Robert Alexy

This collective work provides a chronological and up-to-date reconstruction of the three-round debate between Robert Alexy and Ralf Poscher. The debate represents the German development of an enduring jurisprudential controversy over the concept and adjudicatory role of legal principles, classically addressed by HLA Hart and Ronald Dworkin. Alexy's principles theory, which has initially defined 'legal principles' as optimisation requirements, currently argues that they express an 'ideal ought'. Poscher's critique challenges the soundness of Alexy's principles theory by questioning its ontological and epistemological commitments. As legal principles are directly related to constitutional rights, the Alexy-Poscher debate has significant implications for constitutional adjudication. For instance, proportionality analysis - which incorporates a highly controversial balancing test - and the legitimate boundaries of judicial power, hinge on the debate's two opposing views. Yet despite the centrality and pervasiveness of this topic, German contributions to the theoretical and practical impact of legal principles remain generally overlooked by English-speaking scholars. Concluding with David Duarte's critical and meticulous assessment of the debate, this collection bridges that important scholarly gap. Whether or not conversant in the debate on legal principles, legal researchers and advanced law students with interdisciplinary interests in jurisprudence and constitutional law will find in this book a timely and distinctive introduction to leading developments in German legal thinking.

Law's Ideal Dimension provides a comprehensive account in English of renowned legal theorist Robert Alexy's understanding of jurisprudence, as expanded upon from his publications A Theory of Legal Argumentation (OUP 1989), A Theory of Constitutional Rights (OUP 1985), and The Argument from Injustice (OUP 1992). The collection is divided into three parts. Part One concerns the nature of law: it explores its real and ideal dimensions and how the ideal dimension of law is sometimes employed but does not play a systematically important role. Part Two discusses constitutional rights, human rights, and proportionality. It defends the construction of constitutional rights as principles against objections raised by the rule construction and elaborates on the nature of constitutional rights as well as the mathematical balancing of those rights. Part Three concerns the relation between argumentation, correctness, and law. The author concludes this volume with a biographical reflection.

This collective work provides a chronological and up-to-date reconstruction of the three-round debate between Robert Alexy and Ralf Poscher. The debate represents the German development of an enduring jurisprudential controversy over the concept and adjudicatory role of legal principles, classically addressed by HLA Hart and Ronald Dworkin. Alexy’s principles theory, which has initially defined ‘legal principles’ as optimisation requirements, currently argues that they express an ‘ideal ought’. Poscher’s critique challenges the soundness of Alexy’s principles theory by questioning its ontological and epistemological commitments. As legal principles are directly related to constitutional rights, the Alexy-Poscher debate has significant implications for constitutional adjudication. For instance, proportionality analysis – which incorporates a highly controversial balancing test – and the legitimate boundaries of judicial power, hinge on the debate's two opposing views. Yet despite the centrality and pervasiveness of this topic, German contributions to the theoretical and practical impact of legal principles remain generally overlooked by English-speaking scholars. Concluding with David Duarte’s critical and meticulous assessment of the debate, this collection bridges that important scholarly gap. Whether or not conversant in the debate on legal principles, legal researchers and advanced law students with interdisciplinary interests in jurisprudence and constitutional law will find in this book a timely and distinctive introduction to leading developments in German legal thinking.

Law's Ideal Dimension provides a comprehensive account in English of renowned legal theorist Robert Alexy's understanding of jurisprudence, as expanded upon from his publications A Theory of Legal Argumentation (OUP 1989), A Theory of Constitutional Rights (OUP 1985), and The Argument from Injustice (OUP 1992). The collection is divided into three parts. Part One concerns the nature of law: it explores its real and ideal dimensions and how the ideal dimension of law is sometimes employed but does not play a systematically important role. Part Two discusses constitutional rights, human rights, and proportionality. It defends the construction of constitutional rights as principles against objections raised by the rule construction and elaborates on the nature of constitutional rights as well as the mathematical balancing of those rights. Part Three concerns the relation between argumentation, correctness, and law. The author concludes this volume with a biographical reflection.

