Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-mp689 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-19T00:23:09.127Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

1 - Taking Public Reason to Court: Understanding References to Public Reason in Discussions about Courts and Adjudication

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2020

Silje A. Langvatn
Affiliation:
University of Bergen and University of Oslo
Mattias Kumm
Affiliation:
New York University and WZB Berlin
Wojciech Sadurski
Affiliation:
University of Sydney and University of Warsaw
Get access

Summary

What does it mean to take a “public reason approach to courts”? Public reason conceptions come in a wide range of varieties, but such conceptions do not necessarily translate into a specific jurisprudence. This chapter attempts to outline the main ways in which philosophical conceptions of public reason and jurisprudential approaches tend to correlate in the current literature. It characterizes the public reason approach to courts in an inclusive way, subsuming authors who accept (1) the general “idea of public reason” or the idea that legitimate legal and political impositions must be publicly justifiable and (2) an “ideal of public reason for courts” or the idea of public reason as conferring a duty on at least some courts, in some cases, to help secure the public justifiability some types of political and legal impositions. On this basis the chapter then identifies and characterizes six dominant public reason approaches to courts in the literature: “political liberal,” “liberal,” “classical liberal,” “deliberative,” “natural law,” and “public reason as justification vis-à-vis a broader audience.” The final sections discuss limitations and objections to the proposed taxonomy.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×