Email: a.romeromunoz@surrey.ac.uk

What is the proper role of human disposition (hexis) in legal adjudication? Specifically, how do art/skill (tekné) and practical wisdom (phronesis) help lawyers and judges reason well from facts to legal outcome? This project investigates the underexplored virtue of lawfulness and its role in legal reasoning, drawing both on Aristotle’s own work and on more recent work in both law and philosophy. While some efforts have been made to develop a "virtue jurisprudence", akin to a “virtue ethics” in moral philosophy, none of these have been very comprehensive and none have focused on the specific virtue of lawfulness. The hypothesis explored in this project is that lawfulness is a genuine and distinct virtue, shaped both by the virtue of art and by the virtue of practical wisdom, involving – as it does – both technical and moral reasoning. The expected result is an account of legal reasoning that contrasts distinctively with the most prominent current theories of legal reasoning, which tend to focus excessively on abstract principles rather than on how human beings actually reason about practical matters, including issues of fundamental social importance, such as law.