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Legal Rules: Defeasible or Indefeasible?

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Problems of Normativity, Rules and Rule-Following

Part of the book series: Law and Philosophy Library ((LAPS,volume 111))

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Abstract

This paper proposes a middle-ground solution in the dispute between legal defeasibilism and indefeasibilism. Several different readings of the concept of the defeasibility of legal rules are considered. The focus is on the concept referred to as the strong defeasibility of legal rules as defined by Frederick Schauer, that is, the alleged feature of rules according to which their conclusions may be contested on the basis of unspecified list of reasons. The paper analyzes the arguments of both proponents and opponents of legal defeasibilism. The opposing views are analyzed from the point of view of argumentation schemes theory. Certain points of disagreement in the ongoing debate between these two approaches are assessed as apparent only. Ultimately, the strong defeasibility thesis is rejected. A conception of contextually complete legal rules is presented and justified. The presented theory offers a third way in the debate between legal defeasibilism and indefeasibilism, preserving important insights that are present in the two competing theories.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    From the point of view of legal theory, it is often indicated that H. L. A. Hart in one of his early papers (Hart 1948/1949) introduced certain ideas that provided the foundation for contemporary research on defeasibility in law.

  2. 2.

    For a discussion of the concept of defeasibility in the context of deontic logics, see van der Torre and Tan (1997).

  3. 3.

    Cf. Hage (2005, p. 8).

  4. 4.

    Similar considerations are advanced by Brożek (2004, p. 142; 2007, p. 133 ff.).

  5. 5.

    In one of this recent contributions, Frederick Schauer (2012, (87)) adopts a similar (albeit more nuanced) position according to which “defeasibility is not a property of rules at all, but rather a characteristic of how some decision-making system will choose to treat its rules”.

  6. 6.

    See Rodriguez (2012, p. 96), discussing Schauer’s views.

  7. 7.

    Cf., for instance, Alexy (1989).

  8. 8.

    In this reading, the rule-based argument scheme may be considered as an informal description of application of the Modus Ponens inference pattern.

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Acknowledgments

The author thanks Jaap Hage, Giovanni Battista Ratti, and Andrej Kristan for their valuable comments in connection with the presentation of this paper during the RULES 2013 (September 27–29) conference in Kraków.

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  1. Faculty of Law, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland

    Michał Araszkiewicz

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  1. Michał Araszkiewicz
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Correspondence to Michał Araszkiewicz .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Legal Theory, Jagiellonian University Faculty of Law, Kraków, Poland

    Michał Araszkiewicz

  2. Department of Legal Theory, Jagiellonian University Faculty of Law, Kraków, Poland

    Paweł Banaś

  3. Department of Legal Theory, Jagiellonian University Faculty of Law, Kraków, Poland

    Tomasz Gizbert-Studnicki

  4. Department of Legal Theory, Jagiellonian University Faculty of Law, Kraków, Poland

    Krzysztof Płeszka

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Araszkiewicz, M. (2015). Legal Rules: Defeasible or Indefeasible?. In: Araszkiewicz, M., Banaś, P., Gizbert-Studnicki, T., Płeszka, K. (eds) Problems of Normativity, Rules and Rule-Following. Law and Philosophy Library, vol 111. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09375-8_31

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