About The Workshop
SW 100– In Memoriam Fred Schauer
Convenors: Christoph Bezemek; Michael Potacs; Nicoletta Bersier; Torben Spaak; Brian Bix; Stephan Kirste; Jorge Nunez
Contact: CHRISTOPH.BEZEMEK@UNI-GRAZ.AT
When Frederick Schauer passed away in 2024 legal scholarship lost one of its most significant voices — a scholar whose contributions shaped legal and constitutional theory, the theory and doctrine of freedom of expression, and to the philosophy of law more broadly.
His monograph Free Speech: A Philosophical Enquiry rewrote the terms of the debate by subjecting the tenets of free speech rigorous philosophical scrutiny. Dozens of pathbreaking publications on the subject were to follow.
Still: While free speech was the field in which he first made his mark, legal theory was the field in which he made it most durably. In the early 1990s, at a time when international legal theory seemed consumed by debates about Dworkin’s theory of principles, Schauer published Playing by the Rules. The book offered a sustained analysis of what is distinctive about rules as such. It became an instant classic and remains essential reading for anyone working on the nature of legal reasoning.
Years later he accomplished the same feat again. The Force of Law, published in 2015, took on a settled assumption that had become near-axiomatic in mainstream jurisprudence following H.L.A. Hart: that coercive enforcement is not a conceptually necessary feature of law. Schauer argued otherwise. The book did not simply rehabilitate a pre-Hartian view; it pressed the question of what law’s characteristic connection to force tells us about legal obligations, and did so combining the analytical precision and theoretical ambition that marked all of his major work.
That theoretical ambition extended, in his later years, to the epistemology of legal decision-making. The Proof: Uses of Evidence in Law, Politics and Everything Else, his final major monograph, examined how evidence functions across domains — in courts, in political argument, in everyday reasoning — and what the law’s particular evidentiary practices reveal about its deeper commitments. It was a characteristically wide-ranging project: formally rigorous, substantively serious, and written with a clarity that belied its difficulty.
His work will live on in these monographs, in countless edited volumes and articles and in the minds of generations of academics influenced by his scholarship.
This workshop is dedicated to the topics Fred shaped so significantly.
