Inaugural Lecture: The Geometry of Legal Thought

The lecture is aimed at taking some steps towards a new theory of the nature of law that takes seriously the role of legal examples or exemplars as constituents of the law of any legal system. There are two subsidiary goals. In her recent book Rules (2022), a wide-ranging history of rules in general, the historian of science Lorraine Daston observes that nothing is more humdrum than our reasoning “from exemplum to example, from paradigm to particular”, but then remarks: “The mystery is not that we do it but how we do it. . . . [H]ow is it possible to follow [an example] . . . without being able to analyze that ability into explicit steps like the rule for finding the square root of a given number?” One subsidiary goal of the lecture is to explain the nature of examples in such a way as to show how we reason based on them. The second subsidiary goal is to understand the interplay between, and the co-evolution of, rules and examples in legal systems. This goal is prompted by Edward Levi’s observation, in his seminal An Introduction to Legal Reasoning (1949), that judges will sometimes try to rise above making decisions based on similarities and differences between particular cases, and will attempt to articulate rules. Some such attempts may succeed, whereas others will fail. Either way, according to Levi, rules never entirely replace the relations of similarity and difference between legal examples. At the same time, he observes, the rules themselves affect the ways that examples figure in judges’ subsequent reasoning. My explanation of legal examples is aimed at making sense of such phenomena in an integrated way. In pursuing both subsidiary goals, I rely on conceiving examples as points located in multi-dimensional topological spaces, and the dimensions of such spaces as assigning properties to the examples and specifying relations among them.

Kevin Toh joined UCL Laws as a Senior Lecturer in 2016, and became a Professor of Philosophy of Law in 2020. Previously, he was an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at San Francisco State University, and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Indiana University in Bloomington. Prof. Toh has also held a Visiting Fellowship in the Foundations of Normativity Project at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at University of Edinburgh (Summer 2016), an Emerging Scholars Program Fellowship at University of Texas School of Law (2009-11), and an H.L.A. Hart Visiting Fellowship in Ethics and Legal Philosophy at University College, Oxford University and the Oxford Centre in Ethics and Philosophy of Law (Hilary 2006). In 1997-98, he was a law clerk for Associate Justice Charles Fried of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.
Prof. Toh has A.B. (Social Studies) from Harvard College; and J.D., M.A. (philosophy), and Ph.D. (philosophy) from the University of Michigan.

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