How can citizens know how they ought legally to behave? The answer may seem simple: they should look at the laws of their country. If a law requires some action, they legally ought to perform it. If a law forbids it, they legally ought not to perform it. And if no law either requires or forbids it, they neither ought nor ought not to do so. This answer may well reflect most people’s views about the law. Yet it is not how lawyers think or courts decide. When lawyers argue before courts, and courts argue for their verdicts, their arguments are varied and complex, and their conclusions can surprise lay people. Can it be that most of us do not really know the law?
Law looks very different from the perspective of lay citizens—from the outside, as it were—and from that of jurists—from the inside. There are hundreds of cases in which courts point out the divide between how lawyers, on the one hand, and everyone else, on the other, think and reason about what the law is. This gap between how lawyers and lay people think about what law and how it works carries many jurisprudential implications, which this lecture means to address.
Bio:
Luís Duarte d’Almeida, Professor of Jurisprudence (Full Professor) NOVA School of Law, Lisbon
He was educated in Lisbon (BA, 1999; LLM, 2003) and at Oxford (DPhil, 2011). Before joining the NOVA School of Law he was Professor of Jurisprudence (since 2017), Reader (2015-2017) and Chancellor’s Fellow (2012-2015) at the University of Edinburgh, where he now holds (since January 2022) an appointment as Honorary Professorial Fellow.
Prior to that he was (2011/12) a Junior Research Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge and a Research Fellow in Legal Philosophy at the University of Girona; and from 1999 to 2008 we taught, first as an Assistant Lecturer and then as a Lecturer, at the University of Lisbon Law School.
He was also a Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence (2016/7), and has since 2017 held a visiting appointment at the KU Leuven Faculty of Law, and in 2025/26 is a Fellow at Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin.
Professor Duarte d’Almeida writes and teaches mainly in the areas of general jurisprudence and legal argumentation. He is also interested in philosophy of language, metaethics, argumentation theory, logic, rhetoric, the philosophical foundations of criminal law, and philosophical aspects of discrimination.
He is co-editor and co-author of the forthcoming Elgar Research Handbook on Legal Argumentation
https://www.e-elgar.com/shop/gbp/research-handbook-on-legal-argumentation-9781803925424.html
- Speaker
- Professor Luís Duarte d'Almeida
- Hosted by
- University of Aberdeen Law School
- Venue
- Taylor Building, Block C, Room C11/Microsoft Teams