Compliance, reliance and defiance: The rule of law and the question of substantive content

Event Details

Date:

Friday, 11 October 2019 - Friday, 11 October 2019

Time:

3:00 pm - 4:30 pm

Room:

Room 402 IASH Seminar Room

UQ Location:

Forgan Smith Building (St Lucia)

URL:

https://hpi.uq.edu.au/event/session/4361

Event category(s):

Full Description:: Philosophical and ethical defences of the rule of law tend to conflate three distinct goods that can emerge from it: the goods of subjects being able to comply with the law, of subjects being able to rely on the law in their decision-making, and of subjects being empowered by the law to pursue autonomous life plans. I show how these goods are conceptually and practically distinct, and I demonstrate how each depends not only on the law’s formal properties, but also upon specific parts of its substantive content (including property and basic security rights). By arguing that substantive content intrinsically matters to the rule of law, I challenge a major argument for ‘thin’ conceptions of the rule of law, which claim the rule of law applies only to law’s formal qualities, rather than to its specific substantive content.