Global climate change, environmental degradation and demographic changes has emphasizedthe sustainable development of mekong river basin. The research uses the theoreticalframework that sustainable development in the transboundary water resource management ismost likely to be achieved through the policy making based on the ‘regional approach’ andthe ‘alternative development strategy. Read more i will leave the official topic of this essay as it is given by the instructor: legal realism: some would argue that to be equal before the law should also include equal access to the law. Examine the obstacles an individual who has few resources may face in getting a fair trial in canada, as well as the services available. Thank you in advance brian leiter, naturalizing jurisprudence: essays on american legal realism and naturalism in legal philosophy.

Brian leiter is one of the leading proponents of the use and application of so called naturalistic developments in contemporary philosophy to central questions in analytic jurisprudence. He is also arguably the leading philosophical interpreter of legal realism. He collects many of his most important essays on these topics, organized by theme, and presents previously unpublished responses to critics. The result is a work that goes well beyond the individual essays to present a trenchant, multi faceted and mutually reinforcing set of challenges to core views and methodologies that are prevalent in the field. In an important sense, the book is also agenda setting: it clarifies the impact that naturalistic developments in philosophy can have on core questions in analytic jurisprudence, while gesturing towards a larger and partly empirical project aimed at working out the full scope of these consequences for legal epistemology, the nature of law, and the objectivity of legal judgment. This is thus an important book by one of the most influential legal philosophers of our time.

In what follows, i will critically examine the three parts of this book, which address, more specifically: 1 the philosophical legacy of american legal realism, with specific reference to the nature of justification in adjudication 2 the appropriate philosophical methodology to determine the nature of law including what conclusions to draw from this methodology and 3 the bearing that issues in meta ethics might have on legal objectivity. Although leiter devotes portions of his book to arguing for various of his naturalistic commitments as well, these are large topics, which have commanded an enormous literature of their own. The commitments themselves are controversial but have a distinguished pedigree and have garnered widespread approval in one form or another. It is therefore clearly important to know what naturalism might mean for jurisprudence if true. Leiter's more distinctive contributions are, in any event, on this narrower topic, and i will therefore focus on those aspects of his work here.

Although this term does not have a single definition in philosophy, most people associate the term with several core commitments, which can be stated in broad brush fashion. The first is a metaphysical view, which states that properties, or events, must be capable of explaining some aspect of our experience, or making the right kind of causal difference in our experience, if they are to be considered real. Naturalists often differ, at this stage, over the precise types of explanations that will count. The second is an epistemological view, which holds that the modern sciences have proven to be our best method of ascertaining what is true about the world, and which thus holds scientific inquiry up as the paradigm of knowledge formation. The term can also refer more specifically to a special way of answering epistemological questions, which owes itself to quine's famous work on naturalized epistemology. There is also a more minimalist and yet still fully naturalistic constraint that one might place on epistemology, which is simply to rule out any claims to knowledge about a particular subject matter that either presuppose the existence of any non natural properties, in the metaphysical sense noted above, or would require us to have scientifically implausible psychological capacities to obtain the relevant knowledge. Finally, most so called naturalist philosophers either reject, or are at least highly skeptical of, the possibility of acquiring a priori knowledge through conceptual analysis.

On a methodological level, many naturalists favor a view of philosophy as the most general and reflective branch of the sciences instead. Leiter uses the term naturalism to refer to each of these ideas at different places in his book, and he gives them further refinements as appropriate. In what follows, i will therefore indicate what sense or senses are most pertinent to the discussion at hand. Leiter draws on quine's work on naturalized epistemology to present a philosophical reconstruction of american legal realism.

The term american legal realism hereafter legal realism refers to an important set of developments in u.s. Legal academia, which date back to the 1920s and 30s, and are typically associated with two primary views: first. Within the legal academy, most non philosophers take legal realism to express an undeniable part of the truth as reflected in the familiar motto that we are all legal realists now , whereas most philosophers consider hart's work in the concept of law to have exposed legal realism's central tenets to be philosophical non starters. This state of affairs is unfortunate, in my view, because it prevents both sides from appreciating important insights into the law that are reflected, perhaps only imperfectly, in their opponents' claims. One of the most important, though as yet underappreciated, aspects of leiter's work may thus lie in its ability to help ease the reception of legal philosophy within the larger legal academy by producing a deeper reconciliation between these common views. Leiter is, of course, more than clear that he has the converse aim: to bring legal realist insights back into central debates in analytic jurisprudence. Consider three ways that one might try to understand the basic legal realist claims under discussion.

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First, one might interpret them as expressing a deeply skeptical philosophical claim, to the effect that we cannot make sense of objective tests for legal validity. As leiter notes, this view, which is now more commonly associated with the critical legal studies movement, was the genuine target of hart's criticisms, and these criticisms were largely successful. Leiter is thus careful to distinguish his own philosophical reconstruction from these skeptical views.

Second, one might interpret the legal realists as making no philosophical claims at all, and as instead making only a series of empirical claims about what explains actual judicial decisions. On this view, the legal realists would be claiming that legal reasons even as applied to the relevant facts do not explain actual judicial decisions in at least an important class of cases , whereas other factors do. Empirical claims of this kind are perfectly consistent with hart's work because they say nothing about the possibility of objective tests for legal validity. Still, to reconcile legal realism with hart's work in this way would produce a decidedly minimal reconciliation, because it would caste the legal realists' insights as wholly irrelevant to the philosophy of law.

Third, and finally, one might try to identify something non skeptical but of philosophical significance in the legal realists' insights, something that might speak to a specifically philosophical problem, such as the nature of justification in adjudication. This would be a more ambitious project, and one with the potential for a much more robust and consequential reconciliation. Leiter's project falls squarely into this third category, and his work is unique in this regard. Leiter begins this project by specifying in more detail the discrete set of legal realist claims that will serve as the basis for his philosophical reconstruction. Leiter reads the legal realists as making, first, a specific and somewhat narrow underdetermination claim: namely, that in those hard cases that typically reach the stages of appellate litigation the class of legal reasons as applied to the relevant facts underdetermine judicial decisions.

Second, leiter reads the legal realists as jointly committed to a core view , according to which judges respond primarily to the stimulus of the facts rather than the law in these cases. Although many associate legal realism with the further view that judges have unfettered discretion in these cases, and are motivated primarily by personal idiosyncracies, leiter reminds us that there was another, distinct strain of legal realism, according to which judges instead give predictable responses to recurring and identifiable fact scenarios. These particular legal realists therefore recommended an empirical research program aimed at uncovering the general principles that explain judicial behavior in this class of cases. In the sense that it would be methodologically continuous with the sciences and would replace a priori inquiries here, into the nature of justification in adjudication with a purely psychological set of questions. In the sense that it would aim to uncover empirical generalizations that lawyers might use to predict how judges will actually decide cases.

One of leiter's explicit aims in part i is, in fact, to bring naturalistic and pragmatic developments in contemporary philosophy more squarely into jurisprudential debates, and his initial means of doing this is by this interpretation of legal realism. There is a real question whether this particular constellation of views accurately describes any one or more of the historical legal realists' claims, but this question is, in my view, ultimately the wrong one to ask in the present context. The constellation is either close enough to many of the historical legal realists' views, or can be derived from sufficiently articulated strains of legal realism, to merit attention as a recognizable form of legal realism.

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