Publication details
Koherence práva
| Title in English | A Coherence of Law |
|---|---|
| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2012 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | Právník |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Field | Law sciences |
| Keywords | coherence law morality legal argumentation |
| Description | Coherence theories hold that the law is (or it should be) a coherent whole, or that legal judgments are justified if they fit in a coherent theory of the law. Normative coherence means that legal principles support and explain a number of legal rules and make them interrelated. Today it is widely agreed that coherence is a crucial ingredient of legal justification, because a coherent system allows mutual congruence and reciprocal support among the arguments drawn from the various sources of law. A coherence in general combines three factors: logical consistency, substantial cohesiveness and informational comprehensiveness. In this paper I distinguish many kinds of coherence: narrative vs. normative; conceptual vs. teleological; internal vs. external; diachronic vs. synchronic; global vs. local; in system vs. in reasoning. I engage also in the problem of a coherence between law and morality. I argue that the dworkian coherentism (law as integrity) is from ethical point of view inferior to legal positivism (the separation thesis). We need an autonomous morality as an intransigent watchman of law, because the demands of law must in the end be submitted to an independent moral scrutiny. The main task of morality according to law is not justificatory, but critical one. |