In this paper I present a difficulty for Matczak’s sophisticated textualism. I argue that, due to his claims about the descriptive character of legal language and the unity of the possible world postulated by the legal text, his theory cannot successfully account for norms that express factors that an authority should take into account when determining the measure of sanction. I reject two replies to this objection that do not require a modification of Matczak’s account. The upshot of my argument is that in order to accommodate norms pertaining to sanctions, Matczak should drop the assumption of unity of the possible world described by the legal text.
Consequentialism is often held to be self-defeating due to its incompatibility with intimate relationships. This objection is especially vivid with respect to friendship, highly voluntary character of which is believed to be irreconcilable with impersonal, teleological and maximizing attitudes. There seems to be hardly any place for the least necessary of loves in die-hard consequentialist’s motivational structure. Another problem arises from the fact that both consequentialist and her friend might feel alienated from their relationship in the face of its immediate termination upon realization that it no longer provides maximal good.
The goal of this paper is to identify and criticize an intuitive way of thinking about gaps in the law, which I dub “the input view”. In this approach, legal gaps play the role of premises in legal reasoning in the sense that they trigger the application of, otherwise impermissible, methods of interpretation. The input view thus rests on a sharp distinction between the following two stages of legal interpretation: identification of a legal gap and filling it. The central motivation for embracing this view is to limit the scope of judicial discretion. I argue that the input view fails by its own lights by showing a class of cases in which it actually increases the scope of judicial discretion. My argument exploits the observation that, on any account of legal gaps available to the proponent of the input view, there will be cases in which a judge has discretion to say whether it involves a legal gap or not.
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