Systematic Implications of Norm Individuation

Freiburg Lectures on Staatswissenschaft and Philosophy of Law

Date: Oct 30, 2024
Time: 06:15 PM - 08:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
Speaker: Prof. Dr. David Duarte (University of Lisbon)
David Duarte is a professor at the University of Lisbon where he teaches legal theory, fundamental rights, and administrative law. The bulk of his academic research also focuses on these subjects. He is a founder of the Lisbon Legal Theory Group and a member of various scientific organizations, journals, and reviewer boards (i.e., Associación de Filosofía del Derecho para el Mundo Latino, Archiwum Filozofii Prawa I Filozofii Społecznej, Eudaimonia, Analisi i Diritto, Doxa, Ratio Juris, and Hart Publishing).
Location: University of Freiburg/Germany, Wilhelmstraße 26
Room: 01.014
Host: Department of Political Science and Philosophy of Law at the University of Freiburg in cooperation with the MPI-CSL
Contact: c.hillemanns@csl.mpg.de

Norm individuation seems to be one of the most relevant topics in legal theory. It suffices to consider that without an individuation basis (individuators for the object «norm») legal science cannot, in a consistent way, classify norms or detect conflicts among them. It is of the utmost importance for legal science, then, to adopt criteria of individuation and, in such a way, to define which are the necessary conditions to have, within the legal materials expressed by normative authorities, a (complete) norm. As a task leading to establish the unit of a normative system, the selection of norm individuators is not exempt of consequences in our understanding of law. Accordingly, implications of individuation such as correlativity between agents, generality of norms and their common prescriptiveness have also to be evaluated whenever legal science faces the problem of composing the unit «norm».

The most recent publications of Prof. Duarte include:

Right as Formal Combinations of Normative Variables. Revus. Journal for Constitutional Theory and Philosophy of Law. 51. 1-62 (2023);
Conceptual Norms: Contrasting Theories. Isonomia. 58. 32-56 (2023);
The Expression of Norms as a Speech Act: Assessing the Explanatory Power of Theories of Interpretation (with Pedro Moniz Lopes). International Journal for the Semiotics of Law. 36. 2. 599-628 (2023);
Inference to the Best Explanation in Legal Science; On Balancing Contrastive Hypotheses. Metatheory of Law: Essays on the Methods of Jurisprudence and Legal Science. Edited by Mathieu Carpentier. New York: Wiley. 329-357 (2022);
From Constitutional Discretion to the Positivist Weight Formula. Proportionality, Balancing, and Rights: Robert Alexy's Theory of Constitutional Rights. Edited by Jan Sieckmann. Cham: Springer. 21-73 (2021);
Legal Science: The Demarcation Problem and the Perimeter of «Good Science». Legal Interpretation and Scientific Knowledge. Edited by David Duarte, Pedro Moniz Lopes and Jorge Silva Sampaio. Cham: Springer. 211-251 (2019).