pragmatism – Double Aspect

Against Pure Pragmatism in Statutory Interpretation III: A Way Forward and Walsh (ONCA)

About a month ago, I wrote two posts attacking the concept of “pragmatism” in Canadian statutory interpretation. So my argument goes, the seminal Rizzo case, while commonly said to herald a “purposive” approach to interpretation, is actually methodologically pragmatic This is because the famous paragraph from Rizzo, which contains a list of things an interpret must take into account, does not assign ex ante weights to these factors. That is, it is up the interpreter to choose, in the circumstances of particular cases, which factors will be most relevant. In short, while everyone in theory agrees on what the goal of interpretation is, that agreement rapidly breaks down in the context of particular cases.

In these circumstances, methodological pragmatism is attractive because it permits interpreters to use an entire array of tools as they see fit. So the story goes, this freedom leads to “flexibility.” But it can also lead to a number of pathologies in interpretation that should be avoided. In this final post of the series, I outline these pathologies, sketch a path forward, and then highlight a recent example case (Walsh) from the Ontario Court of Appeal that demonstrates why methodological pragmatism unleashes judges to an unacceptable degree. The point here is that interpretation is designed to determine what the legislature meant when it enacted words. Purpose is important in ascertaining that meaning, but ascertaining purpose is not the point of interpretation. This leads to an approach that prefers some ordering among the relevant interpretive tools (for want of a better phrase), rather than a flexible doctrinal standard motivated by methodological pragmatism.

The Pathologies of Pragmatism

By now, and as I have outlined above and in my previous posts, Canada’s approach to statutory interpretation is oddly enigmatic. On one hand, everyone (seems) to agree on the goal of the enterprise: when courts interpret statutes, they are seeking to discover what Parliament intended when it enacted a particular provision or provisions. Putting aside thorny issues of what “legislative intent” might mean (and see here Richard Ekins’ important work), in practical terms, we are seeking to discover the legal meaning and effect of language enacted by Parliament; we are, put differently, seeking to discover what change has been effected in the law (either common law or existing statute law) by Parliament’s intervention (see Justice Miller’s opinion in Walsh, at para 134).

When a law is adopted, one can speak of ends and means, and it’s this framework that guides the discussion to follow. It would be strangely anodyne to claim that Parliament speaks for no reason when it legislates. We presume, in fact, that every word enacted by Parliament means something (represented in canons like the presumption against surplusage, see also Sullivan at 187). And so it only makes sense to take account of a particular provision’s purpose when considering interpretation. Those are the ends for which Parliament strove when adopting the legislation. Selecting the proper ends of interpretation—at the proper level of abstraction, bearing on the actual text under consideration—is an integral part of interpretation. To avoid a strictly literal approach, text must be read in this context.

But, importantly, this is not the end. What about means? In some ways, and as I will show through the example case, means are the real subject of debate in statutory interpretation. Parliament can achieve an objective in many different ways. In general, Parliament can enact broad, sweeping, mandatory language that covers off a whole host of conduct (within constitutional limits). It could leave it at that. Or it could enact permissive exceptions to general mandatory language. It can enact hard-and-fast rules or flexible standards. Administrative schemes can delegate power to “independent” actors to promulgate its own rules. The point here is that Parliament can decide to pursue a particular, limited purpose, through limited or broad means. This is Parliament’s choice, not the court’s.

While free-wheeling pragmatism can lead to all sorts of pathologies, I want to focus here on the relationship between ends and means, between purpose and text. Pragmatism can distort the proper ascertainment of ends and means. In some cases, the problem will be that the court, without any doctrinal guidance, chooses a purpose at an unacceptably high level of abstraction (see, for example, the debate in Telus v Wellman, and Hillier), perhaps even to achieve some pre-ordained result. The courts can do so because, if one simply follows Rizzo, there is no requirement that a judge seek textual evidence for the establishment of a purpose. Yet we know that, as a descriptive matter, it is most common that purpose is sourced in text (see Sullivan, at 193): an interpreter can usually glean the purpose of the legislation, not from legislative history, subsequent legislative enactments, or even the judge’s own imagination, but from the text itself.

