Bibliographic record
Abstract
The idea of universal liberal legal norms has long been under attack from a variety of sources. One of the most sustained and sophisticated philosophical versions of such an attack is found in the work of Martin Heidegger. His argument from the social embeddedness of the self to the ultimate contingency and groundlessness of any claims of normativity has been highly influential across a number of fields. This paper argues that legal theorists who wish to contest such a view should look to the work of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. In his critique of Heidegger, Levinas affirms the significance of the human beyond the particular context in which we find ourselves embedded. Levinas wrote very little about law; his main focus was on ethical responsibility and the claim that an “other” makes on me. I argue that legal responsibility is fundamentally different, concerned instead with the claims that a self can make on others. Drawing upon Levinas’ understanding of the self as constituted through ethical responsibility, I argue that a Levinasian account of justice can support liberal-democratic norms such as freedom, equality and dignity. Indeed, Levinas himself endorsed universal human rights and even indicated a strong affinity with Kant’s idea of justice. What he denied, however, was that justice is a fully rational and coherent concept. I argue that this does not render justice incoherent or call into question the basic status of the norms of justice. Rather, a Levinasian account of justice shifts the emphasis to the community practice of reasoning about universal norms, a practice that is never complete. I further suggest that such a practice of reasoning should be familiar to lawyers as it bears a strong resemblance to common law reasoning.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.063 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".