On hating and despising legal philosophy

Abstract

This article is a cry for help. It is a search for some possible view of legal philosophy that does not render it either intrinsically useless or useless in its current form. In this article I focus on two methodological hallmarks of contemporary anglophone legal philosophy. The first is the Archimedean way in which the legal theorist places a critical distance between him- or herself and the subject matter of the philosophical inquiry. The second is the introverted way in which the accuracy of any given legal theory is confined to the theorist’s own puzzles, concerns, controversies, and preoccupations. Whilst I consider those who have turned against these methodological commitments and called for an anti-Archimedean or extroverted approach to legal theory, I explain how those who accept both commitments adopt a very modest view of the helpfulness of legal philosophy. I then consider whether, contrary to the modest view, if we accept both commitments, then whatever is true in legal philosophy will always be trivially true, irrelevant, or inconsequential, for any non-philosophical practice or non-philosophical inquiry about the law. The value of this article, I hope, lies in its refutation.