Book Symposium: Introduction from Maksymilian Del Mar

This week at The Junkyard, we’re hosting a symposium on Maksymilian Del Mar’s recent book Artefacts of Legal Inquiry: The Value of Imagination in Adjudication (Bloomsbury Publishing 2020). Today we begin with an introduction from Maksymilian. Commentaries and replies will follow Tuesday through Thursday.

Does imagination matter to legal reasoning? This is the question confronted in Artefacts of Legal Inquiry. Surprisingly, the question has not be asked, let alone answered, much before in legal scholarship. When it has been, it has often been approached through other categories, such as intuition or creativity, or as a moral virtue akin to empathy. What has not been examined is the importance of contemporary developments in the philosophy of imagination for theories of legal reasoning. It is this challenge that the book seeks to meet. It does so by also drawing on other fields that have a great deal to say about imagination: literary theory and history; and rhetorical theory and history. The book is thus an interdisciplinary investigation into the value of imagination for legal reasoning.

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Thought Experiments in Law: Practice and Theory

A Post by Maks Del Mar.

Recent years have witnessed a surge in studies of the role and value of thought experiments (TEs) in a range of fields, especially in philosophy, history, economics and the natural sciences. Within this literature, however, very little acknowledgement is made of the pervasiveness of TEs in legal practice.[i] This is a great pity, for TEs – in the form of hypothetical variations on existing facts or new and sometimes fanciful hypothetical narratives – are a key mode of legal thought and an important engine of legal change. Whether one looks at legal education (and the Socratic, case-based method), exchanges between Bar and Bench, or the reports of case judgements, one cannot miss just how much the law is full of them. Studying their varieties, and their role and value, in legal thought can thus bring a whole swag of new examples to the interdisciplinary study of uses of the imagination, while of course also illuminating the practice of legal thought itself.

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