The Limits of Epistemic Legalism: A Reply

Abstract:     
The Jerusalem Review of Legal Studies has published a symposium on Law and the Limits of Reason (2009). In this reply to the commentators, I attempt to go beyond the book to clarify several critical issues. One is whether epistemic legalism, the book’s main target, is itself a theory of judicial legitimacy; I claim that it is. Another is the distinction between comparing the epistemic capacities of legislators and judges, on the one hand, and comparing the epistemic capacities of legislatures and courts, on the other. The first compares individuals, while the second compares groups. Conflating these two very different comparisons produces aggregation fallacies and analytic mistakes.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 8

Accepted Paper Series