The Jurisprudential Uniqueness of Metaphysical Jurisprudence (MJ)

 

Metaphysical Jurisprudence (MJ) is a distinctive and original approach to legal theory that unifies classical ontology, moral realism, and constitutional reasoning through a rigorous account of person-level rationality (PLR). It holds that the human person possesses a determinate nature, a rational structure discoverable through metaphysical inquiry and empirically confirmable, which serves as the ontological foundation for law, justice, and legal interpretation.

What sets MJ apart is its systematic integration of three elements rarely joined in legal theory:

1. Ontological Precision: MJ begins with a philosophical anthropology that defines the human person not as a procedural subject, a linguistic fiction, or a political construction, but as a real entity characterized by intrinsic capacities for reason, freedom, moral deliberation, and relationality. These PLRs are treated as metaphysical constants, not sociological hypotheses or Kantian postulates.
2. Legal Internalization: MJ insists that these PLRs are not abstract moral ideals but normative determinants that shape and constrain the structure of legal reasoning. MJ reads legal traditions, especially the Anglo-American common law and the U.S. constitutional framework, as imperfect but intelligible attempts to encode the realities of PLR into institutional form.
3. Interpretive Generation: From its ontological foundation, MJ derives interpretive canons that guide and discipline the judicial reading of statutes, precedents, and constitutional provisions. Unlike originalism, textualism, living constitutionalism, or positivist formalism, MJ insists that valid legal interpretation must conform to the truth of what persons are.

Accordingly, MJ offers a jurisprudence of first principles: not deduced from procedural consensus or historical convention, but from the irreducible structure of rational being. In so doing, MJ recovers the classical ideal that law is a rational ordering of persons for the sake of justice while uniquely translating that ideal into the language of constitutional law, judicial restraint, and doctrinal development.

In a legal culture fragmented by relativism, proceduralism, and metaphysical agnosticism, MJ is the only theory that restores unity by rooting law in the truth of the human person. It is neither revivalist nor revolutionary, it is corrective, offering a metaphysically grounded grammar for a jurisprudence worthy of free and rational beings.