About the Book
This book considers the seminal debate in jurisprudence between Ronald Dworkin and Stanley Fish. It looks at the exchange between Dworkin and Fish, initiated in the 1980s, and analyses the role the exchange has played in the development of contemporary theories of interpretation, legal reasoning, and the nature of law.
The book encompasses 4 key themes of the debate between these authors: legal theory and its critical role, interpretation and critical constraints, pragmatism and interpretive communities, and some general implications of the debate for issues like the nature of legal theory and the possibility of objectivity. The collection brings together prominent legal theorists and one of the protagonists of the debate: Professor Stanley Fish, who concludes the collection with an interview in which he discusses the main topics discussed in the collection.
Table of Contents:
Introduction – Thomas Bustamante (Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil) and Margaret Martin (Western University, Canada)
Part One: Legal Theory and Its Critical Role
1. Reasoning Within and About (Legal) Practices, Brian H Bix (University of Minnesota, USA)
2. Fish Versus Dworkin: Sound and Fury, But…?, Larry Alexander (University of San Diego, USA)
3. Explaining Us to Ourselves, Jeremy Waldron (New York University, USA)
4. Law, Reason and Celestial Music, N.E. Simmonds (University of Cambridge, UK)
5. The Game Goes On: Why Legal Theorists Can Never Admit that Stanley Fish is Right, David Kenny (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland)
Part Two. Interpretation and Critical Constraints
6. Reenchanting Practice: Stanley Fish and the Challenge of Virtue Ethics, Maria Cahill (University College Cork, Ireland) and Patrick O’Callaghan (University College Cork, Ireland)
7. The Law in Quest of Integrity: Interpretation, Invention and Internal Critique, T. R. S. Allan (University of Cambridge, UK)
8. The Relevance of Literary Interpretation, Barbara Baum Levenbook (North Carolina State University, USA)
9. Clash of the Titans: Hercules vs. Dennis Martinez (Reflections on the Fish-Dworkin Debate), Charles L. Barzun (University of Virginia, USA)
10. Social, Moral or Ameliorative? Understanding Constraints on Legal Interpretation, Natalie Stoljar (McGill University, Canada)
Part Three: Pragmatism and Interpretive Communities
11. Revisiting the ‘Fish-Dworkin Debate’, Dennis Patterson (Rutgers University, USA)
12. Almost Naturalism: The Jurisprudence of Ronald Dworkin, Dan Priel (York University, Canada)
13. Interpreting Community: Agency, Coercion, and the Structure of Legal Practice, Nicole Roughan (University of Auckland, New Zealand) and Jesse Wall (University of Auckland, New Zealand)
14. Fish versus Dworkin: A Comparison between Two Versions of Legal Pragmatism, Thomas Bustamante (Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil)
15. Making it Objective. Dworkin, Inferentialism, and the CLS Critique, Thiago Lopes Decat (Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil)
Part Four: Implications
16. Dworkin, Fish, and Radically Defective Constitutions, Sanford Levinson (University of Texas Law School, USA)
17. The Problem of Immoral Integrity, Lars Vinx (University of Cambridge, UK)
18. What Makes Law? Dworkin, Fish, and Koskenniemi on the Rule of Law, David Lefkowitz (University of Richmond, UK)
19. Is Hercules a Natural? Rethinking the Fish/Dworkin Debate, Margaret Martin (Western University, Canada)
20. Interview with Professor Stanley Fish, Thomas Bustamante (Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil) and Margaret Martin (Western University, Canada)
About the Author :
Thomas Bustamante is Professor of Legal Theory and Philosophy of Law at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil.
Margaret Martin is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law at Western University, Canada.
