Events at this location

On Monday, 8 June, 4-6pm UK time (in the Law Library, and online on Teams by clicking here), Stephen Sachs (Harvard) – will give an SCLP seminar titled “Truth in Legal Fiction”. You can find the paper here (pre-reading is optional). The abstract is in below.

Abstract

Truth in law can be usefully analogized to truth in fiction. As others have observed, a legal system tells a certain kind of story. It sets up a world of fantastical entities, such as “contracts,” “corporations,” “claims,” or “constructive trusts”; it describes a variety of interesting relations among them; and it sets forth a complex web of duties and powers that some of them possess toward others. Asking what’s true in a given legal system (who owns the lamb of a leased sheep, whether the murderer benefits from his victim’s will, and so on) is like asking what’s true in the world of a fictional work (when Sherlock Holmes was born, whether Macbeth saw or hallucinated Banquo’s ghost, and so on): it takes certain things as given and asks what else would also be true. In this way exploring the “imaginary normative landscape” of a legal system is very much like exploring a fictional world. And this comparison to truth-in-fiction isn’t just a curiosity: it sheds real light on real puzzles about law and legal reasoning.

On Wednesday, 10 June 2026 , in the Law Library and online clicking here, we will host a symposium on Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco’s (Surrey) recent book Responsibility for Negligence in Ethics and Law (OUP). The programme can be found here.

On Monday, 15 June, 12:30-2:30pm UK time (in the Law Library, and online on Teams by clicking here, Barbara Levenbook (NC State) – will give an SCLP seminar titled “Rethinking Legal Authority”. You can find the paper clicking here (pre-reading strongly recommended. The abstract is in below.

Abstract

“Rethinking Legal Authority”

In this paper, I am going to focus on what legal authority is not and what the challenge to justifying legal authority is not. No philosophical discussion of legal authority can advance without considering how to understand authority. My contention in the first part of this paper is that the mainstream conception of authority is incorrect. I am not the first person to make this assertion. Some of the recent criticism has focused on international authority, non-governmental actors, and non-natural actors such as AI. In this paper, I will stick fairly closely to the classic subject: the authority of governmental actors (composed of or staffed by natural persons) in national jurisdictions. (I will, however, deviate from the classic discussion in turning to legal products alleged to be authoritative.)

The mainstream conception of authority has focused on only one aspect of legal authority: the issuing of mandatory dictates. When we look at other aspects, familiar claims about authority – about, in particular, necessary conditions of it — prove to be largely dubious. It follows that one of the traditionally alleged sources of the difficulty of justifying legal authority – the (almost always partial) analysis of authority –is wrongly conceived.

The second part of this paper is devoted to defending the view that the other traditionally alleged source of the difficulty – autonomy – is also wrongly conceived. That thesis is also hardly new; but I hope to provide some fresh reasons (or, more accurately, to remind us of familiar reasons) to support it.