Luís Duarte d'Almeida, DPhil

Arbeitsvorhaben

According to Law

How can you know how you ought legally to behave? The answer may seem simple: just look at the laws of your country. If a law requires some action, you legally ought to perform it. If a law forbids it, you legally ought not to perform it. And if no law either requires or forbids it, you neither ought nor ought not to do so. This answer may reflect most people’s views about the law. Yet it is not how lawyers think or courts decide. When lawyers argue before courts, and courts argue for their verdicts, their arguments are varied and complex, and their conclusions can surprise lay people. I will try to make sense of this complexity. Most philosophical accounts of law pay relatively little attention to legal argumentation: they focus on general law, which they see as a system of authoritatively laid-down rules, and take the role of courts as that of syllogistically “applying” such rules to the cases before them. But there are reasons to think this view of legal arguments is flawed. My project takes the opposite approach, starting with the philosophical analysis of legal arguments themselves to only then draw further-reaching conclusions about law—and about the gap between how law is seen, on the one hand, by lawyers, and, on the other, by everyone else.

Recommended Reading

Duarte d’Almeida, Luís. Allowing for Exceptions: A Theory of Defences and Defeasibility in Law. Oxford University Press, 2015.
—. “On the Legal Syllogism.” In Dimensions of Normativity: New Essays on Metaethics and Jurisprudence, edited by David Plunkett, Scott J. Shapiro, and Kevin Toh, 335–364. Oxford University Press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190640408.003.0015.
—. “What Is It to Apply the Law?” Law and Philosophy 40 (2021): 361–386. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10982-021-09405-x.