Found Law, Made Law and Creation: Reconsidering Blackstone's Declaratory Theory

William S. Brewbaker
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引用次数: 8

Abstract

The subject of this paper is Blackstone's famous declaratory theory of law - the claim that judges find the law, rather than make it. Blackstone's claim is widely rejected in the legal academy, often because Blackstone is (wrongly) associated with the brooding omnipresence view of law rejected in cases like Erie, Guaranty Trust and Southern Pacific Co. v. Jensen. I argue that Blackstone's theory fails for other reasons - namely, because his account does not square well with law practice as it exists and because his distinction between legislative lawmaking and judicial declaration is ultimately unsustainable. Despite its faults, Blackstone's account of judging remains popular in some circles - particularly among evangelicals. The patrician Oxford law professor seems an unlikely hero for American evangelicalism, which is a fundamentally populist movement. Nevertheless, I argue that evangelicals have their reasons for admiring Blackstone. Historically, the assault on Blackstone in American law schools coincided with the academic movement to secularize American law. Philosophically, Blackstone's moral realism and epistemic optimism sit well with evangelical habits of mind. While Blackstone's moral realism may be appealing to orthodox Christians (including evangelicals), his account of law ought to be unacceptable on the basis of their own theological presuppositions, because it represents a deficient understanding of traditional Christian teaching about creation. The traditional Christian theological understanding of creation emphasizes the world as a part of the larger story of God's purposes. This understanding does not depend on any particular account of how the world came to be the way it is, but it has some surprising implications for how we understand the human activity of lawmaking. Indeed, it helps illuminate why accounts of law that treat law as either merely found or merely made have proven unsatisfactory.
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发现法、制定法与创造:对黑石宣言理论的再思考
本文的主题是布莱克斯通著名的法律宣告理论——即法官发现法律,而不是制定法律。黑石集团的主张在法律界被普遍拒绝,通常是因为黑石集团(错误地)与伊利、Guaranty Trust和南太平洋诉詹森(Southern Pacific Co. v. Jensen)等案件中被拒绝的那种令人担忧的无所不在的法律观点联系在一起。我认为,黑石的理论之所以失败,还有其他原因——也就是说,因为他的描述与现有的法律实践不太相符,因为他对立法和司法声明的区分最终是不可持续的。尽管存在缺陷,但黑石对评判的描述在某些圈子里仍然很受欢迎——尤其是在福音派中。这位出身贵族的牛津大学法学教授似乎不太可能成为美国福音主义的英雄,因为福音主义从根本上说是一种民粹主义运动。然而,我认为福音派教徒有他们崇拜黑石的理由。从历史上看,美国法学院对黑石的攻击与美国法律世俗化的学术运动同时发生。在哲学上,布莱克斯通的道德现实主义和认知乐观主义与福音派的思维习惯非常吻合。虽然布莱克斯通的道德现实主义可能对正统基督徒(包括福音派)有吸引力,但基于他们自己的神学预设,他对律法的解释应该是不可接受的,因为它代表了对传统基督教关于创世的教义的理解不足。传统的基督教神学对创造的理解强调世界是上帝旨意的更大故事的一部分。这种理解并不依赖于对世界是如何形成的任何特定描述,但它对我们如何理解人类立法活动有一些令人惊讶的影响。事实上,它有助于阐明为什么将法律仅仅视为发现或创造的法律被证明是不令人满意的。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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