Legal Theory and Linguistic Reality: A Critical Examination of Modern Legal Scholarship
24 Pages Posted: 14 Oct 2007 Last revised: 30 Oct 2007
Abstract
This article is an attempt to apply some of the basic concepts of modern analytic and linguistic philosophy to legal scholarship. More specifically, the analysis tries to demonstrate important connections between the ideas of the modern German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and those of the legal realists, including Karl Llewellyn and Jerome Frank. Both embrace a notion of language, and the practice of capturing ideas in language, that emphasizes the difficulty of assigning definitive formal meanings to words and to phrases and that instead focuses on the degree to which words convey meaning as part of the inherently open-textured and often very complicated social activity that is verbal and written speech.
This notion of language of course carries significant implications for the nature and operation of a legal system that must employ language to capture ideas that are then used to resolve disputes and to regulate a wide range of activities in our society. It also has interesting implications for the academic study of that system. It is some of those implications that this article seeks to explore.
Keywords: Legal Scholarship
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