About
37
Publications
10,737
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
154
Citations
Introduction
Current institution
Additional affiliations
January 2008 - present
Education
October 2007 - April 2011
Publications
Publications (37)
The problem of the individuation of laws, identified by Bentham, is dismissed as irrelevant to legal philosophy by some commentators. This paper presents individuation as crucial for understanding the cognitive processes underlying legal interpretation. It draws on the work of Maciej Zieliński and Teun van Dijk to show that legal interpretation is...
This is the first part of a 2-volume set that presents an in-depth investigation into the canon of constitutionally conforming interpretation. These volumes address the fundamental issues the canon raises in the national, supranational and international contexts.
In volume 1, experts from 19 jurisdictions, including Brazil, Canada, India, the UK, a...
Badacze populizmu zwracają uwagę na istotną rolę języka w realizacji jego agendy. Rola ta jest widoczna w praktykach propagandowych, w próbach redefiniowania pojęć zastanych i w zmianie konwencji społecznych, w tym konwencji językowych. Niedawna fala populizmu (2010–2021) w szczególny sposób dotyczy prawa i praworządności, a tym samym zjawiska taki...
Populism researchers draw attention to the vital role of language in the implementation of Popularist agenda. This role is discernible in propaganda practices, in attempts to redefine pre-existing notions, and in changing social – but also – linguistic conventions. The recent wave of populism (2010–2021) touches upon law and the rule of law in a sp...
Conventionalism once seemed an attractive way to justify the viability of the positivistic social thesis. Subsequent criticism, however, has significantly lessened its attractiveness. This paper attempts to revive jurisprudential interest in conventionalism by claiming that positivists would profit more from the conventionalism of Ruth G. Millikan...
In this paper, I defend legal positivism against recent assaults, specifically that of Greenberg (How Facts Make Law’, Legal Theory, Vol. 10, 157-198, 2004 (‘HFML’). His key argument is that value-based reasoning is required to transform social facts into legal content, and that this reasoning is based on values external to the social practice that...
Judges in different jurisdictions tend to quote foreign verdicts when deciding domestic cases. This practice flies in the face of the well-entrenched theory according to which law is a product of a domestic, sovereign lawmaker, and foreign judicial decisions are irrelevant to its interpretation. This chapter explains why the practice does not follo...
This book casts light on the workings of language in international legal interpretation in the context of contemporary processes of globalization. Its authors take an explicit interdisciplinary perspective, which includes both legal theories of interpretation and linguistic theories of meaning, and both legal philosophy and the philosophy of langua...
Many people must be wondering how it is possible that Poland, not so long ago hailed for its exemplary transition from a communist dictatorship to a liberal democracy, could have so swiftly descended into authoritarianism via a crisis in the rule of law. The majority of commentators point to the size and ferocity of the attack on those mechanisms m...
In this paper, I re-interpret Hart’s concept of the rule of recognition using the theoretical framework of J. L. Austin’s speech act theory, in particular by treating recognition, change and adjudication primarily in terms of acts, not rules. This re-interpretation elucidates why the phenomenon Hart called the ‘rule of recognition’ differs in kind...
Despite the multi-dimensional criticism leveled at his theory, David Lewis is still considered the philosopher who laid the groundwork for our modern understanding of the nature of conventions. This paper presents a radically non-Lewisian approach to conventions, viz. that of Ruth G. Millikan, and argues that Millikan’s conventionalism has more exp...
When a judge follows the letter of the law, her judgment may be considered blinkered by the man in the street. Legal professionals, however, would classify the judgment as formalistic. From a theoretical perspective, formalistic decision-making limits the number of premises on which a judge may base a verdict. It asks the judge to focus on the lite...
This article is divided into two parts. The first one, entitled "Facts" presents briefly the crucial events of what I call "the Polish constitutional crisis" or "Crisis" for short, and what has been widely described as a backsliding on the part of Poland into authoritarianism. The second part, entitled "Interpretations", attempts to explain the nat...
