This seminar is part of a larger work on legal reasoning. The seminar focuses on three aspects of our reasoning capabilities, to provide a sense of the intellectual territory we inhabit when we engage in legal reasoning. The seminar presents a broadly Wittgensteinian approach to rules and rule-following and the nature of knowledge, in particular the distinction between ‘knowing how’ and ‘knowing that’ and the relationship between the two. Lastly, it considers the ‘concept’ of concepts and of legal concepts in particular, and the vexed question of whether ‘conceptual analysis’ has any role to play in legal reasoning.

About the speaker

James Penner (B.Sc (Genetics) University of Western Ontario (1985), LLB University of Toronto (1988), DPhil Oxford (1992)) is Kwa Geok Choo Professor of Property Law at the University of Singapore, which he joined in 2013. He formerly taught at Brunel University, the London School of Economics, King’s College London, and University College London. He is one of the world’s leading scholars in the philosophy of property and the law of trusts, and writes more widely in the areas of private law and the philosophy of law. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Alberta, the University of Queensland, Queen’s University (Canada), Jilin University, the Catholic University of Leuven, the University of Toronto and Harvard University and, most recently, at the Centre for Transnational Legal Studies in London.

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Thursday 3 April

Time: 1-2pm

Venue: Common Room, Level 4, New Law Building, Eastern Avenue, University of Sydney, Camperdown campus

CPD Points: 1

This event is proudly presented by the Julius Stone Institute of Jurisprudence at The University of Sydney Law School.