RphZ Rechtsphilosophie

Based on reflections on the concept of biopolitics, the present paper addresses the junctions between self-determination and heteronomy in the encounter between state actors, global corporations, and the private individual. Rulings of the European...

This paper explores how law and jurisprudence are currently being challenged by anti-racist critiques. Specifically, it examines how the term „whiteness“ is being used to criticize law as inherently unjust and racist. Whilst the paper also...

The introduction of the basic pension, an individual basic pension supplement granted if obligatory contributions to the statutory pension insurance have been paid for decades from below-average earnings, is taken as an opportunity to reflect on the...

The aim of the following enquiry is to reconstruct recognition as an essential building block of Rawls’s egalitarian liberalism, and there to examine in particular the nuanced translation of recognition into forms of law. Thus, through this...

Defeasibility is often related to burdens of proof. By meeting its burdens of proof, a party may defeat a claim by the other party that would have been supported had the burdens not been met. To provide an adequate logical account of burdens of...

The text develops three theses: First, equality has three juridical aspects, namely universal equality, particular equality and social equality. Second, liberal freedom must always appear in these three aspects simultaneously in order to become...

This paper focusses inequalities in the welfare state. Therefore, the equal distribution of an egalitarianism will be examined. The normative sources of the welfare state are not equality but the good life. Such an approach will be discussed...

That wrongdoing can be understood as scalar rather than bivalent, is a kind of truism in modern criminal law theory. But how exactly the strength and stringency of legal prohibitions and corresponding obligations can be conceptualized, is a...

The paper starts from the observation that laws are full of conditional norms or obligations, the defeasible character of which prevents representing them by the material implication of classical logic. Material implication almost never adequately...

My contribution starts with an analysis of the structure of normative argumentation, which is understood as the balancing of normative arguments that leads to normative judgements. Its crucial point is that normative arguments and normative...

Postmodernism has discredited thinking and arguing with dichotomies. Especially since the great dichotomies of object and subject, body and mind, being and ought are obsolete to it. Against this background, a critique of law and jurisprudence grew...

How logic can cope with the law, and vice versa, strongly depends on how one imagines the structure of legal reasoning. Of course, one can analyze relationships between (supposed) statements of legal code in the conditional, prescriptive form...

Distinguishing rules and principles presupposes a criterion as a means not only to identify rules and principles but also to underscore their differences. In this essay, the notion of defeasibility will be presented as such a criterion....

The „Great Reset“ is an initiative of the World Economic Forum WEF which „resets“ in that it seeks to reshape the global economy and society. The associated set of measures portrays an uncertain, risky, unsustainable and barely inclusive...

The legal and ethical justifiability of the measures taken to contain the spread of SARS-CoV-2 has so far been discussed under the aspects of balancing goods and proportionality. The important distinction between negative and positive moral duties...

The question of the relationship between freedom and security is characteristic of the discourse in times of crisis. In the coronavirus pandemic, too, society is faced with the challenge of how a democratic order can overcome the security crisis...

The coronavirus pandemic as an exceptional social situation demands social-philosophical answers. On the basis of care and power as relationship concepts, the following essay discusses several aspects of German pandemic law and its potential for the...

The article deals with the ethical justification of distribution procedures in case of a shortage of life-saving resources, as they have been discussed since spring 2020 under the keyword ‘triage’. Considering individual human dignity and the...