This descriptive state of affairs is normatively desirable for two reasons. First, the point of interpretation is not to establish the purpose or mischief the legislature was intending to solve when it legislated (despite Heydon’s Case). The point is to discover the intent of the legislature as represented in the meaning of the words it used. The words are the law. Purpose assists us in determining the meaning of those words, but it cannot be permitted to dominate the actual goal of the enterprise. A pragmatist approach permits, at least in some cases, for that domination to exist: if purpose is better evidence of intention than text, in some cases, then it can be permitted to override text. But this undermines the point of interpretation.

Secondly, for all we might say about legislative intentions, the best practical evidence of intention is what has been reduced to paper, read reasonably, fairly, and in context. Since statutory interpretation is not a theoretical exercise but a problem solving-one, the practicality of doctrine is central. For this reason, purpose can best assist us when it is related and grounded in text; when the text can bear the meaning that the purpose suggests the words should carry. To the extent pragmatism suggests something else, it is undesirable.

Sometimes, however, the problem will lie in the means; while the relevant purpose may be common ground between the parties, there may be a dispute over the meaning of language used to achieve those ends. Such disputes tend to focus on, for example, the choice between ordinary and technical meanings, the role of particular canons of interpretation, and (importantly for our purposes) the relationship between the properly-scoped purpose and the language under interpretation. It is the job of the interpreter to work among these tools synthetically, while not replacing the means Parliament chose to accomplish whatever purpose it set out to accomplish. But with pragmatism, no matter the means chosen by Parliament, there is always the chance that the court can dream up different means (read: words) to accomplish an agreed-upon purpose. Often, these dreams begin with a seemingly benign observation: for example, a court might simply conclude that it cannot be the case that a posited interpretation is the meaning of the words, because it would ineffectually achieve some purpose.

These pathologies can work together in interesting ways. For example, an expansive purpose can cause distortions as the means selection stage of the analysis; a court entranced by a highly abstract purpose could similarly expand the means chosen by the legislature to achieve those means. But even in absence of a mistake at the sourcing stage, courts can simply think that Parliament messed up; that it failed to achieve the purpose it set out to achieve because the means it chose are insufficient, in the court’s eyes.

A Way Forward

When constructing doctrine, at least two considerations to keep in mind pertain to flexibility and formality, for want of better words. Flexibility is not an inherently good or bad thing. Being flexible can permit a court to use a host of different tools to resolve disputes before it, disputes that sometimes cannot be reduced to a formula. Too much flexibility, however, and the judicial reasoning process can be hidden by five-part factorial tests and general bromides. Ideally, one wants to strike a balance between formal limits on how courts must reason, with some built-in flexibility to permit courts some room to react to different interpretive challenges.

The point I have made throughout this series is that Rizzo—to the extent it is followed for what is says—is pragmatic, methodologically. Whatever the benefits of pragmatism, such a model fails to establish any real sequencing of interpretive tools; it does not describe the relationship between the interpretive tools; and leaves to the judge’s discretion the proper tools to choose. While subsequent Supreme Court cases might have hemmed in this pragmatic free-wheeling, they have not gone far enough to clarify the interpretive task.

The starting point for a way forward might begin with the argument that there must be some reasons, ex ante, why we should prefer certain interpretive tools to others. This starting point is informed by a great article written by Justice David Stratas, and his Law Clerk, David Williams. As I wrote here:

The piece offers an interesting and well-reasoned way of ordering tools of interpretation. For Stratas & Williams, there are certain “green light” “yellow light” and “red light” tools in statutory interpretation. Green light tools include text and context, as well as purpose when it is sourced in text. Yellow light tools are ones that must be used with caution—for example, legislative history and social science evidence. Red light tools are ones that should never be used—for example, personal policy preferences.

In my view, this sort of approach balances formalism and flexibility in interpretation. For the reasons I stated above, the legislative text is really the anchor for interpretation (this is distinct from another argument, often made, that we “start with the text” in interpretation). That is, the text is the best evidence we have of intention, often because it contains within it the relevant purpose that should guide us in discovering the meaning of the text. For this reason, legislative text is a green light consideration. Purpose is also a green-light consideration, but this is because it is sourced in text; if it was not, purpose would be misused in a way that might only be recognizable to a methodological pragmatist. Other tools of interpretation, such as legislative history and social science evidence, can be probative in limited circumstances.

