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Netherlands Journal of Legal Philosophy

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Issue 2, 2014 Expand all abstracts

Roland Pierik PhD
Article

Access_open Introduction: Reciprocity and the Normativity of Legal Orders

Keywords reciprocity, normativity
Authors Prof. Dr. Hans Lindahl PhD and Bart van Klink
AbstractAuthor's information

    This contribution introduces the special issue, which contains a selection of the lectures delivered by key-note speakers during the Summer School organized by the editors in August, 2013, at the behest of the Section of Ethics & Practical Philosophy of the Dutch Research School of Philosophy (OZSW).


Prof. Dr. Hans Lindahl PhD
Hans Lindahl is Professor of Legal Philosophy at Tilburg University.

Bart van Klink
Bart van Klink is Professor of Legal Methodology at the VU University Amsterdam.
Article

Access_open The Public Conscience of the Law

Keywords Hobbes, reciprocity, rule of Law, conscience, legality, liberty
Authors David Dyzenhaus PhD
AbstractAuthor's information

    I focus on Hobbes’s claim that the law is ’the publique Conscience, by which [the individual] (…) hath already undertaken to be guided.’ This claim is not authoritarian once it is set in the context of his complex account, which involves three different relationships of reciprocity: the contractarian idea that individuals in the state of nature agree with one another to institute a sovereign whose prescriptions they shall regard as binding; the vertical, reciprocal relationship between ruler and ruled; and the horizontal relationship between individuals in the civil condition, made possible by the existence of the sovereign who through enacting laws dictates the terms of interaction between his subjects. The interaction of these three relationships has the result that subjects relate to each other on terms that reflect their status as free and equal individuals who find that the law enables them to pursue their own conceptions of the good.


David Dyzenhaus PhD
David Dyzenhaus is a Professor of Law and Philosophy at the University of Toronto, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His books include Hard Cases in Wicked Legal Systems: South African Law in the Perspective of Legal Philosophy (now in its second edition) and Legality and Legitimacy: Carl Schmitt, Hans Kelsen, and Hermann Heller in Weimar.
Article

Access_open Liberalism and Societal Integration: In Defence of Reciprocity and Constructive Pluralism

Keywords societal integration, liberalism, conflict, constructive pluralism, citizenship, national communities
Authors Dora Kostakopoulou PhD
AbstractAuthor's information

    Communities can only be dynamic and projective, that is, oriented towards new and better forms of cooperation, if they bring together diverse people in a common, and hopefully more equal, socio-political life and in welfare. The latter requires not only back-stretched connections, that is, the involvement of co-nationals and naturalized persons, but also forward-starched connections, that is, the involvement of citizens in waiting. Societal integration is an unhelpful notion and liberal democratic polities would benefit from reflecting critically on civic integration policies and extending the norm of reciprocity beyond its assigned liberal national limits. Reciprocity can only be a comprehensive norm in democratic societies - and not an eclectic one, that is, either co-national or co-ethnic.


Dora Kostakopoulou PhD
Dora Kostakopoulou is currently Professor of European Union Law, European Integration and Public Policy at Warwick University. Her research interests include European public law, free movement of persons and European Union citizenship, the area of freedom, security and justice, migration law and politics, citizenship, multiculturalism and integration, democracy and legitimacy in the EU, law and global governance, political theory and constructivism, and, fairly recently, equality law.
Article

Access_open Private law as an open legal order: understanding contract and tort as interactional law

Keywords contract law, Fuller, informal law, pragmatism, rules versus standards
Authors Prof Sanne Taekema PhD
AbstractAuthor's information

    This article puts forward the claim that private law, and especially contract and tort, is the area of law that most clearly shows how law depends on social interactions. Taking its cue from Lon Fuller, interactional law is presented as a form of law that depends on informal social practices. Using tort and contract cases, it is argued that this implies that law is in open connection to moral norms and values, and that law cannot be understood without taking into account people’s everyday reciprocal expectancies.


