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Netherlands Journal of Legal Philosophy

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Issue 1, 2013 Expand all abstracts

Carel Smith
Carel Smith is Associate Professor of Legal Philosophy at Leiden University.
Article

Access_open ‘God hath given the world to men in common’

Grenzen aan privé-eigendom in geval van nood en verspilling in het middeleeuwse en vroegmoderne natuurrecht

Keywords natural law, property, rights of the poor, extreme necessity, necessitas urgens et evidens
Authors Marc de Wilde
AbstractAuthor's information

    This article examines what limitations to private property John Locke recognizes to protect the rights of the poor. As has been pointed out in the literature, Locke’s ideas on the limitations to private property have been influenced by medieval discussions about the rights of the poor and the principle of extreme necessity. Confirming this interpretation, the article shows that Locke borrows the distinction between ‘ordinary need’ and ‘evident and urgent necessity’ from Thomas Aquinas. Taking position in a debate among Grotius and Pufendorf, Locke argues that the poor have a natural right to the ‘surplus’ of somebody else’s possessions, and that this right becomes legally enforceable in case of ‘evident and urgent necessity.’


Marc de Wilde
Marc de Wilde is Professor of Legal Theory at the University of Amsterdam.
Article

Access_open Recht als human condition

Keywords homo faber, homo agens, human condition, participatory judgment, law-linked justice, existence-linked justice
Authors Peter van Schilfgaarde
AbstractAuthor's information

    This paper concentrates on the dynamic tension between law as it is ‘made’ by legal professionals, functioning as homo faber, and law as it is experienced by citizens, functioning as homo agens. In between those two worlds, law develops as a human condition, a term borrowed from Hannah Arendt. It is argued that, in regard to law development and administration of justice, the function of homo agens should have priority over the function of homo faber. The two basic faculties that connect the two worlds are judgment and speech. This leads to further thoughts on the character of judgment as ‘participatory judgment,’ the function of ‘middle terms’ in legal language and the concept of ‘shared responsibility.’


Peter van Schilfgaarde
Peter van Schilfgaarde is an Attorney at Law at the Supreme Court of The Netherlands in The Hague and former Professor of Corporate Law at the Universities of Groningen and Utrecht.
Article

Access_open Juridical Acts and the Gap between Is and Ought

Keywords naturalistic fallacy, duty, obligation, is/ought, contract, promise
Authors Jaap Hage
AbstractAuthor's information

    This article addresses the possibility of deriving ought from is. To that purpose it casts doubt on the very distinction between is and ought; distinguishes between duties, obligations, being obligated and owing to do something; revitalises Searle’s famous derivation of ought from is by replacing promises with contracts; and discusses some of the traditional objections against this derivation. The conclusions are that it is not problematic at all to ‘derive’ the existence of obligations from solely is-premises, and that it is not very problematic to ‘derive’ an ought from the existence of an obligation. The quotes around ‘derive’ signal that the nature of derivation also plays a role in this discussion.


Jaap Hage
Jaap Hage holds the chair for Jurisprudence at Maastricht University.

Henrike Jansen
Henrike Jansen is Lecturer at the section Dutch Discourse Studies of the Faculty of Humanities of Leiden University.

Thomas Mertens
Thomas Mertens is Professor of Philosophy of Law at Radboud University Nijmegen.

Bertjan Wolthuis
Bertjan Wolthuis is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law of VU University Amsterdam.

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