The key innovation here is the Stratas & Williams approach does not rule out so-called “external sources” of meaning, but it does structure the use of various tools for interpretation. For example, the approach does not raise a categorical bar to the consideration of legislative history. But it does make some ex ante prediction about the value of various tools, reasoning for example that purpose is most relevant when it is sourced in text.

This is an immediate improvement over the pragmatist methodology, at least when it comes to my core area of concern, the relationship between purpose and text. In the pragmatist model, purpose can be erroneously sourced and then used to expand the means chosen by the legislature; in other words, it can be used to override the language chosen by the legislature. Under the Stratas & Williams model, such a situation is impossible. Any purpose that is helpful and relevant to the interpretive task will be contained within the language Parliament chose, even if that language is limited, imperfect, or unclear.

An Example Case: Walsh

Much of this can be explained by a recent case, Walsh, at the Ontario Court of Appeal. While Walsh is a very interesting case for many reasons, I want to focus here on a key difference between the majority decision of Gillese JA and the dissent of Miller JA. Gillese JA seems to implicitly adopt a pragmatic approach, arguably making purpose rather than text the anchor of interpretation—presumably because the case called for it. Miller JA, instead, makes text the anchor of interpretation. The difference is subtle, but immensely important, because each opinion takes a different view of the “means” chosen by Parliament.

At issue in Walsh was s.162.1(1) and (2) of the Criminal Code. Section 162.1(1), in short, “makes it an offence for a person to knowingly disseminate an ‘intimate image’ of a person without their consent” [61]. An “intimate image” is defined by s.162.1(2), and relates to a “visual recording of a person made by any means including a photographic, film or video recording.”

Stripping the dispute down to brass tacks, the issue in this case was whether a FaceTime call that displays certain explicit content could constitute a recording. The problem, of course, is that FaceTime video calls cannot be conventionally saved and reproduced, like a photo (putting aside, for a moment, the possibility of recording a FaceTime video call). The Crown, at trial, argued that the language of the provisions are written broadly, and must be read “in the context of the harm that s.162.1 was enacted to address: sexual exploitation committed through technology, including cyberbullying and revenge porn” [23, 55]. For the Crown, the answer was found by reasoning from this general “mischief” that the statute was designed to address: the harm would still exist even despite “the recipient’s inability to further share or preserve the moment…” [23]. The defense, on the other hand reasoned from the ordinary meaning of the word “recording,” concluding that “recording” alludes to the “creation of an image that can be stored, viewed later, and reproduced” [57].

Gillese JA for the majority agreed with the Crown’s argument. She listed five reasons for her agreement, but one is particularly relevant on the issue of the relationship between text and purpose. Gillese JA writes, at paras 68 and 70:

[68] Fourth, restricting the meaning of “recording” to outdated technology—by requiring that it be capable of reproduction—would fail to respond to the ways in which modern technology permits sexual exploitation through the non-consensual sharing of intimate images. In so doing, it would undermine the objects of s.162.1 and the intention of Parliament in enacting it.

[…]

[70] …Giving “visual recording” a broad and inclusive interpretation best accords with the objects of s.162.1 and Parliament’s intention in enacting it.

As we will see, this is precisely backwards.

Miller JA’s dissent should be read in whole. It is a masterclass in statutory interpretation, and it is particularly representative of the approach I favour. But most importantly, Miller JA outlines why the majority’s approach demonstrates a means problem, as described above. For Miller JA, there is no purpose-sourcing problem here, since, as he says, there is common ground about the mischief that these provisions were designed to address [179]. However, for Miller JA, a proper application of the various tools of interpretation counselled an approach that did not rewrite the terms of the statute; the means chosen by the legislature. This approach is supported by a number of considerations. First, as Miller JA says, the term “recording” must be given its ordinary meaning. This is the going-in presumption, absent good reasons otherwise. But for Miller JA, the Crown offered no objective support for its assumption that the term “recording” must encompass the FaceTime video at issue. While dictionary meaning and ordinary meaning are two different things, dictionary meaning can shed light on ordinary meaning, and Miller JA noted that there was no instance of the term “recording” being used to describe a “visual display created by any means” [159].

