At the Irish Jurisprudence Society (IJS) Symposium, the final paper is being delivered by Eoin Daly (UCC) on Non-domination as a primary good: re-thinking the frontiers of the ‘political’ in Rawls’s political liberalism. His main focus is the work of John Rawls, but he also engages with the criticisms of Rawls in John Maynor “Without Regret: the Comprehensive Nature of Non-domination” (2002) 22 Politics 51 and Phillip Pettit Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1997); and, along the way, there are references to Bentham, Berlin, Hegel and Rousseau. In the end, he presents and defends a radical view of Rawls’s conception of liberty.

How far is state power precluded from certain social realms; conversely, how interventionist can the state be in protecting and supporting liberty? John Rawls seeks to provide answers to this question in A Theory of Justice and in Political Liberalism. On the one hand, principles of “neutrality” supposedly ground the legitimacy of the politically-liberal state. On the other hand, can the emancipatory goals of the republican state, in the guise of the politics of liberty as non-domination, be interpreted as spilling over into a realm of “comprehensive” values? Daly argues that the underlying idea of “justice as fairness” in Rawls work does not necessarily preclude the republican goal of non-domination.…

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At the Irish Jurisprudence Society (IJS) Symposium, the fourth paper is being delivered by my colleague (and recently-elected Fellow) Dr Oran Doyle (TCD) on True Morality and the No Necessary Connection Thesis.

HLA Hart, in his seminal article “Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals” 71 Harvard Law Review 593 (1958), famously asserted that there was no necessary connection between law and morality (the No Necessary Connection Thesis: NNC). Discussion of this point has been marred by much confusion, which can be traced to the ambiguous fashion in which Hart referred to “morality” in this article. At its most basic, the word carries two meanings which are best understood by contrasting “moral” with its two antonyms, “immoral” and “amoral”. “Immoral” means something that is contrary to true morality; on the other hand, “amoral” means something that has nothing to do with morality. Conversely, therefore, the word “moral” has two meanings: it can refer to true morality and it can also connote any other assertion about morality. Doyle’s view is that a clearer view on the merits of NNC can be obtained if we limit it to apply simply to true morality and not to asserted morality. Hence, in his view, no legal positivist should be concerned to defend and no natural lawyer should be concerned to rebut NNC if it relates to any assertion about morality.…

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At the Irish Jurisprudence Society (IJS) Symposium, the third paper is being delivered Dr Seán Patrick Donlan (UL | Comparative Law Blog | ESCLH | ISCL | Juris Diversitas) on “The drunkenness of things being various”: legal theory in historical and comparative perspective.

The title quote is from “Snow” by Louis McNeice, and the key word is “various”. His background is a jurist from a mixed jurisdiction working with the comparative method, and his text is was replete with variety, in his sources, in his language, and in his theoretical perspective. Donlon began with the assertion that anglophone legal theory frequently lacks historical and comparative perspective, and his paper represents one strand of theory providing that perspective. He explores the historical ‘hybridity’ (rather than ‘pluralism’) and ‘diffusion’ of Western law, that is, the mixtures and movements of law and non-state norms. His argument is that the historical and comparative fact of hybridity – the diverse instantiation of law historically and, more often, comparatively – forces a major re-evaluation of the goals of legal theory. He began with a tour de theatre of comparative legal history and comparative modern legal systems, and moved to an analysis of the theoretical and normative underpinnings of this diversity.…

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