Prof Sanne Taekema PhD
Sanne Taekema is Professor of Jurisprudence, Erasmus School of Law, Erasmus University of Rotterdam. Her current research is oriented to the rule of law in a global context and to methodological and conceptual issues pertaining to interdisciplinary rule of law.
Article

Access_open The Normative Foundation of Legal Orders: A Balance Between Reciprocity and Mutuality

Keywords reciprocity, mutuality, social morality of duties, legal morality of rights, intergenerational justice
Authors Dorien Pessers PhD
AbstractAuthor's information

    Reciprocity seems to figure as a self-evident normative foundation of legal orders. Yet a clear understanding of the often opaque role that reciprocity plays in this regard demands drawing a conceptual distinction. This article views reciprocity as a social morality of duties, in opposition to mutuality, which concerns a legal morality of rights. In everyday life these two broad categories of human interaction interfere in a dynamic way. They need to be brought into an appropriate balance in legal orders, for the sake of justice. The practical relevance of this conceptual distinction is clarified by the debate about justice between present and future generations. I argue that this debate should be viewed as a debate about the terms of reciprocity rather than relations of mutuality. Acknowledging the deeply reciprocal nature of the relations between past, present and future generations would lead to a more convincing moral theory about intergenerational justice.


Dorien Pessers PhD
Dorien Pessers is Professor of the Legal and Theoretical Foundations of the Private Sphere at the VU University and at the University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses primarily on the theoretical foundations of the public and private spheres.
Article

Access_open Idealized versus Real-Life Reciprocity: How to Strike the Balance?

Keywords norm of reciprocity, moral obligation, gift exchange, hospitality, intergenerational relations
Authors Mrs. Aafke Elisabeth Komter PhD
AbstractAuthor's information

    Rawls’s ’idealized’ notion of reciprocity is compared with the ’real-life’ concept of reciprocity as it has been developed in social scientific theory. The two perspectives appear to differ significantly as concerns dimensions related to equality, human motivation, the temporal aspects of reciprocity, and the supposed mental origin of reciprocity. Whereas norms of obligation and feelings of moral indebtedness are constitutive for reciprocity in real-life encounters, equality, freedom and rationality are the basis for reciprocity in the hypothetical world of the ’conjectural account’. Rather than being fundamentally incompatible, the idealized and the real-life perspectives on reciprocity seem to apply to different spheres of social life, the first requiring greater formality and universality than the second, which allows for more variation and particularities.


Mrs. Aafke Elisabeth Komter PhD
Aafke Komter is Emeritus Professor of Social Sciences and a Visiting Researcher at the Department of Sociology of the Erasmus University of Rotterdam. She has published many articles on (family) solidarity, reciprocity and the social and cultural meaning of the exchange of gifts.
Article

Access_open Reciprocity: a fragile equilibrium

Keywords reciprocity, exchange theory, natural law theory, dyadic relations, corrective justice
Authors Prof. dr. Pauline Westerman PhD
AbstractAuthor's information

    Reciprocity may serve to explain or to justify law. In its latter capacity, which is the topic of this article, reciprocity is commonly turned into a highly idealized notion, as either a balance between two free and equal parties or as the possibility of communication tout court. Both ideals lack empirical reference. If sociological and anthropological literature on forms of exchange is taken into account, it should be acknowledged that reciprocal relations are easy to destabilize. The dynamics of exchange invites exclusion and inequality. For this reason reciprocity should not be presupposed as the normative underpinning of law; instead, law should be presupposed in order to turn reciprocity into a desirable ideal.


Prof. dr. Pauline Westerman PhD
Pauline Westerman is Professor in Philosophy of Law at the University of Groningen and member of staff at the Academy for Legislation in the Hague. She is editor of The Theory and Practice of Legislation, a journal published by Hart, Oxford. She writes mainly on legal methodology and legislation, especially on alternative forms of legislation. For more information as well as publications, see her personal website: <www.paulinewesterman.nl>.
Book Review

Access_open Philip Pettit, Just Freedom. A Moral Compass for a Complex World

Authors Dr. Bertjan Wolthuis PhD

Dr. Bertjan Wolthuis PhD

Wout Cornelissen PhD

A. Daniel Oliver-Lalana PhD

Willem Witteveen PhD

Citation format

Would you like to cite a publication in the Netherlands Journal of Legal Philosophy? You could do this in the following way:

Christoph Kletzer, ‘Absolute Positivism’, NJLP 2013/2 p. 87-99