Im Zentrum dieses Buches steht das Verhaltnis von Recht und Moral. Der Rechtspositivismus behauptet, dass beides zu trennen sei. Sowohl der Begriff des Rechts als auch der Begriff der Rechtsgeltung seien moralfrei zu definieren. Robert Alexy versucht zu zeigen, dass diese These falsch ist. Es gibt erstens begrifflich notwendige Zusammenhange zwischen Recht und Moral, und zweitens sprechen normative Grunde dafur, die Begriffe des Rechts und der Rechtsgeltung so zu definieren, dass sie moralische Elemente einschliessen. Deshalb muss der Rechtspositivismus als umfassende Theorie des Rechts scheitern. Diese Thesen werden in dem angefugten Artikel Die Doppelnatur des Rechts zu einem System der Institutionalisierung der praktischen Vernunft weiterentwickelt, das alle Elemente des demokratischen Verfassungsstaates erfasst.

In any country where there is a Bill of Rights, constitutional rights reasoning is an important part of the legal process. As more and more countries adopt Human Rights legislation and accede to international human rights agreements, and as the European Union introduces its own Bill of Rights, judges struggle to implement these rights consistently and sometimes the reasoning behind them is lost. Examining the practice in other jurisdictions can be a valuable guide. Robert Alexy's classic work reconstructs the reasoning behind the jurisprudence of the German Basic Law and in doing so provides a theory of general application to all jurisdictions where judges wrestle with rights adjudication. In considering the features of constitutional rights reasoning, the author moves from the doctrine of proportionality, procedural rights and the structure and scope of constitutional rights, to general rights of liberty and equality and the problem of horizontal effect. A postscript written for the English edition considers critiques of the Theory since it first appeared in 1985, focusing in particular on the discretion left to legislatures and in an extended introduction the translator argues that the theory may be used to clarify the nature of legal reasoning in the context of rights under the British Constitution. This book will be of central interest to all legal and constitutional theorists and human rights scholars.

At the heart of this book is the age-old question of how law and morality are related. The legal positivist, insisting on the separation of the two, explicates the concept of law independently of morality. The author challenges this view, arguing that there are, first, conceptually necessary connections between law and morality and, second, normative reasons for including moral elements in the concept of law. While the conceptual argument alone is too limited to establish a sufficiently strong connection between law and morality, and the normative argument alone fails to address the nature of law, the two arguments together support a nonpositivistic concept of law, toppling legal positivism qua comprehensive theory of law. The author makes his case within a conceptual framework of five distinctions that can be variously combined to represent a multiplicity of presuppositions or perspectives underlying the enquiry into the relationship of law and morality. In this context, it can indeed be shown that there are perspectives that bespeak solely a positivistic concept of law. The decisive point, however, is that there is a perspective, necessary to the law, that necessarily presupposes a nonpositivistic concept of law. This is the perspective of a participant in the legal system, asking for the correct answer to a legal question in this legal system. The participant-thesis is demonstrated by appeal to Gustav Radbruch's formula (extreme injustice is not law) and to the judge's balancing of principles in deciding a concrete case. The author arrives at a concept of law that systematically links classical elements of legal positivism - authoritative issuance and social efficacy - with the desideratum of nonpositivistic legal theory, correctness of content.

What is to be understood by 'rational legal argument'? To what extent can legal reasoning be rational? Is the demand for rationality in legal affairs justified? And what are the criteria of rationality in legal reasoning? The answer to these questions is not only of interest to legal theorists and philosophers of law. They are pressing issues for practising lawyers, and a matter of concern for every citizen active in the public arena. Not only the standing of academic law as a scientific discipline, but also the legitimacy of judicial decisions depends on the possibility of rational legal argumentation. A theory of legal reasoning which tries to answer these questions pre-supposes a theory of general practical reasoning. This theory is the subject matter of the first two parts of the book. The result is a theory of general practical discourse which rests on insights of both Anglo-Saxon and German philosophy. It forms the basis of the theory of rational legal discourse, which is developed in the third part of this book.

