India Law Journal

"Law might be indeterminate for any of three reasons. The first is that language, upon which law depends, is inherently vague. As a consequence, legal propositions cannot be given a formal structure. This school of thought, which is not unrelated to deconstructionism, is most often associated with Stanley Fish and his followers. Second, law might be indeterminate even if it could be given a formal structure. This is the argument made by those who endeavor to apply Goedel's proof to law. Finally, law might be indeterminate because there is no such thing as 'the law.' We may call these three schools, respectively, linguistic indeterminacy, formal indeterminacy, and conceptual indeterminacy." David R. Dow, Godel And Langdell--A Reply To Brown And Greenberg's Use Of Mathematics In Legal Theory, 44 Hastings L.J. 707, 716 (1993).

See, generally, Duncan Kennedy, http://duncankennedy.net, e.g., Toward An Historical Understanding Of Legal Consciousness: The Case Of Classical Legal Thought In America, 1850-1940, 3 Research in Law and Sociology, 3, 4 (1980) available at:
http://duncankennedy.net/documents/Toward%20an%20Historical%20 Understanding%20of%20Legal%20Consciousness.pdf

"Autonomy of law: The 'autonomy of law' refers to a number of related but distinct claims:
- that legal reasoning is different from other forms of reasoning;
- that legal decision-making is different from other forms of decision-making;
- that legal reasoning and decision making are sufficient to themselves, that they neither need help from other approaches, nor would they be significantly improved by such help; and
- that legal scholarship should be about distinctively legal topics (often referred to as 'legal doctrine') and is not or should not be about other topics.
A claim about the autonomy of law could be understood in three different ways: descriptively, analytically, and prescriptively. Descriptively, the question is what level of autonomy is assumed or encouraged by current practices within a particular legal system. ...Analytically, the question is whether law, by its nature, either necessarily is or necessarily is not autonomous. For an analytical claim, one would investigate the ways in which legal reasoning is purportedly autonomous, and see whether such claims stand up to close scrutiny. " Brian Bix, A Dictionary of Legal Theory, Oxford: OUP (2004), 15-16.

See, e.g., Karl N. Llewellyn, Some Realism About Realism-Responding to Dean Pound, 44 HARV. L. REV. 1222, 1241 (1931); K.N. Llewellyn, Legal Illusion, 31 COLUM. L. REV. 82 (1931); Karl N. Llewellyn, A Realistic Jurisprudence-The Next Step, 30 COLUM. L. REV. 431, 431 (1930).

"Indeterminacy: The argument that legal questions do not have correct answers, or at least not unique correct answers. The issue is sometimes presented differently: whether the legal materials are collectively sufficient to determinate (single right) answer to the legal question. This second formulation is based on the argument that certain legal issues might have unique right answers when extra legal materials (including moral principles or the background, training, or biases of the judges) are considered, but that the law itself is not determinate.

Those who argue that law is significantly indeterminate base that conclusion on a variety of grounds: on the general nature of rules, the nature of language (e.g. pervasive vagueness, or deconstruction); gaps or contradictions within the law; the availability of exceptions to legal rules; inconsistent rules and principles that overlap in particular cases; the indeterminacy of precedent; and the indeterminacy in applying general principles to particular cases." Brian Bix, A Dictionary of Legal Theory, Oxford: OUP (2004), p. 97.

"Legal autopoiesis is probably most controversial in its insistence on legal autonomy. After all, modern law is shaped by external constraints, social pressures and political decisions. How can one, after the social science revolution in law, after sociological jurisprudence and legal economics, still describe the legal system as autonomous?"; "Deggau identifies legal autonomy in the 'conditionalized legal normativity' which is capable of producing the necessary surplus for autopoietic closure. Normativity, as the basis of legal autonomy, produces, at the same time, the specific relation of law to other social systems, since, in its normative structures, law has a 'structural affinity' towards other social systems. The very function of law is to congruently generalize normative structures in its social environment." Gunther Teubner, Autopoietic Law: A New Approach to Law and Society, Berlin: De Gruyter (1988) p. 6.

"The autonomy of legal consciousness is a premise; yet that autonomy is no more than relative. Not only the particular concepts and operations characteristic of a period, but also the entity that they together constitute, are intelligible only in terms of the larger structures of social thought " Duncan Kennedy, Toward An Historical Understanding Of Legal Consciousness: The Case Of Classical Legal Thought In America, 1850-1940, 3 Research in Law and Sociology, 3, 4 (1980) available at:
http://duncankennedy.net/documents/Toward%20an%20Historical%20 Understanding%20of%20Legal%20Consciousness.pdf

See, e.g. Richard Posner, The Economics of Justice (1981),

According to the concept of recursive fulfillment only propositions which are able to be effectively described, counted, written or calculated are valid. Georg Klaus and Manfred Buhr (eds.), Philosophisches Woerterbuch, Leipzig: VEB Bibliographisches Institut (1974) p. 724.

See generally, Brian Leiter, Why Quine Is Not A Postmodernist, 50 SMU L. Rev. 1739 (1997).

