Search

When explaining judicial decision-making, ideological accounts of judicial behavior have not seriously considered the judges’ legal conceptions. This paper brings together two disciplines that used to sit at separate tables: judicial politics and legal theory. It aims at enhancing ideational accounts of judicial behavior by analyzing how legal conceptions such as legal positivism and post-positivism are shaped and socially reproduced. We claim that legal conceptions are, to some extent, determined by the type of educational model under which a judge studied, and by his/her level of education. We surveyed federal judges working in Mexico (N=71) to explore and test our contention and computed two analyses: hierarchical cluster analysis and binomial logistic regressions. We identified three clusters of judges’ legal conceptions, where the educational model showed a significant effect in shaping the judges’ legal conceptions.

The present work has as its object the study of the legal thought of Neil MacCormick on the design of the law and some of its features, as well as its relation with morality and argumentative practice. It aims to clarify the historical context of the development of his theory and the role it assigns to the legal reasoning in decisions related to complex cases, in a concise way. With no claim to address in depth its topic, this work is for those ones who want to start their studies in the fi eld of integrative law theory of MacCormik's.