This might have been enough, but the Crown offered another argument: that the term “recording” must be understood as encompassing new forms of technology [162]. Of course, because of the original meaning canon, it could not be said that any linguistic drift in the term “recording” is legally relevant in this case [166]. However, it is a common application of the original meaning rule that where words are written in a broad and dynamic manner, they could capture phenomena not known to drafters at the time of enactment. For Miller JA, however, this argument failed when it comes to the word “recording.” For him, FaceTime was clearly a phenomenon that existed at the time these provisions were drafted, and in fact, the context of the provisions indicated that Parliament had actually distinguished, in other places, recordings versus “visually observing a person…” [174-176]. The term “recording,” then must rely on the concept of reproducibility, as distinguished from other sorts of displays that cannot be saved and reproduced. This latter category of displays was known by Parliament when it crafted these provisions, but it is conspicuously absent from the provisions themselves.

Miller JA, having disposed of these arguments, then clearly contrasts his approach to Gillese JA’s:

[171] What the Crown is left with is the proposition that a reauthoring of the provision would better achieve s.162.1’s purpose….But where Parliament chooses specific means to achieve its ends, the court is not permitted to choose different means any more than it would be permitted to choose different ends. The interpretive question is not what best promotes the section’s purpose, such that courts can modify the text to best bring about that result, but rather how Parliament chose to promote its purpose

[172] …Although the Crown’s argument is framed in ascertaining the conventional, ordinary meaning of language, it is actually an argument about what meaning ought to be imposed on s.162.1, so as to best achieve the purposes of this section.

These paragraphs are remarkable because they clearly set up the difference between Gillese JA’s approach and Miller JA’s approach; the difference between a methodologically pragmatic approach, and an approach that roots ends in means, purpose in text. For Gillese JA, one of her five reasons for accepting the Crown argument pertained to the fact that the defense’s offered interpretation would fail to achieve the agreed-upon purpose of the provisions. This sort of reasoning is only possible under a pragmatic approach, which permits courts to prioritize different interpretive tools as they see fit. The result is a Holy Trinity abomination: where purpose is the anchor for interpretation, and the text is massaged to achieve that purpose, in the court’s view.

Miller JA’s approach is better, if one follows the argument in this post. His approach clearly sees text as an interpretive “tool” that is prior to all the others, in the sense that it is (1) what the legislature enacted to achieve some goal (2) it, practically, is the best evidence we have of what the purpose of the legislation is. Under this formulation, it is not up to the courts to decide whether better means exist to achieve the purpose of the legislation. If this were the case, the point of interpretation would be to identify the meaning of purpose, rather than the meaning of language as evidence of intention. Miller JA explicitly assigns more weight to the text in cabining the purposive analysis.

The Walsh case illustrates the problem that pragmatism has created. While all agree on the point of interpretation, that agreement tends to break down when we begin to apply the tools we have to determine the meaning of the text. Methodological pragmatism offers no hope for solving this problem, because it fails to take a stand on which tools are best. The Stratas & Williams approach, and the approach offered by Miller JA in Walsh, envisions some ranking of the interpretive tools, with text playing a notable role. This approach is better. It moves us away from the endless flexibility of pragmatism, while still leaving the judge as the interpreter of the law.

Against Pure Pragmatism in Statutory Interpretation I

The first post in a three-part Double Aspect series.

Rizzo & Rizzo, arguably Canada’s leading case on statutory interpretation, has now been cited at least 4581 times according to CanLII. Specifically, the following passage has been cited by courts at least 2000 times. This passage, to many, forms the core of Canada’s statutory interpretation method:

21 Although much has been written about the interpretation of legislation (see, e.g., Ruth Sullivan, Statutory Interpretation (1997); Ruth Sullivan, Driedger on the Construction of Statutes (3rd ed. 1994) (hereinafter “Construction of Statutes”); Pierre-André Côté, The Interpretation of Legislation in Canada (2nd ed. 1991)), Elmer Driedger in Construction of Statutes (2nd ed. 1983) best encapsulates the approach upon which I prefer to rely. He recognizes that statutory interpretation cannot be founded on the wording of the legislation alone. At p. 87 he states:

Today there is only one principle or approach, namely, the words of an Act are to be read in their entire context and in their grammatical and ordinary sense harmoniously with the scheme of the Act, the object of the Act, and the intention of Parliament.

