Critical Analysis of Law Workshop Series
presents
Hanoch Dagan
Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law
The Character of Legal Theory
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
12:30 – 2:00
Solarium (room FA2), Falconer Hall - 84 Queen’s Park
For nearly a century legal scholars have vacillated between two strategies for dealing with the collapse of legal science as an autonomous discipline. One typical response has been to abandon the notion of a legal theory and to borrow a theoretical discipline from the social sciences or from the humanities. Another response has been to discard the idea of legal theory by highlighting the practical wisdom of lawyers and celebrating law as a craft. The mission of this Essay is to describe legal theory as an enterprise robust enough to justify separate naming. Legal theory focuses on the work of society’s coercive normative institutions. It studies the traditions of these institutions and the craft typifying their members, while at the same time continuously challenging their outputs by demonstrating their contingency and testing their desirability. In performing the latter tasks, legal theory necessarily absorbs lessons from law’s neighboring disciplines. But at its best, legal theory is more than a sophisticated synthesis of relevant insights from these friendly neighbors, because of its pointed attention to the persistent jurisprudential questions regarding the nature of law, notably the relationship between law’s normativity and its coerciveness and the implications of its institutional and structural characteristics. Before turning to elaborate on these features, the Essay begins with an outline of the three other important discourses about law: law and policy; socio-historical analysis of law; and law as craft. Sketching these three genres of legal scholarship is instrumental because analyzing the ways in which legal theory is different from these other modes helps characterizing legal theory.
Prof. Hanoch Dagan is the former Dean of the Tel-Aviv University Faculty of Law (2006-2011) and the founding director of the Zvi Meitar Center for Advanced Legal Studies (2007-2011). He is also a Senior Fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute and a member of the American Law Institute and of the International Academy of Comparative Law. Prof. Dagan received an LL.M. and a J.S.D. from Yale Law School (where he held a Fulbright award) after receiving his LL.B. Summa Cum Laude from Tel Aviv University. Prior to becoming Dean he was the Director of the Cegla Center for Interdisciplinary Research of the Law and the Editor in Chief of Theoretical Inquiries in Law. He was also a visiting professor and an Affiliated Overseas Professor at the University of Michigan Law School. Prof. Dagan has published over forty articles in leading legal journals such as Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, New York University Law Review, California Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Texas Law Review, University of Toronto Law Journal, Boston University Law Review, American Bankruptcy Law Journal, American Journal of Comparative Law, and Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities. Prof. Dagan has also written four books: Unjust Enrichment: A Study of Private Law and Public Values (Cambridge University Press, 1997), The Law and Ethics of Restitution (Cambridge University Press, 2004), Property at a Crossroads (Ramot, 2005) (in Hebrew), and Property: Values and Institutions (Oxford University Press, 2011). He is currently working on two new books: Properties of Property (with Gregory S. Alexander) (Aspen, forthcoming 2012), and American Legal Realism Reconsidered (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2013). During the Fall of 2011 Professor Dagan was a Visiting Professor of Law and Oscar M. Ruebhausen Distinguished Senior Fellow at Yale Law School.
A light lunch will be provided.
For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.
