CAVE Workshop: The Virtues and Limits of Coherence in Moral and Legal Reasoning

S The Tapestry of Reason Amalia Amaya Coherence theories of law and adjudication have been very popular in the last decades. Although these theories significantly advance the case for coherentism in law, a number of problems remain open in the current state of the coherence theory in law. This paper attempts to develop a coherencebased model of legal reasoning, which addresses, or at least mitigates, these problems. This model has four main elements: a constraint satisfaction approach to coherence, an explanatory view of coherence-based legal inference; a contextualist approach to legal justification; and a conception of legal justification that importantly depends on the epistemic responsibility of subjects. I conclude this paper by exploring the implications of the version of legal coherentism proposed for a general theory of legal reasoning and rationality.