This paragraph has reached the status of scripture for Canadian academics. To many, it stands as a shining example of how Canadian law has rejected “plain meaning,” or “textualist” approaches to law (though these are not the same thing at all, scholars as eminent as Ruth Sullivan have confused them). Most notably, as Sullivan argues, the practice of the Supreme Court of Canada under the auspices of the modern approach could be considered pragmatist. In many ways, pragmatism is considered by many in related fields to be an implicitly desirable good. Pragmatism in statutory interpretation, to its adherents, pulls the curtain back on judicial reasoning in statutory cases, asking courts to candidly weigh the factors they think are most important to reaching the proper result.

Pragmatism can be seen as a sliding scale—where one factor (such as text) is most persuasive, other factors (such as extrinsic evidence) will need to be stronger to overcome the text. In other cases, the opposite may be true. Notably, as championed by people like Richard Posner, pragmatism is focused on achieving sensible results. Therefore, the methodological approach used to achieve those results matters less than the results themselves.

While I am not sure proponents of pragmatism would classify Rizzo, particularly its leading paragraph, as a pragmatic judgment, in my view, Rizzo alone illustrates the key problem with pragmatism as an organizing and standalone theory of statutory interpretation. The Rizzo formula simply presents a laundry list of factors which should guide judicial decision-making, but fails to prescribe weights ex ante to those factors. It seems to assume that, in each case, the weights to the various factors are either (1) equal or (2) assigned by the judge in a given case. This is the key virtue of pragmatism. But it is also its vice, because “…without an advance commitment to basic interpretive principles, who can anticipate how a judiciary of Posnerian pragmatists would articulate and apply that law?” (see here, at 820). In other words, in a pragmatic approach “[e]verything is up for grabs” (820). Specifically, pure pragmatism has a number of potential issues:

It ignores that, in our legal system, the text of the statute (read in light of its context and purpose, sourced in text) is what governs, and for that reason, should be given the most weight in all interpretation, even if the text is open-textured. Courts must do the best they can to extract meaning from the text, read in light of its context. Call this formalism, call it textualism, call it whatever. The Supreme Court has said that the task of interpretation cannot be undertaken in order to impeach the meaning of text with extra-textual considerations (Telus v Wellman, at para 79).
Aside from the in-principle objection, there is a practical problem. While pragmatists claim that they are bringing the judicial reasoning process into the open, forcing judges to justify the weights they assign to various interpretive factors, in truth a fully-discretionary approach permits judges to reach any result they might wish, especially if they take into account broad “values-based” reasoning, as Sullivan advocates, or source purpose at some high level of abstraction, untethered to text.
Finally, the invitation to consider all factors in statutory interpretation, invited by Rizzo and the pragmatists, seems to assume that each interpretive factor will have something to say in a range of cases. But there are inherent problems with each interpretive factor, including text. The question for statutory interpretation methodology is, in the run of cases, which factors are more persuasive and controlling? By failing to provide an ex ante prediction about this question, pragmatists run close to abridging the idea that courts are supposed to develop norms—guiding principles—for statutory interpretation (see 2747-3174 Quebec Inc, at 995-996).

In order to develop these arguments, and address powerful (and some not-so-powerful) counter-arguments, I will be launching a series on Double Aspect on statutory interpretation, designed around the idea of pragmatism. The second post in the series will summarize Rizzo and why it is indicative of a pragmatist approach. The third post in the series will point out, using Rizzo itself, the flaws of pragmatism. It will also laud the Supreme Court and lower courts for, in recent years, blunting the edge of the pragmatist approach. Overall, this series will be designed to show that while text, context, and purpose are relevant interpretive factors, the task of interpretation is one that must be guided by ex ante guiding principles, not an “anything goes” approach. To this end, a recent attempt by Justice David Stratas and David Williams to assign ex ante weights to statutory interpretive factors is laudable and desirable. It should be followed.

