Abstract
From a philosophical point of view, conventions are expressions of collective intentionality, to the effect that certain social phenomena are accepted or recognized as having legal significance, or that there exist a set of mutual expectations and cooperative dispositions to the said effect in the community. Legal conventions are institutional facts, defined by a set of constitutive rules. According to John R. Searle, the general form of an institutional fact is: “X counts as Y in context C”. Legal conventions may be formal and institutional or informal and customary in kind. Still, mere acceptance or recognition of a social phenomenon as legal by the members of the community is not enough to guarantee its legally qualified status, if the institutional prerequisites for the judgment are not present, as well. Historically, the roots of legal conventionalism can be traced back to the historical school of law, founded by Friedrich Carl von Savigny in Germany in the nineteenth century. According to von Savigny, the origins of the legal system were anchored in the organically evolving spirit of the nation (Volksgeist). As a consequence, the common legal consciousness or shared legal convictions in the community would guide the “organic” path of the law, as found expression in the well-settled practices and usages of customary law in the traditional legal systems and in the lawyers’ law (Juristenrecht) or the law professors’ law (Professorenrecht) in more sophisticated legal systems. As to legal argumentation, the results produced by legal conventionalism do not to a significant degree deviate from those obtained by analytical legal positivism and the new rhetoric, as illustrated by the results obtained by the research group Bielefelder Kreis.
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Notes
- 1.
Lewis’ book to a great extent leans on the insights of mathematical game theory.
- 2.
On brute facts and institutional facts, Searle, Speech Acts. An Essay in the Philosophy of Language, pp. 50–53; Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, pp. 27–29; Anscombe, “On Brute Facts”.
- 3.
Following Ludwig Wittgenstein’s linguistic usage, facts are actually prevalent states of affairs in the world, while states of affairs are merely possible configurations of various objects, their qualities and mutual relations.
- 4.
“Pluto loses status as a planet”, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/5282440.stm; broadcast on 24th Aug., 2006; visited on 27th Nov., 2006.
- 5.
Of course, the naming of planets, stars, and so on, as e.g. Jupiter, Saturn, or Betelgeuze is based on linguistic and scientific conventions in the community of astronomers, but that will not affect the argument made.
- 6.
When the legislator makes use of some brute facts in an enactment or when a court of justice makes use of brute facts in a legal judgment, are we thereafter dealing with brute or institutional facts, when reference is made to the enactment or legal judgment concerned? Tables and chairs in someone’s house and “tables” and “chairs” in legislation or legal judgment need not be the same thing.
- 7.
“… that objects and predicates enter into the world only as elements of facts, and that objects and predicates in isolation are unthinkable.” Stenius, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, p. 25, 68. Cf. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, § 1.1.: “Die Welt ist die Gesamtheit der Tatsachen, nicht der Dinge.”
- 8.
On the institutional character of law, MacCormick, Rhetoric and the Rule of Law, 63–68; MacCormick, Institutions of Law.
- 9.
Rawls wrote in “Two Concepts of Rules”: “In this paper I want to show the importance of the distinction between justifying a practice and justifying a particular action falling under it. (…) one must distinguish between justifying a practice as a system of rules to be applied and enforced, and justifying a particular action which falls under these rules; utilitarian arguments are appropriate writh regard to to question about practices, while retributive arguments fit the application of particular rules to particular case.” Rawls, Collected Papers, pp. 20, 22. – Rawls used the practice or institution of punishment as an example here. With the term “practice”, he refers to “any sort of activity specified by a system of rules which defines offices, roles, moves, penalties, defenses, and so on, and which give the activity its structure”. As examples thereof Rawls refers to games and rituals, trials, and parliaments. Rawls, “Two Concepts of Rules”, p. 20, n. 1.
- 10.
Alf Ross, too, made use of chess as an example of community-shared rules and the judge’s internal point of view as to the law under the premises of Ross’ analytical legal realism. Ross, Om ret og retfærdighed, pp. 22–28.
- 11.
“It is perhaps important to emphasize that I am discussing of rules and not conventions. It is a rule of chess that we win the game by checkmating the king. It is a convention of chess that the king is larger than a pawn. “Convention” implies arbitrariness, but constitutive rules in general are not in that sense arbitrary.” Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, p. 28. (Italics in original.)
- 12.
Kelsen, Der Soziologische und der juristische Staatsbegriff. Kritische Untersuchung des Verhältnisses von Staat und Recht.
- 13.
Searle, Speech Acts, pp. 51–52: “[Institutional facts] are indeed facts; but their existence, unlike the existence of brute facts, presupposes the existence of certain human institutions. It is only given the institution of marriage that certain forms of behavior constitute Mr. Smith marrying Miss Jones. (…) These ‘institutions’ are systems of constitutive rules. Every institutional facts is underlain by (a system of) rule(s) of the form ‘X counts as Y in context C’”. – Cf. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, pp. 28, 43–51. Cf. also Lagerspetz, A Conventionalist Theory of Institutions, p. 13; den Hartogh, Mutual Expectations. A Conventionalist Theory of Law.
