Philosophy of Law

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Carved into the marble façade of the United States Supreme Court building are ten figures whose thought, practice, and legislation have shaped the Western legal tradition and the human aim to govern communities through law more generally: Hammurabi, Moses, Solon, Confucius, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Cicero, Julian, and Gaius. Taken together, they represent nearly three millennia of arguments about what law is, where it comes from, and what it owes to those who live under it. The first two thirds of the semester will provide an overview of these “figures on the wall”, treating them as entry points into a set of enduring philosophical questions. With these figures as our touchstones, the course will shift its attention in the last few weeks to contemporary approaches to the problem of legal interpretation. We’ll examine varieties of formalism (textualism, originalism in some of its flavors) and pragmatism, with particular attention paid to what is at stake in the choice of interpretive method—not just as a fine-grained legal question but as one rooted in concepts of law, morality, and politics, shaped for better or for worse by the figures on our wall.