Non-Normative Principles
29 Pages Posted: 15 Oct 2019 Last revised: 15 Jan 2020
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Non-normative Principles
Date Written: May 24, 2019
Abstract
How should we think about legal principles? In analytic jurisprudence, the best-known account of legal principles — Ronald Dworkin’s account — assigns them a normative function in law, albeit not a hard or determinate one. But legal principles sometimes serve a characterizing rather than a normative function: they tell us about the character of a legal system rather than giving us instructions about how to deal with difficult cases. There is a further question whether characterizing principles can nevertheless perform some sort of normative function in legal argument. In the second half of this paper, I consider the operation of constitutional principles, like the rule of law and the separation of powers.
Keywords: constitutional norms, Critical Legal Studies, Dicey, Dworkin, Fuller, general directive propositions, Montesquieu, principles, Raz, Roman Law, rule of law, separation of powers, rules
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