The Problem of Legal Indeterminacy in Contemporary Legal Philosophy and Lawrence Solum’s Approach to the Problem

Year 2008, Volume: 40 Issue: 57, 37 - 64, 07.12.2011

Sercan Gürler

Abstract

At first sight, the law seems to be a system of rules and the judges only adjudicators who work within the mechanism of that system. That is, they make a decision about disputes only by using some basic logical equipment in order to apply some written laws. This means that there is a determinacy in the law and that rules determine the outcomes in every case. This view of law can be called legal formalism. Even though this approach to the law seems to be intuitively acceptable, it has been under attack, at least from the early critiques of legal realists,since the beginning of the twentieth century. However, more rigid and more exact critiques of legal formalism and especially of the notion of legal determinacy have come from another approach. This contemporary approach to the law is called the critical law studies movement. It’s advocates have been criticizing not only legal determinacy but all aspects of modern western legal thought. They first view all of these modern legal approaches as a whole without distinguishing the differences between them (i.e. the two main traditions in modern legal theory: the natural law theories and legal positivism) and brand these approaches under the name legal liberalism. They then try to show the inner contradictions of this whole. 

Keywords

Legal, Indeterminacy, Contemporary

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