SSLT 2025: Legal Facts

In the seminar “Legal Facts” held on 13th October 2025, Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Philosophy and Law Andrei Marmor of Cornell University conducted a metaphysical inquiry into the nature of legal facts. Building on Hans Kelsen’s conception of law as a scheme of interpretation, Marmor explores how the idea of legal significance as an interpretive construct applies to all semantic and symbolic aspects of human cultures. Crucially, for such broad application to be rendered intelligible, Marmor challenges Kelsen’s view that legal facts derive their validity from the presupposition of a basic norm. Instead, he argues that their intelligibility arises from something more prosaic: the function they serve and the regular, systemic use to which they are put, and commonly known to be put, by a certain population.

In other words, if X is used to represent Y, it is the repeated and commonly known use of this interpretation that grounds the meaning of X. Accordingly, X representing Y ceases to be merely a mental operation and becomes a fact. On this view, legal facts are grounded in the functional patterns of human conduct and attitudes; their meaning constituted through regularity, common knowledge, and shared intentionality.