Law and Enchantment: The Place of Belief

Abstract

The question I wish to raise is whether one must believe what one says when one makes a statement of law. The language of belief that we know, and from which moral discourse and the moral never stray far: do judges, lawyers, law participate in it? Any such question is but an aspect of a larger question, indeed issue, of what we may call the objectivity of legal language. It is raised perhaps most acutely by the broad claims now being made for artificial intelligence and in particular for the computer programming of legal advice (as a species of what is called, in that field of applied science, an expert system). But it arises also when we contemplate legal texts bureaucratically produced texts that are not written by the person who signs them. It is to this latter, more limited, and more familiar context that I will direct our consideration here. The shadow of Herbert Simon's Sciences of the Artificial we will leave to flicker in the background. Initially the question of believing what one says in legal discourse must be approached as a methodological problem, part of the perennial task of coming to grips with and trying to understand lawyers' method and particularly lawyers' close reading of legal texts. Certainly we will be attempting to do that here in some small way, keeping in mind that among working lawyers are judicial officers (judges) as well as legal advisers (officers of the court) and those lawyers (not officers at all) who teach and write in the schools. But the question cannot be cast or left only as a problem of