Can Pragmatism Be Radical? Richard Posner and Legal Pragmatism

Can Pragmatism Be Radical? Richard Posner and Legal Pragmatism

ions such as justice, fairness, and equality. Posner argues that “academic philosophy” is “a field that has essentially no audience among judges and lawyers—let alone among politicians—even when philosophy is taken up by law professors . . . who think it should influence law.” Legal pragmatists reject “abstract theorizing of which professors of constitutional 62. See J.M. Balkin, The Declaratio...

Legal Pragmatism and the Constitution

Jerome Bruner and William James Regarding Pragmatism ’ s Does Pragmatism

As its most basic mission, pragmatism sets out to determine an idea’s merit by examining its practical consequences, rather than through purely abstract evaluation. As a result of this emphasis on an idea’s effectiveness, the complex ways in which pragmatists conceive of abstract notions such as truth and self-concept are often overlooked. Close examination of the works of two pragmatist thinke...

Stanley Fish and the Future of Pragmatism in Legal Theory

Stanley Fish's recent book review' measures Richard Posner's The Problems of Jurisprudence2 more by the importance of the questions it raises than by the coherence of its answers. That standard enables Professor Fish to rank Judge Posner's book with the best of post-war legal thought (p 1475). The same standard demands a similar assessment of Fish's review. Few writings match the economy and pu...

Volitional Pragmatism

I seek here to develop the general outlines of a theory of environmental policy. It is a theory that will stand in stark contrast to the tendentious and normative welfare economics that now dominates the policy dialogue in applied economics. In this standard approach, economists place " …exclusive reliance on individual utilities to judge social goodness and right actions [Sen 1993, p. 521]. " ...