Grounding Legal Reality

Abstract

The four main chapters of this thesis, while each largely autonomous, collectively provide a study of the relation between grounding and supervenience, and a comprehensive application of grounding theory to the philosophy of law. Chapter 1 argues that a supervenience relation interestingly weaker than necessitation can be used to capture a substantive connection between grounding and modality. Chapter 2 argues that metaphysical grounding is the relation of dependence that connects legal facts to their determinants, and that the positivism/anti-positivism debate in legal philosophy involves competing claims on the grounds of legal facts. Chapter 3 criticizes extant grounding- based formulations of legal positivism offered by Rosen (2010) and Plunkett and Shapiro (2017), and puts forward a novel and insightful formulation that is capable of solving their problems, which crucially relies on the notion of a social enabler. Finally, Chapter 4 shows that Hume’s Law – the thesis that one cannot derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ – poses no significant threat to legal positivism or moral naturalism, both understood as views about grounding.