Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Pragmatism, and the Jurisprudence of Agon

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Pragmatism, and the Jurisprudence of Agon
Author: Allen Mendenhall
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2016-12-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1611487927

This book argues that Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., helps us see the law through an Emersonian lens by the way in which he wrote his judicial dissents. Holmes’s literary style mimics and enacts two characteristics of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s thought: “superfluity” and the “poetics of transition,” concepts ascribed to Emerson and developed by literary critic Richard Poirier. Using this aesthetic style borrowed from Emerson and carried out by later pragmatists, Holmes not only made it more likely that his dissents would remain alive for future judges or justices (because how they were written was itself memorable, whatever the value of their content), but also shaped our understanding of dissents and, in this, our understanding of law. By opening constitutional precedent to potential change, Holmes’s dissents made room for future thought, moving our understanding of legal concepts in a more pragmatic direction and away from formalistic understandings of law. Included in this new understanding is the idea that the “canon” of judicial cases involves oppositional positions that must be sustained if the law is to serve pragmatic purposes. This process of precedent-making in a common-law system resembles the construction of the literary canon as it is conceived by Harold Bloom and Richard Posner.

The Pragmatism and Prejudice of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

The Pragmatism and Prejudice of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Author: Seth Vannatta
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2019-06-26
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 149856125X

This book investigates the extent to which various scholarly labels are appropriate for the work of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. As Louis Menand wrote, “Holmes has been called a formalist, a positivist, a utilitarian, a realist, a historicist, a pragmatist, (not to mention a nihilist).” Each of the eight chapters investigates one label, analyzes the secondary texts that support the use of the term to characterize Holmes’s philosophy, and takes a stand on whether or not the category is appropriate for Holmes by assessing his judicial and nonjudicial publications, including his books, articles, and posthumously published correspondences. The thrust of the collection as a whole, nevertheless, bends toward the stance that Holmes is a pragmatist in his jurisprudence, ethics, and politics. The final chapter, by Susan Haack, makes that case explicitly. Edited by Seth Vannatta, this book will be of particular interest to students and faculty working in law, jurisprudence, philosophy, intellectual history, American Studies, political science, and constitutional theory.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Pragmatism and Neuroscience

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Pragmatism and Neuroscience
Author: Jay Schulkin
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2019-08-17
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3030231003

This book explores the cultures of philosophy and the law as they interact with neuroscience and biology, through the perspective of American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes’ Jr., and the pragmatist tradition of John Dewey. Schulkin proposes that human problem solving and the law are tied to a naturalistic, realistic and an anthropological understanding of the human condition. The situated character of legal reasoning, given its complexity, like reasoning in neuroscience, can be notoriously fallible. Legal and scientific reasoning is to be understood within a broader context in order to emphasize both the continuity and the porous relationship between the two. Some facts of neuroscience fit easily into discussions of human experience and the law. However, it is important not to oversell neuroscience: a meeting of law and neuroscience is unlikely to prove persuasive in the courtroom any time soon. Nevertheless, as knowledge of neuroscience becomes more reliable and more easily accepted by both the larger legislative community and in the wider public, through which neuroscience filters into epistemic and judicial reliability, the two will ultimately find themselves in front of a judge. A pragmatist view of neuroscience will aid and underlie these events.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Legal Logic

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Legal Logic
Author: Frederic R. Kellogg
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2018-03-16
Genre: Law
ISBN: 022652406X

With Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and Legal Logic, Frederic R. Kellogg examines the early diaries, reading, and writings of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841–1935) to assess his contribution to both legal logic and general logical theory. Through discussions with his mentor Chauncey Wright and others, Holmes derived his theory from Francis Bacon’s empiricism, influenced by recent English debates over logic and scientific method, and Holmes’s critical response to John Stuart Mill’s 1843 A System of Logic. Conventional legal logic tends to focus on the role of judges in deciding cases. Holmes recognized input from outside the law—the importance of the social dimension of legal and logical induction: how opposing views of “many minds” may converge. Drawing on analogies from the natural sciences, Holmes came to understand law as an extended process of inquiry into recurring problems. Rather than vagueness or contradiction in the meaning or application of rules, Holmes focused on the relation of novel or unanticipated facts to an underlying and emergent social problem. Where the meaning and extension of legal terms are disputed by opposing views and practices, it is not strictly a legal uncertainty, and it is a mistake to expect that judges alone can immediately resolve the larger issue.