A note of caution: the point of this series is not to advocate for a purely text-based approach, or a “plain-meaning approach.” Many have fallen into the trap of simply labelling arguments that highlight the primacy of text as being “textualism” or “plain-meaning.” Many resist the idea of text as a governing factor in interpretation because they believe it is equal to a literal reading, or because it does not take context into account. Virtually no one advocates for this line of thinking anymore. It is a strawman.

Additionally, the point of this series is not to impugn pragmatism wholesale. Instead, the point of this series is to point out that while pragmatism and flexibility have their place in interpretation, those things cannot come at the expense of an interpretive methodology that guides judges according to the core tenets of our legal system, including the separation of powers, as understood by the Supreme Court (see again Telus v Wellman, at para 79).

Stay tuned.

Humanism’s Heirs

Richard Posner is much on my mind these days. Partly that’s due to the excellent “Posner on Posner” extended-profile-and-interview-series by Ronald Collins over at Concurring Opinions (the latest instalment of which is here); partly to my (re)reading a couple of his books on adjudication (How Judges Think and Reflections on Judging); partly to his recent controversial remarks on privacy at a conference (the entire panel is well worth watching, especially in light of the Supreme Court’s recent cell phone search decision). Perhaps that’s why, when I read Mark Walters’s fascinating article on “Legal Humanism and Law-as-Integrity”, (2008) 67:2 Cambridge LJ 352 (alas, not freely accessible), which traces the intellectual ancestry of Ronald Dworkin’s ideas about law to the common law theorists of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, Judge Posner, no less than the late prof. Dworkin, is an heir to the legal humanist thought.

Summarizing his findings, prof. Walters explains that

[t]he efforts made by humanist jurists of the late-sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries to theorise early-modern common law method produced conclusions on the relationship between law and philosophy, the value of coherence, the nature of interpretation and truth, and the importance of integrity and equality for legal reasoning that resemble, in fundamental ways, the tenets of Dworkin’s theory of law-as-integrity. (373)

But it seems to me that Judge Posner’s “pragmatism” bears as much, if not more resemblance, to the humanist jurists’ conclusions ― as expounded by prof. Walters, on whose account I rely here, on the first and the last of these points.

Regarding the relationship between law and “philosophy,” prof. Walters explains that

[c]ommon law humanism, like humanism generally, denied the distinction between theory and practice. The common law existed as part of a larger philosophical enterprise, and therefore the studia humanitatis were relevant to understanding its substance and form. (361)

This meant, according to one of the jurists on whose work prof. Walters’s account is based, that

[t]he “rules of reason” that “direct our course in the arguing of any case” … derive out of “the best and very bowels of Diuinitie, Grammer, Logicke, [and] also from Philosophie natural, Politicall, Oeconomick, [and] Morrall” ― i.e., the studia humanitatis. (362)

Prof. Walters focuses on prof. Dworkin’s embrace of “Philosophie Politicall and Morrall” as part of his theory of law (which led prof. Dworkin, in work published after Prof. Walters’s article, to treat law as a branch of philosophy). But he says nothing of prof. Dworkin’s lack of interest in the other branches of “philosophy” that interested the humanists. Judge Posner, who helped create the law & economics movement, and is now strenuously advocating that lawyers embrace mathematics and the sciences ― which humanists used to call “natural philosophy” ― by contrast, is very much interested in these areas of the studia humanitatis. Admittedly he may seem be interested in them to the exclusion of moral and political philosophy. He has said, for instance, that

[t]he fundamental difference between [him and prof. Dworkin] is that [prof. Dworkin] believes that there is such a thing as moral reasoning and that it should guide judges, and I, while not doubting that there is such a thing as morality and that it influences law, believe that moral reasoning is just a fancy name for political contention.

Yet even here, the first impression might be misleading insofar as, with their habit of including into the realm of philosophy the areas of inquiry which we dignify, or disparage, with the title of science, the humanists might actually have considered political science, in which Judge Posner is very much interested (see his recent opinion, dissenting from denial of a re-hearing en banc, in Frank v. Walker, a voter-ID case), as a branch of political philosophy, and perhaps even psychology as belonging to moral philosophy. (This is, admittedly, a somewhat speculative claim ― it’s difficult, and dangerous, to guess how the people of a past age would have thought of something that simply did not exist when they lived.)

