In Person | Claim-Rights and No-Rights: Against the Dual View

John Austin Seminars - Claim-Rights and No-Rights: Against the Dual View

Speaker: Luís Duarte d’Almeida, Professor of Jurisprudence, NOVA School of Law Lisbon and University of Edinburgh

Chair: Kevin Toh, Professor of Philosophy, UCL Laws 

About the Lectures:

Hohfeld’s (1913, 1917) influential framework of legal positions is an example of a largely successful theoretical account with practical consequences, including for real-life legal argumentation. But it remains the object of intense debate. As has been clear for long, Hohfeld’s tables need amendment.

They display four pairs of ‘opposites’: duty/liberty, claim-right/no-right, power/disability, and liability/immunity. Yet while the latter two are pairs of logical contradictories, the same cannot be said of the former. One simple way—first proposed by Williams (1956) and Fitch (1967)—of addressing this worry is to substitute ‘liberty not’ for ‘liberty’ as the relevant concept. This allows us to treat Hohfeldian ‘opposition’ as logical contradiction across all pairs.

In recent years, though, a different proposal has emerged. Kramer (2019; 2024) and McBride (2021; 2024) argue that we should recognise two kinds of ‘opposites’. Under the ‘Dual’ View (as McBride calls it, and I will too), the claim-right/no-right pair, in particular, is regarded as a pair of logical duals rather than contradictories. In this paper, I argue against the Dual View on meta-theoretical grounds: parsimony (given identical explanatory power), elegance, and, importantly, teachability.

About the Speaker: 

Luís Duarte d’Almeida is Professor of Jurisprudence at NOVA University in Lisbon and Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. He specialises in jurisprudence, legal philosophy, and legal argumentation. Before joining NOVA University in 2022, he was Professor of Jurisprudence (since 2017), Reader (2015-2017), and Chancellor’s Fellow (2012-2015) at the University of Edinburgh. Prior to that he was (2011/12) a Junior Research Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, and a Research Fellow in Legal Philosophy at the University of Girona; and from 1999 to 2008 he taught at the University of Lisbon. He was also a Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence (2016/7), and has since 2017 held a visiting appointment at the KU Leuven Faculty of Law. He was educated in Lisbon (BA, 1999; LLM, 2003) and at Oxford (DPhil, 2011).

Upcoming dates in the John Austin Seminars: 

7 October 2024 - Luis D'Almeida (NOVA University)
14 October 2024 - Hadassa Noorda (University of Amsterdam) 
18 November 2024 - Halvard Lillehammer (Birkbeck) 
2 December 2024 - Chris Essert (Toronto) 
27 January 2024 - Thomas Adams (Oxford) 
17 February 2025 - Lorraine Daston (Chicago) 
24 February 2025 – Daniella Dover (Oxford) 
10 March 2025 - David Enoch (Oxford) 
12 May 2025 – Elsie Woodard (KCL)

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Lecture main image by Giammarco Boscaro from Unsplashed