The Autonomy of Jurisprudence Vindicated: Truth, Necessity, and Conceptual Analysis

What is analytical jurisprudence? The mainstream understanding is that it is a descriptive project of investigating the nature of law by revealing necessary truths about law through the method of conceptual analysis. In recent years this mainstream understanding has been challenged on two fronts: some philosophers argue that jurisprudence is inherently informed by moral-political values and hence cannot be purely descriptive. From their perspective, analytical jurisprudence is political philosophy in disguise. Meanwhile, others have challenged the method of conceptual analysis, arguing that this methodology is unviable because it is either uninterestingly lexicographical or epistemically bankrupt. From their perspective, analytical jurisprudence is legal sociology poorly done from the armchair. In this dissertation I try to defend the mainstream understanding of analytical jurisprudence based on a pragmatist approach, which characterizes analytical jurisprudence as a project of revealing the actual linguistic rules governing the application of a given community’s concept of law, whose meaning is encapsulated in the concept’s inferential role. This pragmatist picture provides several benefits that advance our understanding of analytical jurisprudence as a distinctly philosophical enterprise: first, it explains why analytical jurisprudence is a semantic project but not a definitional one; secondly, it clarifies how the semantic project of conceptual analysis can be both descriptive and evaluative, and thirdly, it preserves the autonomy of analytical jurisprudence by carving out a space for conceptual inquiries that cannot be subsumed under either legal sociology or political philosophy. Moreover, when applied to the domain of internal legal statements, this pragmatist approach allows us to vindicate law’s objectivity, thereby fending off the implausible legal realist thesis that legal statements cannot be objectively true or false, and it allows us to do so without endorsing the implausible metaphysical realist thesis that legal statements can be objectively true only if they correspond to a mind-independent reality.