Grant Lamond
University Lecturer in Legal Philosophy
Grant Lamond is University Lecturer in Legal Philosophy and the Felix Frankfurter Fellow in Law, Balliol College. He holds degrees in Philosophy and Law from the University of Sydney and took the BCL at Magdalen College. He was a Junior Research Fellow at St Edmund Hall, where he completed his DPhil. His research interests lie in the philosophy of law and the philosophy of criminal law.
Publications
Showing five recent publications sorted by year, then title [change this]
G Lamond, 'Coercion' in Hugh LaFollette (ed), International Encyclopedia of Ethics (Wiley-Blackwell 2013) [...]
DOI: 10.1002/9781444367072.wbiee696
This paper provides an overview of issues raised by the nature of coercion. It outlines four major distinctions that are both important to understanding the nature of coercion and important to disputes about its nature: (1) coercion in the sense of actions that aim to force another to do something, as opposed to actions that simply have that effect (i.e. are "coercive"); (2) coercion by the use of physical force against another as opposed to coercoin by the creation of a "forced choice" for that person; (3) coercion as a factor affecting the liability of the person who succumbs to the force ("duress") as opposed to coercion as a means of making another do as one wills; and (4) distinguishing between proposals that are threats rather than offers. These distinctions all bear on the question of why the use of coercion is ordinarily regarded as requiring some moral warrant.
ISBN: 9781405186414
G Lamond, 'The Rule of Recognition and the Foundations of a Legal System' in Andrea Dolcetti, Luís Duarte d’Almeida and James Edwards (eds), Reading HLA Hart's 'The Concept of Law' (Hart Publishing 2013) (forthcoming)
G Lamond, 'The Rule of Law' in Andrei Marmor (ed), Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Law (Routledge 2012) [...]
The central argument of this paper is that the rule of law is an ideal concerned with the conditions that are necessary for the law to succeed in governing a community. The influential views of Fuller and Raz which ground the ideal in the conditions necessary for the law to exist at all (Fuller) or for the law to be capable of guiding behaviour (Raz) are discussed and criticised. Four conditions are highlighted as part of the rule of law: (1) the law is effective; (2) the state is governed by and governs through law; (3) the individual laws can be jointly and severally obeyed; and finally (4) those other legal and social arrangements whose primary rationale is to serve conditions (1)–(3). Condition (4) accounts for the significance of such arrangements as an independent legal profession. Condition (4) also helps to explain both the attraction of regarding other political ideals such as democracy and human rights as aspects of the rule of law, since their existence helps promote the other conditions, and the reasons for excluding them from the rule of law itself, since their primary rationale is not to ensure that the law succeeds in governing the community. Finally, it is argued that the rationale for the rule of law lies in the value of a law governed community. The rule of law itself, however, is not always morally valuable: not because it is purely of instrumental value, but because it is an inherently mixed-value good.
ISBN: 978-0415878180
G Lamond, 'Coercion' in Dennis Patterson (ed), A Companion to Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory (2nd edition) (Wiley-Blackwell 2010) [...]
DOI: 10.1002/9781444320114.ch46
This article provides an overview of the key philosophical issues raised by the nature of coercion. It distinguishes two methods of coercion (physical force and ‘rational’ compulsion–paradigmatically by threats); and distinguishes coercion as a means of making someone act from coercion as a means affecting the normative position of the coerced party (‘duress’). It surveys analyses of what makes a proposal a threat, whether offers can be coercive, and why rational compulsion is per se morally problematic (if it is). It suggests that while all forms of rational compulsion have a common core, the conditions for duress depend on additional situation specific features (e.g. duress as a criminal law defence versus duress as a vitiating factor in agreements or marriage). It goes on to consider the sense(s) in which law can be regarded as coercive, and whether coercion is a necessary feature of law.
ISBN: 9781405170062
G Lamond, 'Persuasive Authority in the Law' (2010) 17 The Harvard Review of Philosophy 16 [...]
This article discusses the nature of persuasive authorities in the common law, and argues that many of them are best understood in terms of their (being regarded) as having theoretical rather than practical authorities for the courts that cite them. The contrast between theoretical and practical authority is examined at length in order to support the view that the treatment of many persuasive authorities by courts is more consistent with this view. Finally, it is argued that if persuasive authorities are best understood as theoretical authorities, this raises difficulties for both positivistic and interpretivist theories of law.
ISBN: 1062-6239