- 14.
Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, pp. 32–37 et seq.
- 15.
On the type/token distinction with reference to money as a general social institution (= type) and money as individual bank notes and coins (= token), cf. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, pp. 32–34, 53.
- 16.
“… a very large number, though by no means all of [institutional facts], can be created by explicit performative utterances.” Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, p. 34.
- 17.
In the Roman Empire, the act of raising or lowering of the Emperor’s thumb sealed the fate of a gladiator who had lost the fight in the arena. Such a gesture may be taken as a kind of institutional speech-act, as well, though there is no express linguistic utterance involved, but only the thumb gesture.
- 18.
Merely tacit contractual or other arrangements are an exception thereto.
- 19.
“Logically speaking, the statement “A certain type of substance, x, is money” implies an indefinite inclusive disjunction of the form “x is used as money or x is regarded as money or x is believed to be money, etc.” But that seems to have the consequence that the concept of money, the very definition of the word “money”, is self-referential, because in order that a type of thing should satisfy the definition, in order that it should fall under the concept of money, it must be believed to be, or used as, or regarded as, etc., satisfying the definition.” Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, p. 32. (Italics added.) – Cf. Lagerspetz, A Conventionalist Theory of Institutions, pp. 45–51.
- 20.
“If everybody stops believing it is money, it ceases to function as money, and eventually ceases to be money. (…) And what goes for money goes for elections, private property, wars, voting, promises, marriages, buying and selling, political offices, and so on.” Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, p. 32.
- 21.
Lagerspetz, A Conventionalist Theory of Institutions; Lagerspetz, The Opposite Mirrors. An Essay on the Conventionalist Theory of Institutions; den Hartogh, Mutual Expectations. A Conventionalist Theory of Law.
- 22.
Lewis, Convention, passim.
- 23.
Kelsen, Pure Theory of Law, p. 71. – Cf.: “Denn es ist eine höchts bedeutsame Eigentümlichkeit des Rechts, daß es seine eigene Erzeugung und Anwendung regelt. Die Erzeugung der generellen Rechtsnormen, das ist das Verfahren der Gesetzgebung, ist durch die Verfassung geregelt, und formale oder Prozessgesetze regeln die Anwendung der materiellen Gesetze durch die Gerichte und Verwaltungsbehörden. Daher die den Rechtsprozess darstellenden Akte der Rechtserzeugung und Rechtsanwendung (die, wie wir gesehen werden, selbst auch Rechtserzeugung ist) für die Rechtserkenntnis nur insofern in Betracht kommen, als sie den Inhalt von Rechtsnormen bilden, durch Rechtsnormen bestimmt sind; so daß auch die dynamische Rechtstheorie auf Rechtsnormen gerichtet is, und zwar auf jene, die die Erzeugung und Anwendung des Rechts regeln.” Kelsen, Reine Rechtslehre (1960), p. 73.
- 24.
The idea of the legal Stufenbau, or the hierarchical structure of law, was initially suggested by Adolf Julius Merkl and then adopted by Kelsen. Cf. Merkl, “Das Recht im Lichte seiner Anwendung”; Merkl, “Das doppelte Rechtsanlitz. Eine Betrachtung aus der Erkenntnistheorie des Rechtes”; Merkl, “Prolegomena einer Theorie des rechtlichen Stufenbaues”.
- 25.
Luhmann, Das Recht der Gesellschaft, p. 188 et seq.; Teubner, Law as an Autopoietic System, pp. 13–46; Teubner, “How the Law Thinks: Towards a Constructivist Epistemology in Law”, passim.
- 26.
Cf. Siltala, A Theory of Precedent, pp. 213–214.
- 27.
On the problematic ontology of the ultimate premises of law under (analytical) legal positivism, Siltala, A Theory of Precedent, pp. 229–231.
- 28.
Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights.
- 29.
Lewis, Convention, p. 78. That is the final definition of a convention. Preliminary versions are presented earlier in the book.
- 30.
Lagerspetz, A Conventionalist Theory of Institutions, p. 18. (Italics added.)
- 31.
Lagerspetz, A Conventionalist Theory of Institutions, p. 19. (Italics added.)
- 32.
Lagerspetz, A Conventionalist Theory of Institutions, p. 22.
- 33.
Lagerspetz, A Conventionalist Theory of Institutions, p. 23. (Italics added.)
- 34.
Lagerspetz, A Conventionalist Theory of Institutions, p. 23.
- 35.
Wróblewski, The Judicial Application of Law, pp. 75–85; Aarnio, The Rational as Reasonable, pp. 33–46.
- 36.
Lagerspetz, A Conventionalist Theory of Institutions, p. 23.
- 37.
den Hartogh, Mutual Expectations, p. 20. (Italics added.)
- 38.
den Hartogh, Mutual Expectations, pp. 220–221. (Italics added.)
- 39.
Ruiter, Legal Institutions, p. 22.
- 40.
Ruiter, Legal Institutions, p. 22; Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, p. 24.
- 41.
Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, pp. 24–25. (Italics in original.) – Cf. also Tuomela, The Philosophy of Social Practices. A Collective Acceptance View; Tuomela, “Collective Acceptance, Social Institutions, and Social Reality”; Tuomela, “Collective Intentionality and Social Agents”; Tuomela, The Philosophy of Sociality. The Shared Point of View.
- 42.
Cf. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations – Philosophische Untersuchungen, § 217 (p. 85/85e): “If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached the bedrock, and my spade in turned. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do.’” – In On Certainty, Wittgenstein to a great extent followed the philosophical lead of G. E. Moore’s line of argumentation.
- 43.
von Wright, “Wittgenstein varmuudesta”, p. 19.
- 44.
On formal legal conventions, den Hartogh, Mutual Expectations, pp. 113–116, 150–153.
- 45.
Reynolds and Lowery, “Convention and Custom”, pp. 161–162.
- 46.
On the two concepts of “law as unconscious conventional custom” and “law as a conscious conventional creation of social norms, (…) deriving from all the people in particular society”, Reynolds and Lowery, “Convention and Custom”, p. 162.
- 47.
Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p. 191: “To borrow once more Michael Polanyi’s useful phrase, what results from this process [of following paradigms as shared examples] is “tacit knowledge” which is learned by doing science rather than by acquiring rules for doing it.”
- 48.
Hart, The Concept of Law (1961), p. 107: ”… the rule of recognition exists only as a complex, but normally concordant, practice of the courts, officials, and private persons in identifying the law by reference to certain criteria. Its existence is a matter of fact.”; Cf.: “The question whether a rule of recognition exists and what its content is, i.e. what the criteria of validity in any given legal system are, is regarded throughout this book as an empirical, though complex, question of fact.” Hart, The Concept of Law (1961), p. 245 (note to p. 97).
- 49.
MacCormick, Legal Reasoning and Legal Theory, p. 241. – Cf. also MacCormick, Institutions of Law, pp. 56–57.
- 50.
“Diese Konzeption musste in der Augenblick eine tiefgehende Veränderung erfahren, in dem Savigny – zuerst in der Schrift über “Beruf unserer Zeit” – nicht mehr das Gesetz, sondern die gemeinsame Rechtsüberzeugung des Volkes, den “Volksgeist”, als die ursprüngliche Quelle allen Rechtes ansah.” Larenz, Methodenlehre der Rechtswissenschaft, p. 13.
- 51.
On the intellectual strife on codification by Thibaut and Savigny, cf. Thibaut und Savigny. Ihre Programmatische Schriften. The book entails Thibaut’s opening essay, “Über die Nothwendigkeit eines allgemeinen Bürgerlichen Rechts für Deutschland”, and Savigny’s response, “Vom Beruf unserer Zeit für Gesetzgebung und Rechtswissenschaft”, along with other basic writing by the two prominent authors of the said intellectual strife.
- 52.
On Savigny’s concept of law, Wieacker, Privatrechtsgeschichte der Neuzeit, pp. 381–399; Larenz, Methodenlehre der Rechtswissenschaft, pp. 11–18; Reimann, “Savigny, Friedrich Carl von (1779–1861)”, pp. 772–773. – On Savigny’s Juristenrecht, Larenz, Methodenlehre der Rechtswissenschaft, p. 392. – Savigny’s first name is seen written with either c or k in different sources. Of the major commentators, Karl Larenz uses the form Friedrich Karl von Savigny, while Franz Wieacker uses the form Friedrich Carl von Savigny.
- 53.
On legal institutes and legal relations in Savigny, Wieacker, Privatrechtsgeschichte der Neuzeit, p. 398; Larenz, Methodenlehre der Rechtswissenschaft, pp. 14–15, 18.
- 54.
Larenz, Methodenlehre der Rechtswissenschaft, p. 15.
- 55.
Cf. Klami, “Tapaoikeus”, pp. 1135–1137.
- 56.
The normative impact of customary law is expressly acknowledged in Article 11 of Chapter 1 of the Finnish Act of Judicial Procedure: “The judge shall carefully consider the right grounds and purpose of the law and give the verdict accordingly, but not against it or according to his own mind. The customs of the land shall also be his guide in giving the verdict, if there is no legislation on the issue.” (Translation by the present author.) The said article of the (Swedish and) Finnish law dates back to year 1734.
- 57.
den Hartogh, Mutual Expectations, pp. 221–230.
- 58.
“This study [by the Bielefelder Kreis] resulted in a list very closely resembling the one I developed in this chapter. I take this to be a corroboration of the conventionalist account. Conventionalism can go beyond the mere enumeration of forms of legal argumentation, and provide an explanation of their use.” den Hartogh, Mutual Expectations, p. 230. – Cf. MacCormick and Summers, eds., Interpreting Statutes. A Comparative Study, pp. 512–525.
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Siltala, R. (2011). Legal Conventionalism: Law as an Expression of Collective Intentionality. In: Law, Truth, and Reason. Law and Philosophy Library, vol 97. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1872-2_8
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