KJuris: Kevin Toh, UCL

KJuris seminar with Kevin Toh (UCL)

Abstract

There has been a trend in recent metaphysics to deploy the notion of grounding to regiment our thinking about various relations. These are the relations that we talk about by using idioms such as “. . . depends on . . .”, “. . . obtains in virtue of . . .”, “. . . is determined by . . .”, “. . . is constituted by . . .”, etc. And several legal philosophers have followed suit by formulating in ground-theoretic terms competing theses about the relation between legal facts on the one hand and the non-legal facts in virtue of which the legal facts obtain on the other. This paper is an attempt to come to terms with various deployments of the notion of grounding in legal philosophy. In particular, it attempts to reconcile (i) the sense in which legal facts are not plausibly conceived as metaphysically basic and hence must be grounded in other kinds of facts, and (ii) the sense in which the ultimate legal facts of any legal systems are ungrounded.

 

Speaker bio

Kevin Toh is Professor of Philosophy of Law at UCL. He has published a number of articles in philosophy of law (or jurisprudence), and has also made forays into moral philosophy and constitutional theory. His work in philosophy of law addresses the nature of legal thought, discourse, and practice by exploiting certain theoretical resources from contemporary metaethics, aesthetics, and philosophy of action.