Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0199685789 ISBN 13: 9780199685783

Casa editrice: Oxford University Press, 2015

You find yourself in a court of law, accused of having hit someone. What can you do to avoid conviction? You could simply deny the accusation: 'No, I didn't do it'. But suppose you did do it. You may then give a different answer. 'Yes, I hit him', you grant, 'but it was self-defence'; or 'Yes, but I was acting under duress'. To answer in this way-to offer a 'Yes, but. . .' reply-is to hold that your particular wrong was committed in exceptional circumstances. Perhaps it is true that, as a rule, wrongdoers ought to be convicted. But in your case the court should set the rule aside. You should be acquitted.

Within limits, the law allows for exceptions. Or so we tend to think. In fact, the line between rules and exceptions is harder to draw than it seems. How are we to determine what counts as an exception and what as part of the relevant rule? The distinction has important practical implications. But legal theorists have found the notion of an exception surprisingly difficult to explain. This is the longstanding jurisprudential problem that this book seeks to solve.

The book is divided into three parts. Part I, Defeasibility in Question, introduces the topic and articulates the core puzzle of defeasibility in law. Part II, Defeasibility in Theory, develops a comprehensive proof-based account of legal exceptions. Part III, Defeasibility in Action, looks more closely into the workings of exceptions in accusatory contexts, including the criminal trial.

About the Author:

Luis Duarte d'Almeida, Chancellor's Fellow in Law, University of Edinburgh

Luis Duarte d'Almeida is Chancellor's Fellow in Law at the University of Edinburgh. He was educated at Lisbon (BA, LLM) and at Oxford (DPhil), and prior to his appointment at Edinburgh he was Junior Research Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, and Research Fellow in Legal Philosophy at the University of Girona, Spain. His research is in general jurisprudence, the philosophical foundations of criminal law, and legal reasoning and argumentation.

Review:

"Tightly argued and highly valuable...In explaining the intersection of defenses, defeaters, and exceptions in criminal law, in law generally, and for rules generally by use of the idea of the burden of proof, [Duarte] d'Almeida has not only offered a more than plausible solution to the problem he has set out to solve, and has not only done so with admirable rigor, but has also made a substantial contribution to the literature on rules more generally...Deserves to be read and absorbed by anyone interested in deontic logic, artificial intelligence, the operation of legal (and other) rules, and the characteristics of normative systems generally, whether those be the normative systems of law, of games, of etiquette, or even of morality." Frederick Schauer, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews