Defeasibility in Law

Workshop

12-13 March 2015

Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main, Campus Westend
Lübeckerstraße/Ecke Hansaallee
Gebäude "Normative Ordnungen", EG 01

Participants:

Carsten Bäcker (Kiel)
Ruth Chang (New Brunswick)
Jonathan Dancy (Austin/Reading)
Michel de Araujo Kurth (Frankfurt)
Klaus Günther (Frankfurt)
Matthias Klatt (Hamburg/Osnabrück)
Susanne Mantel (Saarbrücken)
Andrei Marmor (Los Angeles)
Josep Juan Moreso (Barcelona)
Andreas Müller (Frankfurt)

Description:
In this workshop philosophers and jurists with different theoretical backgrounds come together to discuss about defeasibility in the law.
Defeasibility, most generally speaking, means that given some set of conditions A, something else B will hold, unless conditions C apply.
Especially reasons seem to be an appropriate candidate for an object to which defeasibility may be attributed to. Roughly speaking a reason r is defeasible when the justification it offers is only inconclusive because it can be challenged by defeating conditions (the so called “defeaters”). Now a central question is: does this also hold for legal reasons? If legal reasoning is, as most people think it is, mainly a rule-governed activity, then the defeasibility of legal reasons cannot just be taken for granted and more need to be said about how the defeasible force of legal reasons may be reconciled with the rule-governed character of legal reasoning (some philosophers suggest that one way to do this is to require that “contend independent reasons” or “formal principles” must be taken into account in the process of balancing reasons for and against deviating from a rule indicated outcome. This is supposed to make it more difficult to set the rule aside). It is also still unclear whether defeasibility poses a real challenge for legal positivism (as for example Dworkin seems to have supposed) or whether legal positivism is neutral to defeasibility based arguments. Questions like these will be discussed by the participants of this workshop.

Registration required. Unfortunately registration is only possible until March 9, 2015 Email to: Diese E-Mail-Adresse ist vor Spambots geschützt! Zur Anzeige muss JavaScript eingeschaltet sein!

Schedule: click here...

Language: english

Conveners of the workshop are:
Prof. Klaus Günther (Co-Speaker Cluster of Excellence "The Formation of normative Orders" and Prof. Marcus Willaschek (Cluster of Excellence "The Formation of normative Orders")

Presented by:
Cluster of Excellence "The Formation of Normative Orders"