I centrum för denna bok står den urgamla frågan om förhållandet mellan rätt och moral. Idag som tidigare står två grundpositioner mot varandra: den positivistiska och den icke-positivistiska. Rättspositivismen hävdar att de båda ska skiljas åt, den icke-positivistiska positionen att begreppet rätt inte kan definieras oberoende av en moralisk måttstock. Den tyske rättsteoretikern Robert Alexy gör en noggrann genomgång av striden om rättsbegreppet, bl.a. i förhållande till Nazitysklands rättsordning och fenomenet med extrem rättslig orättvisa. Till grund lägger han distinktionen mellan ett åskådar- och ett deltagarperspektiv. Den rättspositivistiska positionen kan bara upprätthållas i ett åskådarperspektiv, medan man som deltagare i ett rättssystem ofrånkomligen ställer frågan om rättens riktighet, om dess förhållande till rättvisan. Alexy argumenterar för ett rättsbegrepp som kombinerar rättspositivismens klassiska element ? att rätten är vederbörligt fastställd och socialt verksam ? med den icke-positivistiska rättsteorins riktighetskrav. Boken är försedd med en inledning av professor emeritus Aleksander Peczenik. Robert Alexy är professor i offentlig rätt och rättsfilosofi vid Christinan-Albrechts-Universität i Kiel. Bland hans övriga publikationer kan nämnas böckerna Theorie der juristischen Argumentation, Theorie der Grundrechte och Recht, Vernunft, Diskurs. Utanför juristernas krets är Alexy främst känd som företrädare för en variant av det diskursteoretiska program som förknippas med Apel och Habermas.

At the heart of this book is the age-old question of how law and morality are related. The legal positivist, insisting on the separation of the two, explicates the concept of law independently of morality. The author challenges this view, arguing that there are, first, conceptually necessary connections between law and morality and, second, normative reasons for including moral elements in the concept of law. While the conceptual argument alone is too limited to establish a sufficiently strong connection between law and morality, and the normative argument alone fails to address the nature of law, the two arguments together support a nonpositivistic concept of law, toppling legal positivism qua comprehensive theory of law. The author makes his case within a conceptual framework of five distinctions that can be variously combined to represent a multiplicity of presuppositions or perspectives underlying the enquiry into the relationship of law and morality. In this context, it can indeed be shown that there are perspectives that bespeak solely a positivistic concept of law. The decisive point, however, is that there is a perspective, necessary to the law, that necessarily presupposes a nonpositivistic concept of law. This is the perspective of a participant in the legal system, asking for the correct answer to a legal question in this legal system. The participant-thesis is demonstrated by appeal to Gustav Radbruch's formula (extreme injustice is not law) and to the judge's balancing of principles in deciding a concrete case. The author arrives at a concept of law that systematically links classical elements of legal positivism - authoritative issuance and social efficacy - with the desideratum of nonpositivistic legal theory, correctness of content.

In any country where there is a Bill of Rights, constitutional rights reasoning is an important part of the legal process. As more and more countries adopt Human Rights legislation and accede to international human rights agreements, and as the European Union introduces its own Bill of Rights, judges struggle to implement these rights consistently and sometimes the reasoning behind them is lost. Examining the practice in other jurisdictions can be a valuable guide. Robert Alexy's classic work, available now for the first time in English reconstructs the reasoning behind the jurisprudence of the German Basic Law and in doing so provides a theory of general application to all jurisdictions where judges wrestle with rights adjudication. In considering the features of constitutional rights reasoning, the author moves from the doctrine of proportionality, procedural rights and the structure and scope of constitutional rights, to general rights of liberty and equality and the problem of horizontal effect. A new postscript written for the English edition considers critiques of the Theory since it first appeared in 1985, focusing in particular on the discretion left to legislatures and in an extended introduction the translator argues that the theory may be used to clarify the nature of legal reasoning in the context of rights under the British Constitution. This book will be of central interest to all legal and constitutional theorists and human rights scholars.