Bücher von Sebastian Urbina

Reason, Democracy, Society deals with basic points of legal theory and philosophy of law. Some of its claims are that we must sharply separate what the law is from, what the law ought to be, and that we can know what the law is without appealing to meta-legal considerations.

We cannot see the world as it is because we face it in a 'contaminated' vein. That is, our conceptual scheme and biological constitution condition our world view. The legal normative world we are dealing with has some special features, like the primacy of practical reason over theoretical reason and the primacy of the internal point of view over the external point of view. Although it is not a feature of all legal traditions, 'legal dogmatics' is a privileged way of knowing legal normative object, that is, our legal orders. But we are not undertaking - as legal scholars - an empiricist enterprise because, among other reasons, we are not interested in the reality 'in itself' but in the 'relevant' reality, at least for us. In this respect, we do not only depend on theories (like physicists) but also on legal authoritative sources, that is, power and legitimacy. Legal scholars (and other participants in the legal life) are not neutral observers of their own world, trying to discover somehidden truth. They are committed experts trying to describe, justify and improve the legal order.