"Autopoiesis: An approach to law developed by Niklas Luhman (1927-1998) and Gunther Tuebner (1944-) and others, under which social systems, including law, are seen as (relatively) autonomous. Autopoiesis is the idea that many systems (both biological and social) have significant feedback or recursive mechanisms that allow the self-regulation of the system. 'Autopoietic law' starts from the notion that legal systems often are self regulating, self reinforcing, and self sustaining. Law is created, transformed, and justified according to its own rules; and autopoietic law discusses what follows from this fact. It is important to note that, at least in Luhmann's version of autopoiesis, 'law' and 'legal system' refers primarily to the 'discourse' of law, not to some set of institutions.

... The claim is not that law is 'autonomous' in the sense of being unaffected by external forces (e.g. political movements and cultural changes); autopoietic law accepts that such forces affect law, but the effects are transformed into legal terms (distinguishing what is 'lawful' and 'unlawful') by the normal legal processes. Under this approach, there is a sense, not always fully delineated, in which law 'acts', 'thinks' or develops 'on its own'." Brian Bix, A Dictionary of Legal Theory, Oxford: OUP (2004), p. 18.

Kurt Goedel, Ueber formal unentscheidbare Saetze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme I [On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems I], 38 Monatshefte Fur Mathematik Und Physik 173 (1931). An English version can be found in From Frege To Godel: A Source Book In Mathematical Logic, 1879-1931, at 596, 596-616 (Jean van Heijenoort ed. & trans., 1967).

"(1) that within any consistent formal system, there will be a sentence that can neither be proved true nor proved false; and (2) that the consistency of a formal system of arithmetic cannot be proved within that system." Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty Of Genius, p. 295 (1990). "Goedel showed ... that any such precise ("formal") mathematical system of axioms and rules of procedure whatever, provided that it is broad enough to contain descriptions of simple arithmetical propositions ... and provided that it is free from contradiction, must contain some statements which are neither provable nor disprovable by the means allowed within the system." Roger Penrose, The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, And The Laws Of Physics, 102 (1989).

David R. Dow, Godel And Langdell--A Reply To Brown And Greenberg's Use Of Mathematics In Legal Theory, 44 Hastings L.J. 707, 712 (1993).

An axiomatic formal system must be logically independent, complete, and free of contradiction.

Gunther Teubner, Autopoietic Law: A New Approach to Law and Society, Berlin: De Gruyter (1988) (autopoietic system is closed) p. 2. Goedel's theorem argues that the autopoietic system cannot be closed and consistent.

But see, Gunther Teubner, Autopoietic Law: A New Approach to Law and Society, Berlin: De Gruyter (1988) p. 4. "Circularity replaces extra-legal foundations of laws as does Kelsen's fictitious Grundnorm." p. 4. But Teubner has not, so far as I have seen, shown why extra-legal justification should be abandoned in favor of circular reasoning.

See, "Correspondence theory of truth", Brian Bix, A Dictionary of Legal Theory, Oxford: OUP (2004), p. 44.

Pascal Engel, Truth 9-29 (2002).

Alan R. White, Truth 105 (1970).

Jaap Hage, Studies in Legal Logic, Heidlberg: Springer (2005) p. 177.

Pascal Engel, Truth 14, 26, 34 (2002).

John C. Merrill & S. Jack Odell, Philosophy And Journalism, 71 (1983).

Elizabeth Blanks Hindman, When Is The Truth Not The Truth? Truth Telling And Libel By Implication, 12 Comm. L. & Pol'y 34 (2007).

Elizabeth Blanks Hindman, When Is The Truth Not The Truth? Truth Telling And Libel By Implication, 12 Comm. L. & Pol'y 34 (2007).

See generally, Willard Van Orman Quine, Word and Object, 24-25 (1960).

“In my naturalistic stance I see the question of truth as one to be settled within science, there being no higher tribunal. This makes me a scientific realist. I keep to the correspondence theory of truth, but only holophrastically: It resolves out into Tarski's disquotational version of truth rather than a correspondence of words to objects.” W.V.O. Quine, "Comment on Lavener", in Perspectives on Quine 229 (Robert B. Barrett & Roger F. Gibson eds., 1990).

W. V. O. QUINE, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism", in From A Logical Point Of View 20, 42 (2d ed. 1980).

“there is no absolute position or velocity; there are just the relations of coordinate systems to one another, and ultimately of things to one another .... What makes sense is to say not what the objects of a theory are, absolutely speaking, but how one theory of objects is interpretable or reinterpretable in another.” W.V. QUINE, Ontological Relativity 50 (1969).

“Have we . . . so far lowered our sights as to settle for a relativistic doctrine of truth--rating the statements of each theory as true for that theory, and brooking no higher criticism? Not so.” Willard Van Orman Quine, Word and Object 24-25 (1960).

