LEGAL THEORY WORKSHOP SERIES
presents
Charles Barzun
University of Virginia Law School
Jerome Frank, Lon Fuller, and American Pragmatism
Respondent:
Malcolm Thorburn, University of Toronto Faculty of Law
12:30 – 2:00
Friday, September 25, 2015
Solarium (room FA2) – Falconer Hall
84 Queen’s Park
Jerome Frank and Lon Fuller seem to stand at opposite poles of twentieth-century legal thought. Indeed, when H. L. A. Hart famously accused American jurisprudence of oscillating between two extreme views about adjudication, he explicitly mentioned Frank as one who adopted the “Nightmare” view (according to which judges never decide cases according to law), and he could have plausibly classed Lon Fuller among the “Noble Dreamers” (those who say that judges always decide cases according to law). Today Hart’s characterization still seems to fit. These days Frank is typically characterized as an “extreme” realist, who thought judges decided cases on the basis of irrational biases, whereas Fuller is most known for his defense of natural law and his association with the Legal Process school, which is itself seen as a response to precisely those excesses of realism that Frank is said to epitomize.
On closer inspection, however, the writings of Frank and Fuller contain various intriguing similarities, with respect to both their underlying philosophical outlooks and their views on adjudication. Early in their careers, for instance, both of them wrote about legal fictions, and both did so because they thought their use by courts reflected and vindicated a pragmatist account of the nature of truth. Furthermore, Frank and Fuller both emphasized throughout their careers that studying judicial decisionmaking could yield important lessons about the nature of human inquiry more generally. Of course, in adopting a broadly pragmatist philosophical outlook and in focusing their attention on adjudication, Fuller and Frank were typical of their time; nevertheless, by identifying the common threads that link their jurisprudential views, we can better understand not only why Frank came to endorse a natural-law position like Fuller’s later in life, but also why philosophical pragmatism has played such a large role in American legal thought.
Charles Barzun joined the faculty in 2008. His areas of interest include evidence, torts, legal history and jurisprudence. After receiving his A.B. in government from Harvard in 1997, Barzun worked in corporate and product development at CNET Networks, an Internet media company in San Francisco. In 2005, he received a J.D./M.A. degree from Virginia. During law school, he served as notes development editor of the Virginia Law Review and won the Best Note Award for his student note, "Common Sense and Legal Science." After graduating, he clerked for for Judge Robert D. Sack of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Prior to joining the faculty, Charles was a Climenko Fellow and lecturer at Harvard Law School.
A light lunch will be served.
For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.
