Prof. Scott Brewer – Universality of Logic and Globalisation of Legal Analysis

Laws of nation states and laws of logic: The law of every existing legal system is local to time, place, and country. That proposition is central to Legal Positivist legal theories that are so familiar to jurists (professors and students) at this august institution who are so robustly aware of Hans Kelsen’s seminal jurisprudence. That proposition is also acknowledged by any plausible “natural law” theory of law. Logic has been well and powerfully characterized, in the work of great philosophical logicians as diverse and influential as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Gottlob Frege, as the discipline that articulates universal “laws of thought,” local to neither time nor place nor country nor person.

In this presentation I shall describe a method of analysis, the Logocratic Method, that provides an explanation of both law and logic that captures the locality of law and the universality of logic. I shall explain how the Logocratic Method enables, enhances, and empowers critical analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of legal arguments, which are at the heart of all local legal analysis. In providing this explanation, I share and reinterpret and articulate Leibniz’ aspiration — high and deep and, alas, never fully realized by him — for what he called the “new general science for the instauration and development of the sciences for the benefit of public happiness”:

We will present here, thus, a new and marvelous calculus, which occurs in all our reasonings and which is not less rigorous than arithmetic or algebra. Through this calculus, it is always possible to terminate that part of a controversy that can be determined from the data, by simply taking a pen, so that it will suffice for two debaters (leaving aside issues of agreement about words) to say to each other: let us calculate! In this way, just as when two arithmeticians dispute about a calculation mistake, so too the method I am proposing will yield the same solution, including for ignorant persons or for those who are not willing to use it. . . . We will conclude with an exhortation addressed to those persons who are most illustrious by virtue of dignity and knowledge, about their opportunity to increment immensely human happiness in a short time, if only we wish to do so.1

After outlining the Logocratic Method, I conclude my exploration of the locality of the laws of nation-states and the universality of logic with a brief critical discussion of a legal paradox that Leibniz addressed in his doctoral dissertation on law, a “perplexing” case that he sought to resolve as part of his lifelong effort to bring “the light of reason” to law through the use of logic. I argue that Leibniz, great master of logic though he was, failed to use the full resources of logic to resolve this particular paradox, and that the Logocratic Method, properly applied here, provides one example of the deep utility of logic for explaining how legal argument both can, and all too often does, fail to meet the legitimate demands of universal logical integrity.

1: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: The Art of Controversies. Translated and Edited, with an Introductory Essay and Notes, by Marcelo Dascal, with the collaboration of Quintín Racionero and Adelino Cardoso. The New Synthese Historical Library, volume 60. Dordrecht: Springer, 2006, pages 216-17 (emphasis added; notes omitted).