228. Eric A. Posner, Boumediene and the Uncertain March of Judicial Cosmopolitanism (August
2008)
229. Cass R. Sunstein, Second Amendment Minimalism: Heller as Griswold (August 2008)
230. John Bronsteen, Christopher Buccafusco, and Jonathan Masur, Happiness and Punishment
(September 2008)
231. Adam B. Cox and Thomas J. Miles, Judicial Ideology and the Transformation of Voting
Rights Jurisprudence (September 2008)
232. Daniel Abebe and Jonathan S. Masur, A Nation Divided: Eastern China, Western China
and the Problem of Global Warming (September 2008)