European New Legal Realism and International Law: How to Make International Law Intelligible

Practice theory and change in international law: theorizing the development of legal meaning through the interpretive practices of international criminal courts

“…As put by Jens Meierhenrich (2014, 6), using practice theory therefore allows for a focus on the ‘everyday products of international law,’ such as the decisions and interpretations of international courts. Through such a focus, it for example facilitates empirical research on how legal meaning as interpreted by legal experts is assessed within an interpretive community (see similarly Holtermann and Madsen 2015).…”

“…In international law, Schindler and Wille's conceptualization resonates with Holtermann and Madsen's (2015) proposal to empirically research the construction of legal validity by international lawyers in practice. Specifically, they suggest that, instead of seeing the rules and doctrines that lawyers draw on to argue that a legal position is valid (and on whose interpretation they might disagree) in themselves as a way to discover (internal, legal) truth, legal validity should be researched empirically (Holtermann and Madsen 2015, 213-21).…”

Getting Real or Staying Positive:LegalRealism(s),LegalPositivism and the Prospects of Naturalism in Jurisprudence

“…Interestingly, Weber emphasized virtually the same distinction between two kinds of validity in Weber and in the English translation of that book (Weber ) one finds this distinction aptly expressed with the two terms axiological and empirical validity respectively. For discussion, see Holtermann and Madsen 2015. Technically speaking, propositions about empirically valid law ( gældende ret ) are a particular kind of so‐called propositional attitude‐reports , i.e., of complex propositions that record the existence of certain attitudinal relations between given agents and propositions (e.g., “Peter hopes that/feels that/believes that P,” where P can be any proposition including normative propositions). And as Gottlob Frege (, 37) tells us, in propositional attitude contexts the truth value of the embedded proposition has no bearing on the truth value of the compound proposition, i.e., of the full propositional attitude report. It should be noted that Ross's norm‐descriptive propositions about empirical validity differ from so‐called detached normative statements or normative statements from a point of view as Raz defines them (Raz , chap.…”

“…Interestingly, Weber emphasized virtually the same distinction between two kinds of validity in Weber and in the English translation of that book (Weber ) one finds this distinction aptly expressed with the two terms axiological and empirical validity respectively. For discussion, see Holtermann and Madsen 2015.…”

“…Holtermann and Madsen (2015) suggests how this Scandinavian model can lay the ground for a distinct European version of New Legal Realism by further combining Ross with insights from Weberian and Bourdieuian sociology of law.…”