"A somewhat less skeptical view may be the pragmatist view, although there is some disagreement over what the pragmatist view of truth is. The pragmatist view of truth, or at least one version of it, would be content using the predicate "true" if the statement to which it belongs is useful or handy. A more principled pragmatic theory of truth would also require some level of coherence requiring that for a statement to be true, it must cohere with other statements or beliefs that we hold to be true. Thus, truth is not reduced to simply anything you want to assert at any time, regardless if they are useful; rather, assertions must be consistent with other assertions you would make. This is consistent with truth being relativist in a theory-dependant way (i.e., relative to the theory that determines the coherent set of beliefs) but not radically relativistic to anything you want to say at any time" Christopher Roederer, Negotiating The Jurisprudential Terrain: A Model Theoretic Approach To Legal Theory, 27 Seattle U. L. Rev. 385, 396-397 (2003).

Elizabeth Blanks Hindman, When Is The Truth Not The Truth? Truth Telling And Libel By Implication, 12 Comm. L. & Pol'y 34 (2007).

E.g., Catharine Wells Hantzis, Legal Innovation Within the Wider Intellectual Tradition: The Pragmatism of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., 82 Nw. U. L. Rev. 541, 552 (1987) ("a pragmatic coherence theory of truth sees truth as a coherence among ideas") .

Steven D. Smith, The Pursuit of Pragmatism, 100 YALE L. J. 409, 410-11 (1990) .

Margaret Jane Radin, The Pragmatist and the Feminist, 63 S. CAL. L. REV. 1699, 1705 (1990).

Michael Sullivan & Daniel J. Solove, Can Pragmatism Be Radical? Richard Posner and Legal Pragmatism, 113 YALE L. J. 687, 688 & n.11 (2003) .

"Sind die Gesetze, Schlussregeln usw. der formalen Logik Konventionen, oder sind sie Gesetze der Wirklichkeit selbst, oder sind sie nur Gesetze des Denkens? Der dialektische Materialismus beweist, dass die Gesetze der formalen Logik weder Konventionen noch irgendwelche dem Bewustsein a priori gegebene Denkformen sind, sondern dass es sich zwar um Gesetze des Denkens handelt, aber um solche, die in der objektiven Realitaet wurzeln, die durch Abstraktion aus wirklichen Zusammenhaengen gewonnen wurden."
Georg Klaus and Manfred Buhr (eds.), Philosophisches Woerterbuch, Leipzig: VEB Bibliographisches Institut (1974) p. 721

See generally, Brian Leiter, Why Quine is not a Postmodernist, 50 SMU L. Rev. 1739, 1740, 1746 et seq. (1997).

W. V. O. Quine, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism", in From A Logical Point Of View, 20, 42 (2d ed. 1980).

See, "Defeasability", Brian Bix, A Dictionary of Legal Theory, Oxford: OUP (2004), p. 50.

"Imperativen kommt im Gegensatz zu Aussagen weder Wahrheit noch Falschheit zu. Imperative sind zweckmaessig oder unzweckmaessig, adaequat oder nicht adaequat." Georg Klaus and Manfred Buhr (eds.), Philosophisches Woerterbuch, Leipzig: VEB Bibliographisches Institut (1974) p. 723.

"Der historische Ausgangspunkt des Aufbaus mehrwertiger logischer Systeme ist die Fragestellung nach der universalen Gueltigkeit des Satzes vom ausgeschlossenen Dritten" Georg Klaus and Manfred Buhr (eds.), Philosophisches Woerterbuch, Leipzig: VEB Bibliographisches Institut (1974) p. 718.

Georg Klaus and Manfred Buhr (eds.), Philosophisches Woerterbuch, Leipzig: VEB Bibliographisches Institut (1974) p. 719.

"Antinomie... évident contradiction entre les règles" Ch. Perelman, Logique Juridique, Paris: Dalloz (1976), p. 41 (citing Tribunal d'Orleans 29 XI 1951).

W.V. Quine, The Ways Of Paradox And Other Essays 7 (Random House Publishers 1966).

"[a]n antinomy produces a self-contradiction by accepted ways of reasoning. It establishes that some tacit and trusted pattern of reasoning must be made explicit and henceforward be avoided or revised." W.V. Quine, The Ways Of Paradox And Other Essays 7 (Random House Publishers 1966).

Gunther Teubner, Recht als Autopoeitisches System. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp (1989) p. 123.

Gunther Teubner, Autopoietic Law: A New Approach to Law and Society, Berlin: De Gruyter (1988) p. 4.

"Goedel showed ... that any such precise ("formal") mathematical system of axioms and rules of procedure whatever, provided that it is broad enough to contain descriptions of simple arithmetical propositions ... and provided that it is free from contradiction, must contain some statements which are neither provable nor disprovable by the means allowed within the system." David R. Dow, Godel And Langdell--A Reply To Brown And Greenberg's Use Of Mathematics In Legal Theory, 44 Hastings L.J. 707, 713 (1993).

"le présent énoncé prescriptif doit être inefficace" Ch. Perelman (ed.) Etudes de Logique Juridique, vol. 7 Bruxelles: Bruylant (1978) p. 93.

John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Oxford: OUP (1973), p. 350, 363, 371.