Handbook of the History of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy

Handbook of the History of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy
Author: Gianfrancesco Zanetti
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2023-04-03
Genre: Law
ISBN: 3031195469

This Handbook discusses representative philosophers in the history of the philosophy of law and social philosophy, giving clear concise expert definitions and explanations of key personalities and their ideas. It provides an essential reference for experts and newcomers alike.

Stereoscopic Law

Stereoscopic Law
Author: Alexander Lian
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 537
Release: 2020-12-03
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1108474748

This book argues for a three-dimensional view of law and restates the message of Holmes's 'The Path of the Law' for legal educators of today.

The Three Ps of Liberty

The Three Ps of Liberty
Author: Allen Mendenhall
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2020-03-12
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3030396053

This book considers the “three Ps” of liberty: pragmatism, pluralism, and polycentricity. These concepts enrich the complex tradition of classical liberal jurisprudence, providing workable solutions based on the decentralization, diffusion, and dispersal of power.

Artefacts of Legal Inquiry

Artefacts of Legal Inquiry
Author: Maksymilian Del Mar
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 932
Release: 2020-02-20
Genre: Law
ISBN: 150993619X

Winner of the 2022 Commendation for Excellence by the International Association for Legal and Social Philosophy (IVR). What is the value of fictions, metaphors, figures and scenarios in adjudication? This book develops three models to help answer that question: inquiry, artefacts and imagination. Legal language, it is argued, contains artefacts – forms that signal their own artifice and call upon us to do things with them. To imagine, in turn, is to enter a distinctive epistemic frame where we temporarily suspend certain epistemic norms and commitments and participate actively along a spectrum of affective, sensory and kinesic involvement. The book argues that artefacts and related processes of imagination are valuable insofar as they enable inquiry in adjudication, ie the social (interactive and collective) process of making insight into what values, vulnerabilities and interests might be at stake in a case and in similar cases in the future. Artefacts of Legal Inquiry is structured in two parts, with the first offering an account of the three models of inquiry, artefacts and imagination, and the second examining four case studies (fictions, metaphors, figures and scenarios). Drawing on a broad range of theoretical traditions – including philosophy of imagination and emotion, the theory and history of rhetoric, and the cognitive humanities – this book offers an interdisciplinary defence of the importance of artefactual language and imagination in adjudication.

Pragmatism, Logic, and Law

Pragmatism, Logic, and Law
Author: Frederic Kellogg
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2020-12-10
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1793616981

Pragmatism, Logic and Law offers a view of legal pragmatism consistent with pragmatism writ large, tracing it from origins in late 19th century America to the present, covering various issues, legal cases, personalities, and relevant intellectual movements within and outside law. It addresses pragmatism’s relation to legal liberalism, legal positivism, natural law, critical legal studies (CLS), and post-Rorty “neopragmatism.” It views legal pragmatism as an exemplar of pragmatism’s general contribution to logical theory, which bears two connections to the western philosophical tradition: first, it extends Francis Bacon’s empiricism into contemporary aspects of scientific and legal experience, and second, it is an explicitly social reconstruction of logical induction. Both notions were articulated by John Dewey, and both emphasize the social or corporate element of human inquiry. Empiricism is informed by social as well as individual experience (which includes the problems of conflict and consensus). Rather than following the Aristotelian model of induction as immediate inference from particulars to generals, a model that assumes a consensual objective viewpoint, pragmatism explores the actual, and extended, process of corporate inference from particular experience to generalization, in law as in science. This includes the necessary process of resolving disagreement and finding similarity among relevant particulars.

Of Bees and Boys

Of Bees and Boys
Author: Allen Mendenhall
Publisher: Red Dirt Press, LLC
Total Pages: 76
Release: 2017-05-10
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0692888942

In this collection of essays, literary lawyer Allen Mendenhall examines ideas about place, literature, reading, family, and custom from the vanishing perspective of a traditional Southerner. Whether he is lamenting the lack of learning among lawyers, recalling experiences with grandparents, or speculating about the impact of technology on scholarship, Mendenhall's distinctive prose, self-deprecating honesty, and contemplative tone make him one of our most interesting social critics. Always attentive to the profundities of everyday life, he evokes nostalgic feelings while expressing sometimes pointed, sometimes sensitive opinions that reflect a deep understanding of history, heritage, and the human condition.