Looking Outward or Looking Inward? Obligations Scholarship in the Early 21st Century

Abstract

It is a commonplace in the philosophy of law that you can try to understand legal institutions and practices from two points of view: you can look at them from the outside in, or from the inside out. From the outside or ‘external point of view’, you try to make sense of them by looking at the externals: what the various officials and other participants are actually doing and (what is in practice inseparable) what they say they are doing. From the inside or ‘internal point of view’ you try to get into the heads of the lawyers, to grasp what they think they are doing by considering their thoughts and (what is in practice inseparable) their utterances. Neither viewpoint is reducible to the other.

Keywords: interpretivism, law of obligations, internal point of view

JEL Classification: K12, K13