ELTRG Seminar: Felipe Jimenez (University of Southern California)- ‘On Legal Expertise’
Location:
Online only
Date/time
Thu 27 March 2025
16:00-18:00
This is a seminar organised by the Edinburgh Legal Theory Research Group. The speaker Felipe Jimenez, from University of South California, will be presenting his paper on ‘On Legal Expertise’.
Our seminars consist of a 30-minute presentation given by the author, followed by a 60 to 90-minute Q&A. This is not a pre-read event, but the paper will be circulated beforehand through our mailing list. To subscribe, please send an email to edinburgh.legal.theory@gmail.com.
Author bio: Felipe Jiménez is Associate Professor of Law and Philosophy at the University of Southern California. He works in the areas of private law, legal theory and comparative private law. He teaches contracts, and upper-level seminars and undergraduate courses on private law, legal reasoning and legal theory. Jiménez graduated, summa cum laude, from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and holds LLM (Legal Theory) and JSD degrees from New York University. He has also worked as a lawyer specialized in international arbitration and commercial litigation in Chile and the United States.
Abstract: Legal experts can reliably determine which legal norms are valid, and therefore which legal propositions are true. Legal experts are in this position because, beyond accurate knowledge about enacted legal texts and mastery over certain types of reasoning, they have a grasp of the deep cognitive structure of law: the habits, commitments, and values that characterize the practice of legal argument in a jurisdiction. Legal expertise has an impact on the content of the law. Thus, differences in legal content across jurisdictions are not reducible to differences in authoritative legal materials. Despite some grounds to doubt whether legal expertise plays a causal role in legal decision-making, it is not epiphenomenal. Legal expertise is not necessarily valuable, all things considered. But it does have certain benefits. This is particularly true under conditions of moral and political disagreement.