Legal Reasoning for Hedgehogs

• Author: Grant Lamond
• Published date: 01 December 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/raju.12181
• Date: 01 December 2017

Legal Reasoning for Hedgehogs

GRANT LAMOND

1. Introduction

Amalia Amaya’s book The Tapestry of Reason (Amaya 2015) is a sophisticated, schol-

arly, and far-ranging examination of the nature of coherence in various areas of

philosophy, and in legal reasoning in particular. It might be described, with a nod

to Dworkin’s later comprehensive theory of value (Dworikin 2011), as a theory of

legal reasoning for hedgehogs. Hedgehogs, because of the idea Isaiah Berlin devel-

oped from a line of the ancient Greek poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many

things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing” (Berlin 2013, 1). Coherence-based

reasoning is the one big thing, because coherence-based reasoning subsumes, uni-

fies, and encompasses the whole of legal reasoning. It applies to all forms of legal

reasoning, whether over propositions of fact or propositions of law, and it rejects

any form of foundationalism in the justification of propositions of fact and law.

Furthermore, it is optimistic about the capacity of reason in such a coherence-based

theory to resolve value conflicts.

Fascinated as I am by the hedgehog, my own sympathies lie with the fox—with

the idea of the plurality of values, the existence of irreconcilable value conflicts,

and with the contingency of human life and social practices. In this discussion,

therefore, I will pursue some vulpine worries about the hedgehog’s project. That

project is carried out in considerable detail, and I wish to step back from the detail

and raise some general questions about the aims and prospects for the theory. In

particular, I will examine three major themes: (a) the methodology of the project;

(b) the scope of the theory; and (c) the ambitions of the account of legal reasoning.

My focus will generally be on reasoning about propositions of law, rather than

propositions of fact, but theme (b) will give some attention to the latter.

To begin, however, I wish to briefly summarise my understanding of the main

features of the account of legal reasoning provided in chapter 10 of The Tapestry of

Reason, following the formulations in the book as much as I can, but occasionally

putting the points in my own terms for the sake of brevity. The theory is summar-

ised as follows:

A belief about the law [...] is justifiedif and only if it is optimally coherent, that is to say, if

it is a belief that an epistemically responsible legal decision-maker might hold by virtue of its

coherence in like circumstances. (Amaya 2015, 531; see also 552)

V

C2017 The Authors. Ratio Juris V

C2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Ratio Juris. Vol. 30 No. 4 December 2017 (507–521)