----- Original Message ----- From: "Justin Schwartz" <jkschw at hotmail.com> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Monday, April 08, 2002 6:00 PM Subject: RE: Why we will need lawyers anyway
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> Godel assures us that no system of laws can be perfect, so lawyers will
>always be necessary. Wake up.
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That's not what Goedel showed, and his theorem has no relevance to law or political or legal philosophy or practice. What he showed was that arithmetic is incomplete, i.e., that in any formal system powerful enough to express arithmetic, there is at least one true proposition not provable within that system. jks
================================== lord only knows what sort of decision procedures can be devised to adjudicate the conflicting claims of the papers below:
< http://www.uchastings.edu/hlj/abstracts/abstr436.html >
On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Law: Legal Indeterminacy and the Implications of Metamathematics by Mark R. Brown and Andrew C. Greenberg
Recent articles in the Critical Legal Studies literature claim that results from mathematical logic show that no system of law can be formalized so that every dispute is determinate. Specifically, it has been suggested that Godel's Incompleteness Theorem and the works of Lowenheim and Skolem inform the question whether the law compels outcomes of cases. Because those results prove that certain formal systems of mathematics are necessarily indeterminate, they might suggest that analogous claims are true of the law.
In their Article, Mr. Greenberg and Professor Brown analyze Godel's Incompleteness Theorem in an attempt to determine how, if at all, these proofs apply to the law. The underlying issue addressed by this Article is whether the law can formally direct outcomes, given specific facts. The authors demonstrate that for any reasonably powerful formalization of the law, a proposition can be constructed that cannot be formally resolved. Like mathematics, any formally constructed model of the law must prove trivial, inconsistent, or incomplete. Legal reasoning cannot be automated, and must ultimately turn on human judgment and intuition. The ideal of legal formalism is therefore an illusion.
< http://www.uchastings.edu/hlj/abstracts/abstr443.html >
Godel and Langdell--A Reply to Brown and Greenberg's Use of Mathematics in Legal Theory by David R. Dow
In 1931, the German mathematician Kurt Godel proved that formal mathematical systems cannot be both complete and consistent. Using an intricate technique known as "embedding," Godel was able to use the basic tools of mathematical logic to prove their own indeterminacy. In recent years, scholars addressing law's indeterminacy have begun to discuss the applicability of Godel's Incompleteness Theorems, attempting to prove for law what Godel proved for mathematics.
In this Essay, Professor Dow challenges the utility of mathematical analysis in legal discourse. Focusing on a recent article by Mark R. Brown and Andrew C. Greenberg, Professor Dow shows that legal and mathematical reasoning are fundamentally dissimilar, and argues that law should scavenge only for things that law is like. Scavenging from mathematics, and from Godel's work in particular, represents a return to the discredited "scientific" approach to legal analysis epitomized by Christopher Columbus Langdell. Moreover, Professor Dow explains, attempting to prove law's indeterminacy through formal devices shows a basic misunderstanding of the source of law's inability to mechanically resolve disputes. The root of law's indeterminacy lies in the incoherence of the very concept of "the law." Law comprises distinctive sets of norms, entirely discrete normative regimes. The real task of legal theory, Professor Dow concludes, is to determine how we should choose among these competing regimes.