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    The law is not coherently designed to serve a unified soc... — Carmelics
    Home/Democracy & Governance
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    The law is not coherently designed to serve a unified social purpose, and instrumentalism about law should be rejected.

    Democracy & GovernanceSocial Contract
    ?Rate how convincing each reason is below to see the overall strength.
    2 reasons for
    1 reason against

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Legal systems are products of iterative political contestation, not unified design, making coherent purpose an incoherent expectation from the outset.
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    • 2.Lon Fuller's internal morality of law identifies procedural ideals law must meet, but these are compatibility constraints, not evidence of substantive unified purpose.
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    • 3.The US Constitution's slavery compromises confirm that foundational legal texts encode irreconcilable value conflicts, undermining any instrumentalist unity thesis.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Ronald Dworkin's 'law as integrity' requires judges to impose coherence retrospectively, proving coherence is aspirational fiction rather than descriptive fact.
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    • 2.Critical Legal Studies scholars like Duncan Kennedy demonstrated that legal doctrine contains contradictions between individualism and altruism that no unified purpose can resolve.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 1.Constitutions are drafted by agents with political and economic interests they seek to advance.
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    • 2.When self-interested agents design basic social, economic, and political institutions, incoherence can infect those institutions.
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    • 3.The US Constitution's compromises over slavery, when viewed against its democratic and equality provisions, illustrate such incoherence.
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    Topics

    Democracy & GovernanceSocial Contract

    Connections

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    Justice & Punishment1 linked

    Related

    Constitutions are drafted by agents with political and economic interests they s...Critical Legal Studies scholars like Duncan Kennedy demonstrated that legal doct...If foundational legal documents like constitutions are incoherent, the claim tha...Legal systems are products of iterative political contestation, not unified desi...
    +5 moreShow less
    Lon Fuller's internal morality of law identifies procedural ideals law must meet...Ronald Dworkin's 'law as integrity' requires judges to impose coherence retrospe...The US Constitution's compromises over slavery, when viewed against its democrat...The US Constitution's slavery compromises confirm that foundational legal texts ...When self-interested agents design basic social, economic, and political institu...

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    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: legal-econanalysis
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    Radical political economists reject this reasoning. They carry the logic of the argument about the incoherence of legislative behavior through to the level of institutional and constitutional design. Constitutions are drafted by agents with political and economic interests that they seek to forward when they create the basic social, economic, and political institutions of the society. Incoherence may thus infect these institutions as well. The compromises over slavery in the US Constitution, for
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (2 for, 1 against)
    Edits
    1 edit