The 2024 Isaiah Berlin Lecture (Week 4, MT24)

professor melissa lane v2 min

Abstract: While ancient Greek lawgivers can be construed as embodied versions of Hart’s ‘rules of recognition’, their role went beyond that of identifying the authoritativeness of a set of laws. The most intuitive way to construe a set of laws as having an ethical purpose or telos is to construe them as having been composed by a lawgiver (as opposed to simply evolving piecemeal over time). This helps to explain the appeal to the lawgiver in the legal philosophy of Lon Fuller, who championed a purposive interpretation of the nature of law. It also helps to explain the appeal to the lawgiver Solon by his Athenian contemporaries and their descendants. I argue that Solon as a lawgiver, a role which he coupled with that of poet, embodied both the function of identifying the laws of the Athenian community and simultaneously their ethical telos. To be an Athenian was to accept the laws of Solon—yet the questions of ratification and legitimacy look different when conceived through the ancient Greek lawgiver lens, in which the ‘laws of Solon’ did not count as such in virtue of having been passed by the assembly or any other collective law making institution.