Many people wonder why Poland, which used to be a paragon of successful transition from communism to liberal democracy, descended so easily to an illiberal state via a rule of law crisis. How was it that the defences erected against relapsing into illiberalism, namely independent constitutional and judicial review, were so easily undermined? The ma...
Judicial formalism is perceived as fully compliant with the requirements of the rule of law. With its reliance on plain meaning and its reluctance to apply historical, purposive and functional interpretative premises, it seems an ideal tool for constraining discretionary judicial powers and securing the predictability of law’s application, which la...
The nature of legislative intent remains a subject of vigourous debate in legal theory. A conspicuous feature of the debate is that its participants perceive in many different ways. Some see it as an intention concerning the meaning of the words used in legal text, others as a will to enact the law, others still as a set of expectations regarding t...
In this paper, I argue against the thesis presented by Jeremy Waldron (2009) that the Hartian rule of recognition is reducible to the rule of change, and as such superfluous. To this purpose, I re-interpret Hart’s concept of secondary rules using the theoretical framework of J. L. Austin’s speech act theory, in particular by treating recognition, c...
By significantly diminishing the role intentions play in communication, in Imagination and Convention (2015) Lepore and Stone attempt to overthrow the Gricean paradigm which prevails in the philosophy of language. The approach they propose is attractive to theorists of legal interpretations for many reasons. Primary among these is that the more gen...
Legal philosophers distinguish between a static and a dynamic interpretation of law. The former assumes that the meaning of the words used in a legal text is set at the moment of its enactment and does not change with time. The latter allows the interpreters to update the meaning and apply a contemporary understanding to the text. The dispute betwe...
Judges in different jurisdictions tend to quote foreign verdicts while deciding domestic cases. This practice flies in the face of the well-entrenched theory according to which law is a production of a domestic, sovereign lawmaker and foreign judicial decisions are irrelevant to its interpretation. In this paper I answer the question why the practi...
The aim of this paper is to analyse the nature and structure of ad absurdum arguments (AADA) used in courts' statements of reasons. I particularly attempt to conclude which of the two possible grounds for lawyers applying AADA is the most consistent and thus more convincing. The first of these grounds, which in this paper I call traditional grounds...
W niniejszym opracowaniu autor zajmuje się ważnym elementem koncepcji prawa, jakim jest koncepcja interpretacji prawniczej. Centralnym punktem prezentowanej koncepcji jest tekst prawny. Koncepcja ta jest więc tekstocentryczna, w przeciwieństwie do większości koncepcji interpretacji prawniczej, które można uznać za autorocentryczne. Powodem skupieni...
The speech-act approach to rules is commonplace in both Anglo-American and continental traditions of legal philosophy. Despite its pervasiveness, I argue in this paper that the approach is misguided and therefore intrinsically flawed. My critique identifies how speech-act theory provides an inadequate theoretical framework for the analysis of writt...
In this paper I would like to outline a comprehensive theory of legal interpretation based on an assumption that legal text, understood as the aggregate of texts of all legal acts in force at a particular time and place, describes one rational and coherent possible world. The picture of this possible world is decoded from the text by interpreters a...
Given far-reaching changes in the legal systems of East Central Europe since the mid-1990s, one might expect administrative court judges to have modified the way in which they decide cases, in particular by embracing less formalistic adjudication strategies. Relying on an original dataset of over one thousand business-related cases from the Czech R...
Questions
Question (1)
Semantic externalists, like Kripke and Putnam, famously argued that the reference of natural kind terms can be explained without analysing the internal mental states of speakers. Those terms refer to whatever happens to have a certain nature or structure that the instances of natural kinds share, i.e. the reference is defined by conditions that are external to our mind. Do you think that the externalist approach can explain the reference of non-natural kind terms? Putnam suggested that the externalist approach can be extended to artifacts, like pencils. But can we explain the reference of theoretical or abstract terms in the same way? I am a lawyer, so I would like to analyse the meaning of the words like "proportionality", "justice" or "equality" in an externalist way. Is it viable?