In any case, beyond the specifics, the whole project of the humanist jurists sounds similar to Judge Posner’s. As prof. Walters describes it,

they were suggesting that the common law was woven into a very specific and developed intellectual tradition associated with the liberal arts and sciences that were (mainly) taught within European universities at the time and that could not be known to judges and lawyers through the spark of natural reason alone.

This echoes Judge Posner’s (somewhat desperate) insistence, in Reflections on Judging, that judges need to be acquainted with

specialized bodies of knowledge in or relating to psychology, political science, education, prison administration, religious practices and institutions, statistics, economics, computer science, biochemistry, finance, personnel management, marketing, medicine, epidemiology, collusion between commercial competitors, intellectual property, terrorism, and the status of members of minority groups in foreign countries, (79)

and any number of others ― and that they cannot rely on “merely intuitive grounding for [their] beliefs” (92). Of course, the scientific disciplines that exist today are vastly different from those that existed 400 years ago, but Judge Posner’s attitude ― a desire to incorporate the most advanced elements of knowledge available into the law ― seems to be more consonant with that of the humanists than the much narrower project of making law embrace moral reasoning. Indeed, the aim of one of the jurists cited by prof. Walters

to show how common law cases already revealed forms of argument that followed humanist dialectical methods … and also how a more thorough order might be brought to the common law through a more rigorous application of those methods (362)

is an exact parallel to the twin projects of law & economics: the descriptive project, to show how the common law already incorporates important elements of the most rigorous and sophisticated methodology of its time (obviously, a very different one); and the normative project, to argue for the law’s improvement by further and more rigorous application of that methodology.

As for the role of integrity and equality in legal reasoning, prof. Walters argues that the humanist jurists’ views prefigured prof. Dworkin’s because they regarded “the common good,” conceived “as embracing equality and opposing favouritism to individuals or groups” (370-71) as the criterion for choosing between the principles that could be derived from conflicting authorities ― a way, as prof. Dworkin would say, of presenting the law in its best light. Prof. Walters claims that this conception of the common good meant that the humanists did not have “utilitarian or policy-based grounds for the common law,” which would seem to exclude Judge Posner as their intellectual heir. But I find this assertion hard to understand ― surely one can be a utilitarian and think that the law should aim at public, rather than private, advantage. Posnerian pragmatism, or even a more unalloyed law & economics approach, are not ways of favouring individuals or groups ― on the contrary, they aim at increasing the welfare of society as a whole.

And in other ways, Judge Posner’s views on adjudication are quite consonant with those of the humanists. The idea, for instance, that “the authorities and cases … should rather be examined how they accord with reason, then how many they be in number” (370) foreshadows his denunciations of excessive and mindless citation in How Judges Think. Similarly, Sir John Dodderidge’s claims “that Cases different in circumstance, may be neverthelesse compared each to other in equality of Reason; so that of like Reason, like Law might be framed,” and that “[i]t is not the Case ruled this way, nor that way, but the reason which maketh Law,” (373) which prof. Walters cites as evidence of common law humanism’s embrace of the Dworkinian “values of equality and integrity,” may just as well ― and in my view better ― be seen reflected in Judge Posner’s emphasis on looking at the policy reasons behind the holdings in prior cases in order to extend ― or not extend ― these holdings to apply in the different circumstances of new disputes. Unlike both the humanists and prof. Dworkin, Judge Posner insists that, in such cases, judges are legislating rather than merely applying pre-existing law, but that dispute is, it seems to me, little more than semantic. What Judge Posner means is that precedents cannot be mechanically applied in new circumstances; that an effort of reasoning, of understanding their purposes is necessary before their authority can be extended; and neither the humanists nor prof. Dworkin would have denied this.

Thus Judge Posner’s pragmatic, science-infused approach to adjudication can be seen, as well as prof. Dworkin’s law-as-integrity, as development of the humanist common law thought described by prof. Walters. Indeed, in some ways, it reflects that intellectual tradition better than law-as-integrity does. Just like prof. Dworkin, Judge Posner would likely disclaim the heritage, but prof. Walters is right that we should not place too much stock in such disclaimers.