Affiliation:
1. John Henry Wigmore Professor of Law, Northwestern University; and Staff Law Clerk, United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, respectively
Abstract
The nature of the distinction between issues of fact and issues of law is considered. Courts in the United States and England have failed to articulate the distinction. Arguments that a distinction may be drawn on ontological, epistemological or analytical grounds are considered and rejected. It is argued that the law/fact distinction involves a complex interaction between three variables: (1) conventional meanings of the terms ‘law’ and ‘fact’; (2) structural relationships within the legal process; and (3) a distinction between matters of general import and specific, localised phenomena. It is concluded that this interaction is too complex to be reduced to simple rules and that the labelling of a particular issue as ‘legal’ or ‘factual’ is essentially a functional decision made on pragmatic grounds.
Subject
Law,Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law,Sociology and Political Science
Cited by
12 articles.
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1. What about the non-legal facts: Revising Allen and Pardo’s analytical distinction between law and fact;The International Journal of Evidence & Proof;2019-06-02
2. Index;Copyright and Collective Authorship;2019-05-02
3. Bibliography;Copyright and Collective Authorship;2019-05-02
4. An Inclusive, Contextual Approach to the Joint Authorship Test;Copyright and Collective Authorship;2019-05-02
5. Characteristics of Collective Authorship and the Role of Copyright Law;Copyright and Collective Authorship;2019-05-02