Instructions:
Choose one question from the following array of options, and prepare a 15-20 minute video answer to the prompt.
Note that for this session, you will also have the option of developing your own research question, if you wish! This can be a great pathway to set you up on stepping stones to future focused research, but it will require additional hurdles to ensure that we can set up an effective (and assessable!) research question. See the final ‘SPECIAL OPTION’ section below for instructions if you are interested in pursuing this option.
In answering your chosen question, your response should make use of the resources provided by the Flexible Focal Readings and Supplementary Readings provided on the vUWS, as well as at least two sources drawn from theorists and/or texts drawn from outside of the texts provided in the Unit.
Questions:
1. Critically discuss the following claim:
‘Law is necessarily moral. It becomes moral any time content is injected into otherwise hollow concepts, like reasonableness and the reasonable person.
2. Critically discuss the following claim:
‘Nazi crimes were products of an atrocious period of political excess. We should never forget them, historically, so that they may never be repeated. BUT, there is little to extract from Nazi examples that is applicable to the laws and problems of contemporary Australia. Continuing to trace well-worn grooves in the old jurisprudential debates about Nazi crimes offers little to modern legal education; it is time for new topics, with new voices.’
3. Critically discuss the following claim:
‘It is universally understood among sensible beings that murder, rape, theft and deception are forms of wrongful conduct. From these fundamental facts, it is possible to derive the core terms of a legal system. Indeed, it would be wrong to construct a legal system in any other way: any less-than-universal propositions would be necessarily subjective, and, to that extent, a product of oppressive social force.’
4. Critically discuss the following claim:
‘Legal realism tells us that all law is politics. But this neglects the clear depth of methods and processes which are unique to legal reasoning; hence legal realism cannot be correct, and has subsided from theoretical relevance accordingly.’
5. Critically discuss the following claim:
‘Fuller and Hart clearly agreed on all the important positions – that the rule of law is good, that tyranny is bad, etc – so, in the end, the so-called ‘debate’ between them doesn’t amount to much. Since it yields little substantive difference, it can have little impact on judging; so, judicial education can do without it.’
6. Critically discuss the following claim:
‘Dworkin’s ‘one right answer’ claim undermines the validity of his entire jurisprudence, since it is obviously false, owing to the mere existence of persistent legal argument among reasonably intelligent disputants. Justice Hercules, accordingly, is not just an unhelpful judicial ideal; it is a tremendously dangerous one.’
