Presented by Professor Wibren van der Burg

Professor Wibren van der Burg will present his argumentation concerning legal interactionism and his theory of law and morality. In devising this paradigm, he was inspired by Lon Fuller's work and utilised aspects of Philip Selznick's work. He takes legal pluralism seriously and he claims that legal interactionism provides the most adequate theory of law and morality for the twenty-first century.

Theories of law in the beginning of the twenty-first century must be able to address at least four phenomena: global legal pluralism, the regulatory explosion, the emergence of interactional law, and the dynamics of law and society. My claim is that legal interactionism provides the best answer to those challenges. Legal interactionism (inspired by the work of Lon Fuller and Philip Selznick) takes interactional (or implicit) law seriously, however, without reducing all of law to interactional law. It is thus consistently pluralist in its approach. As pluralism and dynamics are pervasive in modern law, legal interactionism is a more adequate theory to describe modern law than the traditional competitors of legal positivism and natural law. This theory also helps to understand apparent anomalies of modern law, such as international law, the law of the European Convention on Human Rights, and horizontal, interactive legislation.

In legal interactionism, law and morality are not separate entities, nor is law the dominant partner authoritatively deciding which parts of morality to incorporate. Law cannot be separated from morality and in this sense there is a necessary intertwinement between law and morality; yet the degree of intertwinement and the form it takes is variable and thus contingent. Legal interactionism thus offers a perspective to do justice to the core of truth in both legal positivism and natural law. Moreover, it is an adequate theory of law for interdisciplinary socio-legal research. On the one hand, it goes beyond law in the books by accepting interactional law; on the other hand, it does take legal doctrine seriously.

His presentation will be based on his book The Dynamics of Law and Morality. A Pluralist Account of Legal Interactionism, Farnham: Ashgate 2014. http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472430403

Wibren van der Burg studied law and moral philosophy at Utrecht University. He is professor of Legal Philosophy and Jurisprudence at Erasmus University Rotterdam and visiting professor at Queen Mary University of London. Before he moved to Rotterdam in 2008, he was professor of Jurisprudence at Tilburg University. From 1986 until 1994, he worked in Utrecht at the Centre for Bioethics and Health Law and at the Department of Philosophy.

The central theme of his research and teaching is the interaction between law, ethics and society. A special focus in his research is how law and politics should deal with the dynamics of cultural and religious pluralism. A second focus is on the methods of legal research as a hermeneutic, argumentative, and empirical interdiscipline.

He has written 7 books in Dutch and co-edited 6 books, including The Importance of Ideals (with Sanne Taekema), Rediscovering Fuller (with Willem Witteveen) and Reflective Equilibrium (with Theo van Willigenburg). Some recent articles: ‘What Is Neutrality?’, Ratio Juris (2014)4, 496-515 (with Roland Pierik), and ‘Essentially Ambiguous Concepts and the Fuller-Hart-Dworkin Debate,’ Archiv für Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie, 95 (2009) 3, 305-326.

Website: www.wibrenvanderburg.nl