Posts by HORansome
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Hard News: The war over a mystery, in reply to Keir Leslie,
We’re going to have to disagree on a proper definition of legal positivism, I see. Then again, lots of people do.
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Hard News: The war over a mystery, in reply to Islander,
I’m not saying it is irrelevant; it is just that, when it comes to eye-witness testimony, expert witnesses turn out not be so significantly better than non-expert eye-witnessesas. The problem really is that we often think eye-witnesses are reliable sources of information, but psychologists can show you that they are not. Expert witnesses (and we're talking here about eye-witness testimony) are somewhat better, but still not brilliant.
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Hard News: The war over a mystery, in reply to Keir Leslie,
And so we reach impasse where all we're going to do now is pass snide comments
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Hard News: The war over a mystery, in reply to Russell Brown,
Given all the provisos I've made in this thread about my view on the Scott Watson verdict, your assumption that I was using jargon to hide an insubstantial point is pretty unfair.
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Hard News: The war over a mystery, in reply to Keir Leslie,
Or you are operating with a sophisticated version of LP.
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Hard News: The war over a mystery, in reply to Keir Leslie,
he seems to take it that the courts are interesting in fact-finding
Dear lord, what a mad assumption!
Except it is a pretty weird assumption when you look at the practice of the courts. Often trials hinge on points of law rather than matters of fact. Often these two activities result in the same outcome (which is nice, since we'd like laws to map onto some construal of right behaviour), but, still, Dworkin's construal of the workings of the court is subject to debate.
I, personally, haven't really reduced legality to tautology in the same respect that you haven't really, reduced legal guilt to moral culpability. These are live debates in the literature and my reading of it has it that Legal Positivists are pretty much the status quo at the moment (and legal positivism in its modern guise is a pretty finessed theory).
Legal positivism, in the narrow sense you seem to be defining it as, is only emptied of its relation to broader society if the broader society has no input on the laws of the land. That clearly isn't the case in our society; whilst our judiciary is free and independent it also doesn't make the laws; the democratically-elected parliament does that.
Indeed, one of the useful notions inherent in positivism of this type is that it explains why the socially constructed laws are meaningful; they reflect society's attitudes and it also explains also why some laws need to be revised/become to be thought of as unjust (which is a problem for many theories about the law), which is that society has changed. What you see to be a flaw in the system I see as being quite a nice sophistication which illustrates how society works.
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Hard News: The war over a mystery, in reply to Russell Brown,
Let me put it in slightly simpler English for you, then:
No body of evidence ever determines one (and only one) explanation. This is because there will be a range of different hypotheses, all of which are consistent with the evidence, that would be explanatory (cf. W. O. Quine, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism"). Only some of those hypotheses will be plausible explanations and, presumably, only one of those explanations will be the best explanation.
Keith Hunter, in "Trial by Trickery," amasses a body of evidence and suggests that one particular explanation is the best explanation available. However, I don't think his argument (or set of arguments) allows him to come to the conclusion that his argument is the best., Rather, what he shows is that his hypothesis is an explanation that should be considered to be in the pool of plausible explanations for the event.
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Hard News: The war over a mystery, in reply to Keith Hunter,
As I noted earlier in the thread, Keith, I'm not committed to the Crown's case in re what happened to Olivia Hope and Ben Smart but I've not yet been convinced by the case that says Scott Watson is innocent of the crime he was convicted of. I have read your book, so you can consider the overall argument of your book (summed up nicely by its title "Trial by Trickery") to be one of the many arguments (or sets of arguments) that have not persuaded me to change my mind. Whilst it is admirable that you want to persuade me of the merits of your case, really, I'm not all that interested. As far as I'm concerned all this started because we (as in the people in this thread) were having a discussion about miscarriages of justice and I expressed some skepticism about the skepticism over the Scott Watson verdict. That really is, for me, as far as I want to take the conversation.
Also, I'm not in anyway suggesting I have private evidence about the case when I say I know things about it. I was simply saying that I have not come to my view from a position of ignorance. Given my own research interests into conspiracy theories I have read up on the material, because I was given a letter which alleges that the author of "Silent Evidence"was in on the Crown's conspiracy to hide what really happened that night.
Now, I don't in anyway believe the substance of the letter but I did read end up reading quite widely on the matter, including your book, to see if I could work out why someone might think there is a coded message in "Silent Evidence."
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Hard News: The war over a mystery, in reply to Keir Leslie,
HORansome would be pushed to declare that the murder was legal if the courts allowed it, which tells us that whatever it is he is discussing, it isn't anything we care about as far as wrongful convictions go!
Yes, your right that I would. It is a stipulative definition, after all. Nothing about that definition says anything about the rightness or wrongness of the act in question, though.
In re Dworkin; I know Dworkin's work and I also know that his view on legal positivism is, at the very least, controversial. Certainly, I don't buy his arguments about how the legal system works; he seems to take it that the courts are interesting in fact-finding, but, as others have argued, if you look at the way the courts operate they aren't so much interesting in getting the facts of the matter as they are for discerning how the law should be interpreted.
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Hard News: The war over a mystery, in reply to Keith Hunter,
I meant the argument in your book, Keith.