Why Individual Freedom and the Autonomy of Law Stand or Fall Together
| Autor | Bjarne Melkevik - Åsbjørn Melkevik |
| Cargo | Doctorat d'État in Legal Science at University Paris 2, France. Professor at the Faculté de Droit, Université Laval, Canada - Ph.D. in political studies, Queen`s University. Post Doctoral Fellow in Residence at Harvard University |
| Páginas | 4-11 |
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Volume 89, número 01, jan-jun. 2017
Why Individual Freedom and the Autonomy of Law
Stand or Fall Together
Bjarne Melkevik1
Åsbjørn Melkevik2
1 Two Kinds of Autonomy – Legal and Individual
There is, in legal philosophy, an ongoing debate about the autonomy of law, that
is, about the extent to which law is distinguishable from some other phenomena. The
dominant views, today, all understand law as fulfilling a certain instrumental role. Justice
and efficacy, then, are probably the most common relational others to law. For example,
it is common to say that the law should further a certain understanding of distributive
justice – this is the view preferred by philosophers such as John Rawls and Ronald
Dworkin. Others have argued for the efficacy of the law as with the law-and-economics
approach most famously championed by Judges Frank Easterbrook and Richard Posner.
This paper argues for a radically different understanding of the law, as it explains why
the law should indeed be autonomous. The question, however, is not whether the law is
actually autonomous or not – it is obviously not, as the law is too often the plaything of
various lawgivers. The real question is the following – do we want to be autonomous, as
individuals? The answer is obviously yes, individual freedom being a universal value,
and therefore, this paper argues, the law should also be autonomous. There is, as we will
1 Doctorat d’État in Legal Science at University Paris 2 – France. Professor at the Faculté de Droit –
Université Laval /Canada.
2 Ph.D. in political studies, Queen`s University. Post-Doctoral Fellow-in-Residence at Harvard University.
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Recebimento em 27/06/2017
Aceito em 07/07/2017
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