On Richard Rorty's Legal Thought Of Neo-Pragmatism

Richard Rorty is a representative of American Neo-Pragmatism, as well as one of the main theorists of western postmodernism. The philosophy of Pragmatism is the native philosophy in America, while Rorty's legal thought of Neo-Pragmatism is founded in such pragmatic culture. Both the philosophy of Pragmatism and the Legal Pragmatism form the important sources of Rorty's legal thought, which includes two main parts antifoundational jurisprudence and visionary judicial experiments. Following Antifoundationalism, Rorty's Jurisprudence obviously opposes Legal Formalism, puts forward the division of prophets while the good kind of prophets might adopt Pragmatism but the worse kind not, points out that Legal Pragmatism revolts against authority and seeks for reasonable consensus. So the ethnocentric legal theory will be an inevitable way out after antifoundation. The afore-mentioned suggests that Rorty's brand of pragmatism is"banal". With regard to judicial philosophy, Rorty followed the experimentalism of Dewey and supported social experiment above theory. By individually analyzing some famous constitutional cases in American history, he encouraged legal workers to take visionary judicial experiments--"leap in the dark", as we need visionary paradigm shifts to break up a chain of bad precedents which have become embedded as binding law, which finally leads to the disenchantment of grand-theory and the advocacy of creativity. Since Rorty's contributions in legal theory are multiple, not only because the endless inspiration of the freedom of thought, but also he is indispensable to Postmodern Jurisprudence and American judicial philosophy, we must take seriously to Rorty's legal theory of Neo-Pragmatism. So the intellectual resources contained in Rorty's thought are of some positive significance for Chinese legal study and judicial practice.