Main points
You should know what each justice believes about these questions.
- What is the source of law?
- What is the role of the judge?
- What about justice?
“The Case of the Speluncean Explorers” describes a fictional court trying to decide a fictional case.1 Each judge has a different understanding of the nature of the law, which makes this article a great way of talking about the concrete implications of abstract theories about the nature of the law.
We will structure our discussion around three questions for each opinion:
Truepenny has an attractively straightforward approach: the statute clearly says they are guilty and that is pretty much all there is to it. Unlike some of the other judges, he cannot be accused of overthinking the matter or making things more complicated than they really are.
We have to do some work to figure out what he thinks about the role of judges and justice. He does not explicitly discuss either point, but there are implicit positions in his opinion. I find it helpful to think about what he might think about the role of the judiciary in the government as a whole.
Foster advances two arguments for overturning the conviction.
The defendants were governed by the law of nature rather than the laws of Newgarth.
Even if the laws of Newgarth did apply to them, reflection on the purpose of the statute shows it does not apply to them.
While Foster begins with a point about justice, it seems to me that considerations of justice do not play a significant role in his arguments. I think Fuller threw in a little misdirection there.
This is the argument, as I understand it.
The law is predicated on the possibility of coexistence; when that is impossible, the laws do not apply (620).2
Since that was not possible here, the spelunceans were under the law of nature.
The spelunceans made their own legal system that was as valid as the one in Newgarth.
Each point is worthy of discussion:
What does it mean to say that the law is predicated on the possibility of coexistence and why should we think that is true?
Were the spelunceans incapable of coexisting? If so, what does it mean to say they were under the law of nature?
Why does it matter whether they made their own legal system?
Foster’s second argument is that the law should be interpreted in light of its purpose. He asserted that the purpose of the law in question was to deter willful killing and also that deterrence was impossible in this case. That led him to conclude that the defendants did not violate the law.
Foster maintains that several examples of accepted legal practice that confirm that statutes should not be read literally.
The parked car case (Commonwealth v. Staymore). Here the driver couldn’t move the car and so the court held he could not be convicted of a parking violation.
The misplaced “not” case (Fehler v. Neegas). Here the courts tacitly amended a statute to put a “not” where it clearly belonged.
The self-defense exception to the statute in question. The statute says “Whoever shall willfully take the life of another shall be punished by death” (Fuller 1949, 619). While the statute makes no provision for self-defense the courts do not convict people who kill in self-defense.
The lesson Foster draws is that judges have to look to the purpose of the law. Here is how he applies that lesson to the case at hand.
The purpose of the rule against murder is deterrence (Fuller 1949, 625).
There is no deterring someone who acts in self-defense, so that is why the statute does not apply in cases of self-defense.
There is also no deterring someone who acts out of necessity. (see the paragraph that starts “When the rationale of the excuse …”)
Therefore, the prohibition on murder does not apply to this case either.
Point 3 trips people up. There is a difference between acting in self-defense and acting out of necessity. People who kill in self-defense kill someone who poses a threat to them. People who kill out of necessity do so because they have to in order to avoid dire consequences. Whetmore was not a threat to the others, so they did not kill him out of self-defense. But they did need to kill him in order to stay alive.
That matters because it complicates Foster’s argument. The courts in Newgarth all admit an exception to the statute: they allow what looks like willful killing in self-defense. They are not sure exactly how this is consistent with the statute, but they take it for granted that it is. Foster has to argue that this exception should be extended to the Spelunceans on the grounds that the reasons for allowing the self-defense exception also apply to them.
Tatting, for example, denies that the exception for self-defense can be extended in this way. He gives two reasons.
The law schools teach that when people act in self-defense they do not do so “willfully” because they act by impulse rather than intentionally. Since the defendants acted deliberately, this analysis of the self-defense excuse would not apply to them.
He found a case, Commonwealth v. Valjean, in which the court denied that necessity is an excuse; thus it convicted a starving man who stole a loaf of bread.
You should know what each justice believes about these questions.
The “facts” of “The Case of the Speluncean Explorers” are clearly taken from several real cases involving shipwrecks. I put the court’s decision in one of them, Regina v. Dudley and Stephens, on Sakai.↩︎
Cessante ratione legis, cessat et ipsa lex, the reason for a law ceasing, the law itself ceases.↩︎