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The antinomies of legal theory: An introductory survey

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Peter Goodrich
Peter Goodrich*
Affiliation:
Liverpool Polytechnic
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Extract

Any discipline or body of knowledge operates within the confines of a set of criteria as to what constitutes its object and equally as to how that object is to be known. The two sets of criteria, of object and method, are obviously interrelated. How we know an object is in large part constitutive of what that object is taken to be. At the same time, if there is in some sense an object external to how we come to know it, this presupposed or preconstructed object is going to act as a powerful limit upon what can be knowledge of it, without at some point transgressing the boundaries of the common sense of the object. There comes a point, in other words, when divergent statements are no longer concerned with the same object. It is my contention here that positivist jurisprudence, a certain tradition of statements about what law ‘is’, has already arrived at this point.

Type
Research Article
Information
Legal Studies , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , March 1983 , pp. 1 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Legal Scholars 1983

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References

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31. A claim, incidentally, which Wittgenstein himself was not prepared to make, cf Philosophical Investigation (supra) para. 65.

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52. Nietzsche, F. The Dawn of Day (1903, London)Google Scholar aphorism 444. My thanks in particular to Cosmo Graham and to Neil MacCormick for criticisms and encouragement in relation to an earlier draft of this paper.