Heidegger and the Theory of Adjudication Brian Leiter According to Ronald Dworkin's influential model for constructing a theory of adjudication, the theorist aims both for a descriptively adequate and a normatively defensible account of adjudication. To be descriptively adequate, the theory must make explicit the rule-governed procedures that regulate and explain the process of judicial decisionmaking. Can the theory of adjudication carry out its descriptive project? Professor Leiter argues that it cannot, for reasons that Heidegger adduced in the context of a more general attack on the philosophical idea that human practices can be made theoretically explicit. To the contrary, argues Heidegger, all such practices depend upon a range of noncognitive "coping" skills that constitute a "Background" of intelligibility against which the practice itself takes place. The Background, however, cannot itself be made theoretically explicit. Locating this theme in the works of Heidegger, Pierre Bourdieu, and the analytic legal philosopher Gerald Postema, among others, Professor Leiter shows how the general Heideggerian argument similarly frustrates the ambitions for a theory of adjudication. He concludes by showing how this argument lends support to the recent "practical-wisdom" theories of judicial decisionmaking, and why it may warrant a turn to what Professor Leiter calls a "naturalized" jurisprudence. Return to Issue 106-2