Abstract
Lawyers and judges often claim to know what the law requires. However, the presence of widespread disagreement among methodological friends threatens to undermine the possibility of legal knowledge. This casts doubt on the reliability of their shared theoretical commitments for securing legal knowledge, even in cases of agreement. To handle this problem, legal disagreement must be approached with epistemic humility. This preserves legal knowledge and has major implications for our understanding of precedential constraint. In the first chapter, I lay out a neutral metaphysical framework for making jurisprudential claims about the law by endorsing the metaphysical concept of grounding. This not only demonstrates that the divide between jurisprudential theories is both smaller and larger than we typically think, but it also lays the groundwork for a neutral account of legal knowledge. The second chapter offers a neutral account of legal knowledge by requiring that beliefs about the law be inferred from the grounds of law, to secure epistemic justification. Furthermore, I distinguish this account from other accounts by highlighting its internalist and foundationalist commitments – arising from a lack of ‘reality checks’, coming from later evidence, to confirm beliefs about legal facts. The third chapter tackles the problem of disagreements between methodological friends and argues that the solution is to adopt an open-minded and humble approach to disagreement among all legal experts as epistemic peers. I defend an inclusive account of epistemic peerhood for legal experts given their shared fundamental epistemic principles prevent them from being engaged in disagreements deep enough to undermine peerhood. This humble position requires belief-revision whenever stalemate peer disagreement is encountered, a position I call Legal Conciliationism. The fourth chapter offers an alternative to the standard account precedential constraint by arguing 4 that precedential constraint is largely about epistemic peer disagreement rather than metaphysically changing the law – as illustrated by consideration of UK case law.