Legal systems, regardless of socioeconomic, political, cultural, or ideological context, naturally drift towards jurisprudential internalism. “Legal internalism” is a behavioral paradigm in which legal actors treat legal rules as normative, epistemologically self-contained, and systemically coherent. While a method of legal reasoning, internalism naturally appeals to lawyers and judges due to the socioeconomic incentive structures they face. Once socially accepted, internalism greatly increases the legal knowledge gap between specialists and non-specialists, rendering legal comprehension easier for trained lawyers and but more difficult for laymen. This enhances the legal profession’s functional dominance over legal interpretation, which in turn enhances its prestige, sociopolitical stature, and earning power. As a result, legal professionals will tend to behaviorally embrace internalism regardless of its intellectual merits. Legal scholars, in contrast, have different incentive structures that significantly dilute the appeal of internalism. We demonstrate the applicability of this theory to six of the world’s most important legal systems: the United States, China, Germany, England, Japan, and India. In all six countries, which otherwise diverge dramatically, legal professionals behaviorally drift towards internalism over time. They do so despite some significant political and intellectual obstacles, and often in an explicitly self-interested manner. In contrast, legal scholars in several of these countries are visibly more skeptical towards internalism.
Speaker: Professor Shyamkrishna Balganesh, Sol Goldman Professor of Law, Columbia Law School
Shyam Balganesh writes and teaches in the areas of copyright law, intellectual property, and legal theory. He has written extensively on understanding how intellectual property and innovation policy can benefit from the use of ideas, concepts, and structures from different areas of the common law, especially private law. His recent work explores the interaction between copyright law and key institutional features of the American legal system. He is also working on a series of articles advancing an account of “legal internalism” that explains the shape and trajectory of legal thinking. Balganesh’s work has appeared in leading law journals, including the Columbia Law Review, Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and Yale Law Journal. He is also a co-author of sections of the leading copyright law treatise Nimmer on Copyright. He received a J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was an articles and essays editor of the Yale Law Journal and a student fellow at the Information Society Project. Prior to that, he spent two years as a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford, where he received a B.C.L. and M.Phil.
Chair: Professor Haochen Sun, Faculty of Law, The University of Hong Kong
Please register at https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_regform.aspx?guest=Y&UEID=107190
This event is co-hosted with the Centre for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies, The University of Hong Kong